A disbarred attorney was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison for being the ringleader of a massive immigration fraud out of his Manhattan office. "I can only blame myself for my downfall and destructionI am paying the price for my former actions," Earl Seth David, 49, told Southern District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald (See Profile) before she pronounced sentence.
David, who was disbarred in 2012, pleaded guilty last year to a conspiracy to submit thousands of fraudulent claims to labor and immigration authorities claiming employers were sponsoring illegal aliens seeking legal status. The scheme, in which the firm charged upwards of $30,000 per client, ran from 1996 to 2009, when David fled to Canada. He was charged in 2011 with 22 others, including 16 employees of his firm, and extradited from Canada in 2012. In all, prosecutors believe David’s law firm submitted in excess of 25,000 fraudulent applications that included fake pay stubs, tax returns and "experience letters" purporting to show the immigrants had genuine sponsorships and the special employment skills needed to get a labor-based certification from the Department of Labor.
