Theft of $4.5 Million Earns a 10-Year Term

A former $350,000-a-year Los Angeles financial consultant who stole at least $4.5 million from 36 of his clients to finance what one of them described as a “Rolls-Royce life style” was sentenced Friday to 10 years in state prison.

Stephen Harrison Henry, 42, also was ordered by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Marsha N. Revel to pay $100,000 restitution. Last month, Henry pleaded no contest, the equivalent of a guilty plea, to 10 counts of grand theft for stealing money from his clients from May, 1982, to July, 1986.

“He stole so much from so many for so long,” Revel said.

A La Canada Flintridge resident, Henry was a partner in the Mid-Wilshire investment firm of Henry-Evans & Pierce Co. until he left last October.

Henry told clients that he specialized in setting up pension trust accounts, educational trusts and retirement plans for doctors and dentists. In a 1985 USA Today profile, he characterized himself as a crusader for doctors in financial trouble, saying he wanted to “get them as independent of medicine as they can so they can play doctor because they enjoy it, not because they need it financially.”

Instead, Henry stole his clients’ money, using it to fund an extravagant life style that included four homes, a 33-foot yacht, a Rolls-Royce Silver Spur, $5,000 shotguns and memberships in three country clubs. Henry has also acknowledged that he was a compulsive gambler.

Revel rejected arguments for a more lenient sentence made by Henry’s attorneys and clinical psychologist Neil C. Warren, who blamed Henry’s problem on a compulsive personality formed by an unstable childhood.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Frederick G. Stewart said Henry lacks sympathy for his victims. Stewart said Henry prepaid $40,000 in college tuition for his daughter at USC and $7,000 in horse stable fees after promising his clients last fall that he would repay them.