An appeals court has upheld an injunction freezing the assets of Stanley Chesley—once known as the “master of disaster” for his work in mass tort litigation—after concluding that the disbarred Cincinnati plaintiffs attorney is likely to continue what it called a “high-stakes shell game.”

In the latest chapter of a saga that began two decades ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Thursday upheld a district judge’s injunction freezing Chesley’s assets as part of a case brought by his former clients who are attempting to collect on a $42 million judgment from a Kentucky state court. The payments come from a $200 million settlement in 2001 over the diet drug cocktail fen-phen in which Chesley and several of his co-counsel were accused of pocketing the funds. The former clients brought a fraudulent conveyances action in federal court against Chesley’s former firm and a Cincinnati attorney in charge of his assets.