Pilferer of trust: Fear led to crime

Ex-lawyer given 5-year sentence

Just before being sentenced Friday afternoon to five years in prison, former Little Rock lawyer David Patrick Henry told a judge that his fear of facing reality led him to pilfer a $1.3 million family trust he was appointed to oversee for a friend's widow and two daughters.

A federal jury convicted Henry, 71, in March of 26 counts of mail fraud and three counts of tax evasion stemming from his eight-year management of the Joe Thomas Swaffar family trust after Swaffar, a Little Rock architect, died Aug. 18, 2004, of a gunshot wound that some suspected was suicide.

Joe Swaffar had arranged for Henry, a friend, to oversee the trust to ensure that Swaffar's widow, Sandra Carol Swaffar, and her daughters had enough money to live on.

Henry was supposed to make investments and otherwise manage the trust, which was funded by life insurance proceeds. Instead, he had all financial statements concerning the trust forwarded to himself and created a false company to conceal his skimming of the funds to pay off his own mortgage and treat his family to perks such as insurance coverage, vehicles and college tuition.

Carol Swaffar, 68, now lives in a rented house in Benton with her oldest daughter, relying on $965 a month from Social Security. She testified at trial that Henry regularly told her the trust fund was doing well, adding that she was stunned the day she asked for some money from the trust and he told her she was "broke."

While Henry denied the allegations throughout the trial, he owned up to them at his sentencing hearing Friday before Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller.

From a courtroom lectern, with defense attorney John Wesley Hall at his side, Henry said that in the years he was a successful attorney, "It seemed like everything I touched turned to gold. I didn't realize the other side of karma was coming."

When his business took a nose dive, he said, "I didn't deal with it well."

He said he couldn't bring himself to tell his family members that they needed to change their lifestyle because they could no longer afford the luxuries to which they'd grown accustomed.

"I couldn't say, 'Wait a minute. We're broke. We need to change our lifestyle,'" he told Miller. "When I finally got to where I could tell my family, they have turned out to be the most supportive group of people ever. ... I don't know what I was afraid of five years earlier."

"The last few years," Henry said, "I've had very few nights where I've slept longer than two hours at a time. I saw myself rationalizing that I could put it back and everything would be alright."

"I'm sorry for my acts and the effects they've had on the Swaffars," he said.

Minutes earlier, Swaffar addressed the judge. She said that while she was ill and housebound in late 2003, Henry took advantage of her helplessness and intimidated her into following her late husband's directives and putting Henry in charge of the trust despite her own reservations and opposing advice she had received from two trusted friends.

"He threatened me with my home, and he threatened me with my husband's past following me. He said he'd make sure of it," she said.

Joe Swaffar, 68, died less than a week before his sentencing hearing related to his March 2004 guilty plea to bankruptcy fraud and tax-evasion charges dating to 1996 -- for which he faced 21/2 years in prison.

Remembering how lost, confused and depressed she felt after her husband's death, while also suffering from a condition that eventually led to her having part of her colon removed, she told the judge, "This man doesn't have a heart. He put me in a position where he inherited my trust, and his first priority to take care of was himself and his family.

"He lived out of the trust for my family, that my husband had worked hard to provide," Swaffar said. "We were at his mercy. ... The man inherited my trust. It's just not fair."

Under federal sentencing guidelines, Henry faced 51 to 63 months in prison and a fine of between $10,000 and $100,000, in addition to making full restitution of $1,021,133.74 to the trust and the Internal Revenue Service. Hall asked for a lesser sentence of 24 to 30 months because of Henry's age and health problems, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela Jegley sought a longer term of 70 to 87 months because of Swaffar's vulnerability and the sophisticated way Henry carried out his scheme.

"The fact is," Jegley told the judge, "Mr. Henry is a grifter. ... He's a cheat." Noting that he surrendered his law license in 2002 to avoid being disbarred for stealing from another woman over a 10-year period, Jegley argued, "Instead of learning from that, he went on to victimize the people in this case, and he needs to be punished for that. ... The public needs to understand that a position of trust when you're a lawyer is a big deal. ... People need to know you can't do that and get away with it."

Miller settled on 60 months, to be followed by two years of probation, and gave Henry until Oct. 15 to self-report to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, so he can receive some scheduled medical care first.

Metro on 08/23/2014

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