Dive Brief:
- New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and the Division of Criminal Justice charged John Dunlea, 61, with embezzling more than $1.5 million from his former employer, the law firm of McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter, the AG announced in a Thursday release.
- Between 2017 and 2022 Dunlea, the New Jersey-based law firm’s former CFO, allegedly paid himself unauthorized compensation totalling $1.18 million and had the law firm pay $355,256 in credit card expenses, including for international and domestic airline flights, hotels and restaurants for himself and his family, which he falsely claimed were business expenses. For five years Dunlea evaded paying income tax in connection with the credit card scheme, the AG’s office alleges.
- “Dunlea was a trusted, high-level executive at a national law firm, and he allegedly abused that trust for years by stealing more than $1.5 million from his employer,” the AG office’s Legal Chief Pablo Quiñones said in a statement contained in the release. “This investigation and prosecution should place potential white-collar fraudsters on notice that our office will seek to hold them accountable for taking advantage of businesses that call New Jersey home.”
Dive Insight:
The charges against Dunlea come about a year after Platkin announced the creation of a new office within the division of criminal justice to focus on pursuing major financial crimes, including securities fraud, according to a release. At the time Platkin said that Quiñones would be leading the effort.
Platkin, in a statement included in the Thursday release, said the case “reinforces our commitment to ensuring that fraud and tax cheating does not go unpunished in New Jersey.”
Dunlea, of Westfield, New Jersey, was charged by criminal complaint with two counts of theft by deception and five counts of failure to pay tax in connection with the alleged fraud, according to the release. A spokesperson for the AG’s office said there are no dates scheduled yet for the case.
Ricardo Solano, Dunlea’s defense lawyer, did not respond to a request for comment. Kevin Marino, an attorney who represented McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpente in a lawsuit filed against Dunlea last summer, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Dunlea was a long-time executive at the firm, according to the civil complaint filed by the firm in June against Dunlea and wife Nicole Alexander, the firm’s former director of professional and business development, for misappropriation of more than $3.2 million of firm funds over a period of more than 10 years. Dunlea joined the company in 2003 and was named the firm’s CFO/COO in 2007 and resigned on April 13, 2023 after the firm told him he would be fired if he didn’t resign.
