Ex-Girardi firm lawyer pleads guilty over failure to pay families of Lion Air crash victims

A lawyer who worked for now-imprisoned attorney Tom Girardi pleaded guilty to criminal contempt on Thursday for disobeying a court order that called for settlement funds to be distributed to relatives of those killed in the devastating 2018 crash of a Boeing jet into the Java Sea.

As part of a plea agreement, Keith Griffin admitted he failed to follow a federal judge’s order to distribute $7. 5 million received from the aerospace company for the relatives of those killed in the crash of Lion Air Flight 610.

It is the latest legal fallout from mismanagement of client settlement funds by the now-defunct legal firm of Girardi Keese, which led to Girardi’s federal conviction.

Girardi was once one of the nation’s most formidable trial attorneys, whose lavish lifestyle, a federal judge would note, included “private jets and country clubs” for himself and his wife, Erika Jayne, a former star of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

Griffin was one of the last two lawyers at the firm as it crumbled. The 54-year-old, of Temple City, entered his plea before U.S. District Judge LaShonda A. Hunt in the Northern District of Illinois. Hunt set sentencing for Aug. 6.

Girardi Keese filed civil lawsuits in federal court in Chicago against Boeing and settled them in 2020.

U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin ordered that the settlement funds, which totaled $7.5 million, be apportioned to each client as soon as possible. Boeing wired the settlement funds into Girardi Keese’s client trust account in March 2020.

Griffin admitted in a plea agreement that he knew that, for the next eight months, the firm failed to distribute the full amount to the Indonesian widows and orphans whose loved ones had died in the crash. Griffin acknowledged withholding information from a Chicago-based attorney who was assisting Girardi’s firm with the case, in contravention of Durkin’s order and despite the clients’ repeated inquiries and demands for the money.

In the plea agreement, Griffin stated that on multiple occasions he confronted Girardi about paying the clients. Griffin knew, however, that Girardi was not distributing those funds as required by Durkin’s order over those eight months, the plea agreement states.

The Lion Air victims eventually received their settlement funds when another law firm’s insurer paid them.

Evidence that Girardi, a power broker in California politics and the law, had misappropriated millions of dollars in settlement money from the Indonesians led to the implosion of his law firm five years ago. It spurred allegations that he had stolen money from clients for decades and eluded detection thanks to a cozy relationship with State Bar regulators and the judiciary.

Girardi, 86, was disbarred in 2022 and, in 2024, convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles of embezzling millions of dollars in settlement funds from other clients. Jurors in that case were told about the Lion Air misappropriation. Girardi is now serving a seven-year federal prison sentence.

Tom Girardi was disbarred after being convicted of embezzling from clients.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Two other Girardi Keese employees were also convicted. Attorney David Lira, 65, Girardi’s son-in-law, pleaded guilty last year to a criminal contempt charge for his willful failure to abide by the settlement payment order. Lira was sentenced to four months in federal prison and four months of home confinement and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.

The law firm’s former chief financial officer, Christopher Kamon, pleaded guilty last year to a wire fraud charge for helping Girardi embezzle the victims’ settlement funds. Kamon was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison, which will run concurrently with a 10-year sentence that he received in federal court in Los Angeles for a related embezzlement scheme.