Welcome to www.lyinglawyers.com and to my nightmare. My story starts in February 1996 when I received a call from a long time friend and business associate, Randy Garrett, in Houston. He described a joint venture program using leveraged money accounts that were paying over 30% per month. Having never heard of anything even remotely like this I called Michael Murphy, also in Houston and a friend of Garrett's. Murphy, a former V.P. at E.F. Hutton, talked with me for over an hour describing how much he knew about this program and that he was also an investor.

I then referred four clients to Garrett and told them not to invest any money that they couldn't afford to lose, as I still did not know how this would work or if it would work.

By July my clients were receiving 20% per month every month on their money. The clients wanted to invest more money and referred more people to me.

In early October I was contacted by the State securities department to see if I was selling an unregistered security. I called my long time lawyer, Ralph A. Dyer, for advice. This was the beginning of a long slide down a tube greased by my own lawyers using my own money. At this time, following the advice of Dyer and Peter DeTroy of Norman, Hanson, and DeTroy I made eight sales from October 1996 to May 1997. At which point my personal investment in the venture exceeded $102,000.

What followed after May 1997 I would not have believed had it not happened to me. When the venture turned out to be a Ponzi and it collapsed I was horrified and went to Dyer and DeTroy.

DeTroy referred me to his friend Richard Berne, of Berne and LaFond who trotted me up to the State to have me give a statement against myself. I didn't know at the time that Berne was working to help DeTroy avoid a malpractice suit. In Maine if you are guilty of a crime that you committed at the direction of your lawyer you can't sue your lawyer for malpractice, the Moore's decision. Berne's job was to get me to plead guilty as quickly as possible. When that failed and I was indicted for a felony I knew it was time to change lawyers. What happened next is why the saying "out of the pan into the fire" was invented.

I called Jack Simmons, at Berman & Simmons and he assigned me to David VanDyke. VanDyke failed to disclose that he and DeTroy were friends and that he played basketball with Ben DeTroy. For the next three years VanDyke lied to me non-stop while charging me nearly $30,000 to keep DeTroy from being sued by me for malpractice.

After pleading guilty, having it vacated, and pleading guilty a second time, only then did I realize that all my lawyers were helping protect each other at my expense. During this time I read Dr. Joseph Long's letter in the Forecaster and I was suspicious that I might be getting the same treatment from Berne and DeTroy. When VanDyke let slip that Steve Dunwoody and Scott Liberty were getting the same hosing from Berne and DeTroy I was really concerned.

How, you may ask, did VanDyke get me to plead guilty to a felony twice, that I didn't commit? It was a two-stage process. First he lied and said that there were no documents in my file to back up my claim that Dyer and DeTroy never warned me. Without those in hand I would get the maximum sentence from a judge as punishment for calling Dyer and DeTroy liars in open court. Next, VanDyke had no preparation for trial (see his affidavit) and stated "that I could plead guilty today and get 0 to 9 months in the county jail or lose at trial in five days and start a 2.5 year sentence on Friday". With a ten-year-old son at home which would you choose?

Here follows, the documentation from the record both public and private of what happened from May 1997 to September 2002.