HAMILTON, Bermuda, CMC – A High Court judge has remanded a 37-year-old lawyer into custody after he was found guilty of stealing nearly half a million US dollars belonging to his clients.
Puisne Judge Juan Wolffe remanded Tyrone Quinn, 37, into custody after the 12-woman jury found him guilty of three counts of theft by a unanimous verdict following three and a half hours of deliberation.
The judge rejected an appeal from Quinn that he be released on bail pending sentence to allow him to get his affairs in order. The Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, Alan Richards, told the High Court that the offenses were serious and deserved a significant sentence.
Justice Wolffe has ordered a social inquiry report on Quinn and for the matter to return to the court to be mentioned next month.
Quinn was accused of three counts of theft totaling $483,000 after three of his clients said he had failed to turn over compensation payments he had received on their behalf.
The offenses are alleged to have occurred between May 2020 and February 2021, and the High Court was told that Quinn had represented Jacqueline Trott in 2020 when she sought compensation for an injury she suffered while working as a security guard.
The woman said Quinn advised her to accept an award of US$100,000, and near the end of February 2021, he informed her that the money had been transferred.
He then gave her an envelope with $13,000 in it and said that the rest of the money was transferred to her account, but no such transfer was ever made.
Another client, Larry Brangman, said he had retained Quinn in March 2019 after an accident had caused him cuts and a dislocated hip. He settled for US$300,000 in April 2020 but became suspicious after he did not receive the money.
Brangman said Colonial Insurance told him in March 2021 that the money had been sent out almost a year earlier.
The third client, Jenna Riley, said she had settled a case for US$89,000 and was told by Quinn she would receive the funds in a matter of weeks, but after months of trying to receive the funds, she reported the matter to the police.
Quinn admitted in court that he had received the funds for the clients and had no intention of permanently depriving them of the money.
He said he had been approached by two men in 2019 over a “problem” related to an illegal business transaction and that they had demanded compensation.
Quinn said he did not know the men or their “problem,” but he complied with their demands after they threatened him and his family, paying them thousands of dollars and making a range of payments on their behalf. He told the court he had always intended to repay the funds owed to his clients.
He told the jury to consider what they would have done if the lives of their families had been threatened.
But the prosecutor said Quinn had acted dishonestly and had treated his client’s funds as if they were his own.
Richards said neither Quinn nor his witness was willing to identify the alleged culprits to the police or the courts and that large portions of the money were used for expenses utterly unrelated to the likely threats.
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