Attorney charged
A Washington attorney was charged this week with diverting tens of thousands of dollars from an elderly client’s bank account for his own use.
The Allegheny County district attorney’s office announced Thursday it charged Michael Alberty, 57, with two counts of theft and one of misapplying entrusted funds. Detective William Miller wrote in an affidavit of probable cause Northwest Bank flagged suspicious activity on an 87-year-old woman’s account and notified an administrator at the Pittsburgh nursing home where she was staying.
An elder financial abuse audit performed by the Allegheny County Area Agency on Aging found Alberty had paid himself more than $180,000 in checks from the victim’s account between Sept. 14, 2015, and March 31.
Detectives later reviewed activity for Alberty’s bank account and determined he used the money he’d taken for personal expenses.
Alberty gave the county financial investigator three contracts from 2015 purportedly outlining his business arrangement with the woman that, among other duties, specified he would receive $50 an hour to work as construction manager on the woman’s home renovation project and $100 an hour for personal services, including visiting her in the nursing home. When detectives showed the woman the contracts, she said she hadn’t seen or read those documents.
Investigators also showed her 33 checks totaling $180,470 written from her account during that period. The woman said she’d signed blank checks – usually about six at a time – that Alberty told her would be used to remodel her home on Pittsburgh’s South Side. She reportedly told investigators she “was unaware (Alberty) took such large dollar amounts and said he needs to be thrown in jail,” Miller wrote. “The actor did not provide her with receipts, invoices or bills for the home improvement project.”
A time log Alberty admitted creating after the fact states he worked on the remodeling project for 1,368 hours during the 6 1/2-month period. Workers with the primary contractor told Miller “the longest they saw (Alberty) at the job site was an hour or two” and he was late letting workers into the home in the morning, so he gave workers their own key to the house. Alberty told an auditor he was so busy seeing to the woman’s needs he closed his law practice, which was based in Wheeling, W.Va.
Applying Alberty’s purported rates in the contract, he would have been paid $126,400, according to Miller’s calculations during the period in question, meaing he’d diverted $54,070 of the woman’s money to himself. In March, he was paid $56,300, or $32,700 than he would have received for the 236 hours he logged that month.
Alberty was in the Allegheny County jail Thursday on $50,000 bond set by District Judge Blaise Larotonda the day before.
Court papers don’t list an attorney for Alberty.