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“Judge, I’m an addict and I never got control of my addiction problem,” Jeffrey P. Squitieri told Presiding Superior Court Judge Liliana DeAvila-Silebi.
“I lost everything,” he said, including “three beautiful children” who haven’t spoken to him in four years.
“I come from a family of attorneys and they have turned their backs on me,” Squitieri, 48, added. “None of them are here today.
Jeffrey P. Squitieri (STORY/PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
“I should have gotten help for my problems years ago, but I didn’t.”
He’s on the right path now, he said.
“The best thing that happened to me was going to [prison],” Squitieri told the judge, referring to a 30-month federal term imposed in December 2012, which he said has gotten him off drugs and taught him how to better cope.
Squitieri said he’s looking forward to “getting out, securing employment, maintaining my sobriety and restoring my relationship with my children.
“I want to make my children proud of me,” he said.
A grand jury in Hackensack indicted Squitieri in June on charges of siphoning $88,000 from a severely injured client’s $100,000 insurance settlement for his own use.
Squitieri was disbarred and sentenced in December 2012 in Manhattan to 30 months in federal prison after admitting that he filed a $1 million claim against the FBI for a man who he thought was a car accident victim. The man actually was an undercover agent working with a healthcare fraud task force.
Wearing a wire, the agent met with Squitieri and made repeated visits to a medical clinic and received unnecessary MRIs and medical treatments over a few months to boost the claim.
Meanwhile, in Bergen County, an investigation by prosecutor’s investigators found that Squitieri illegally diverted the tens of thousands of dollars in 2009.
The victim, Guillermo Henao, suffered a severe head injury and several broken bones when he was hit by a BMW in front of his Englewood apartment building that November 2009, records show.
While Henao was hospitalized and comatose, his 24-year-old son Victor signed his father’s name to the retainer agreement without authorization, according to a suit filed against the disbarred lawyer.
Around December 2009, with Henao recently out of his coma, Squitieri got the son to sign a release settling the case for $100,000 while falsely certifying that he saw Henao sign, records show.
Squitieri then allegedly kept $88,000 of the settlement proceeds, paying the other $12,000 to Care One of Wellington, where Henao spent a month in rehabilitation.
STORY/PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia
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