The Limits Of The Client Protection Fund

The denial of reimbursement from the Lawyers Fund for Client Protection was affirmed by the New York Appellate Division for the Third Judicial Department

Petitioners each applied for reimbursement from respondent based upon attorney Jarrett Haber’s involvement in a scheme to obtain payment from petitioners to invest in a nonexistent real property transaction…

in December 2006 petitioner John W. Yengo Jr. met Justin Boivin, owner of Harvard Square Development (hereinafter HSD), who invited Yengo to participate in a transaction to purchase property ostensibly owned by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (hereinafter HUD). Yengo was thereafter made aware of a purported sales contract between HSD and HUD, which listed Haber as the agent who would hold HSD’s earnest money deposit. In February 2007, Yengo entered a partnership agreement with HSD to purchase the property and agreed to contribute $600,000 to the transaction. Yengo in turn recruited petitioner Sanford Weiss to provide $200,000 of his $600,000 contribution. After numerous delays in closing the transaction, petitioners ultimately learned that the property had never existed. They then contacted law enforcement authorities and applied for reimbursement from respondent.

An essential element is a prior attorney-client relationship

Respondent denied the claim on the basis that there was inadequate evidence documenting Haber’s service as an attorney in any legal matter either prior to or in the course of petitioners’ investment activity with him, or that the investment arose out of an attorney-client relationship…

Respondent found that the absence of a retainer agreement, evidence of any payments made to Haber for legal work, or any other documentary evidence of an attorney-client relationship, in connection with other circumstances set forth in the record, indicated that petitioners’ losses were not incurred within an attorney-client relationship with Haber. Neither petitioner was included as a party to the purported contract for sale of the HUD property. Although Yengo entered into a partnership with HSD with respect to the property, that partnership was created after the execution of the contract for sale and was not a party to the transaction. In addition, the partnership agreement made no reference to Haber acting as that entity’s attorney. The foregoing provides a rational basis to support respondent’s determination that petitioners’ losses did not occur within an attorney-client relationship and the practice of law.

SILive.com reported on charges against the attorney in 2012.

 A real estate lawyer already facing prosecution in a Brooklyn mortgage fraud scheme now stands accused of stealing a $75,000 down payment from a Staten Island woman who was selling her house.

Prosecutors say Jarrett Haber, 45, of Hicksville, had already been indicted in Brooklyn — alongside a disgraced rabbi who would later be accused of arranging two murders — when he helped himself to the money in 2010. 

Haber was representing a friend of his who was selling her Bentley Street home for $475,000, and the buyer had placed $75,000 in an escrow account as a down payment, prosecutors allege.

The rabbi got life, per the Times-Herald Record online. 

The attorney’s disbarment was reported by the New York Law Journal. (Mike Frisch)