'A poster boy for all corrupt attorneys'

The call that marked the beginning of the end for James “Jamie” Perdigao came in late August 2004. The accounting department at Boomtown Casino, one of Perdigao’s biggest clients, had questions about a bill that the attorney had recently submitted. Neither Perdigao, a partner at Adams and Reese, the largest firm in New Orleans, nor his secretary was in, so a temp routed the call to the firm’s accounting department, which could find no record of the matter in its system. The firm asked Boomtown-a riverboat casino business-to fax over the paperwork, and checked with other Adams and Reese lawyers whose time appeared on the invoice. No one had a file number matching the one on the bill. Further inspection showed that the invoice looked “nonstandard” as the firm would later term it, as did some other billing statements to Perdigao’s clients, which included many of the country’s top gaming companies.

On the Friday before Labor Day, Perdigao, the firm’s top-billing partner, was placed on mandatory leave and told not to return to the office until further notice. Despite that directive, over the long holiday weekend, security cameras at the 51-story office tower in downtown New Orleans where Adams and Reese is headquartered captured Perdigao carting off about 60 boxes of files. On the Tuesday after his Labor Day haul, Perdigao faxed in his resignation and admitted that he had been misappropriating funds. In the weeks that followed, the scale of his theft remained unclear. Initially, it seemed it might just be around $1 million. But after a series of meetings between firm management and Perdigao’s lawyer, he agreed to return about $9 million to the firm. About a month after that, the U.S. attorney’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had been brought into the case by Adams and Reese, discovered that, even as Perdigao was negotiating with the firm following his resignation, he had transferred an additional $19 million to a branch of Credit Suisse Group in Zurich. The FBI arrested Perdigao on Oct. 16, 2004. At that time, agents found about $25,000 in cash and two cashier’s checks totaling nearly $1.2 million in the trunk of his car. He was released on $2 million bail.