February 28, 2014
A Florida man has found himself living in the three-bedroom home of his former attorney after a federal judge said that the two lawyers who represented him in a 2008 drug case demonstrated the “most outrageous” conduct he’d ever seen.
Now Patrick Coulton’s new attorney, Paul Petruzzi, tells Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper that his client’s former counsel is “the reason people hate lawyers.”
Coulton was busted nearly six years ago with smuggling cocaine and marijuana into the United States and charged in court with counts of federal drug and money-laundering as a result. After several years behind bars, however, he’s now experiencing a rather surreal twist of fate.
Following that March 2008 arrest, Coulton’s family hired the two ex-attorneys in question — Peter Mayas and Emmanuel Roy — and hoped for the best. Coulton eventually pleaded guilty and accepted a deal that stood to put him in prison for 14 years until a better agreement could be reached, but Mayas and Roy never helped have those charges reduced and instead disappeared with $275,000 in cash and other items that belonged to their former client.
US Magistrate Judge William Turnoff held numerous investigative court hearings during the last several years, the Sentinel reported earlier this month, but had a difficult time even finding Mayas and Roy. When the court did find them, however, the justice system handed down a decision that Coulton said he never dreamed would happen.
Mayas and Roy had lied in court, Turnoff said, hid their assets and demonstrated legal conduct he considered to be “disgusting,” “abhorrent” and among the “most outrageous” he ever witnessed during a quarter-century on the bench, Paula McMahon reported for the newspaper.
“He ruled that neither man had been qualified or legally permitted to practice in federal court in South Florida and that they had wrung cash and property out of Coulton’s family for doing a minimal amount of work,” McMahon wrote.