A Bronxville real estate attorney facing grand larceny charges in New York for stealing roughly $3 million from his law clients pleaded guilty Tuesday in Connecticut to income tax fraud.
Timothy Griffin, a resident of Ridgefield, admitted in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport that he failed to report approximately $272,000 in income from his law practice in 2004 for which he owed approximately $71,000 in federal income tax. Griffin on his joint tax return reported and paid taxes on about 46 percent of his actual income that year.
Griffin was granted a probationary release from U.S. Magistrate Judge William I. Garfinkel while awaiting sentencing on Dec. 23.
The lawyer”™s guilty plea followed his appearance last month in New Rochelle City Court on seven grand larceny charges for his alleged theft of more than $1 million from his clients”™ escrow accounts over a five-year period.
New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman alleged Griffin transferred money to his personal bank account that his clients had given him to be held in escrow for pending real estate deals. The alleged thefts, which occurred between April 2009 and February, were used to support an “extravagant lifestyle” that included membership fees at Waccabuc Country Club and purchases of BMW and Lexus automobiles and expensive jewelry, according to Schneiderman.
In a separate but related case, Griffin in February was charged with grand larceny for allegedly transferring $1.9 million to his attorney escrow account from the account of United Hebrew Cemetery on Staten Island while he served as the cemetery nonprofit”™s acting president.
Schneiderman said investigators from his office think Griffin stole from the cemetery to reimburse the escrow account from which he had been stealing his Westchester law clients”™ money.
Griffin faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted on the Westchester County charges and the same penalty for the alleged thefts on Staten Island.
