Local News in Brief : Warrant Issued for Lawyer in Theft Case

A Van Nuys Superior Court judge issued an arrest warrant Thursday for a Woodland Hills attorney accused of bilking two clients out of $92,000 after the lawyer failed to appear in court for sentencing on grand-theft charges.

Superior Court Judge Richard A. Adler issued the no-bail warrant for Cary Alan Rosen, 45, of Agoura Hills, who pleaded no contest last June to one count of grand theft in the 1980 incident.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office had earlier requested bail of $1 million for Rosen but Adler set bail at $10,000, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Diamond.

Diamond said he made the unusually high bail request because of Rosen’s recent arrest for possession of cocaine, because Rosen failed to appear in court to produce documents in an unrelated civil case and because he failed to notify clients that he had been suspended by the State Bar of California.

Adler said he was reluctant to set the high bail because Rosen’s attorney was not in court at the time the request was made, although Rosen was.

In exchange for Rosen’s plea, prosecutors dropped an additional charge of forgery and agreed to request a sentence of no more than one year. As a condition of the agreement, Rosen was to pay restitution of $30,000 to the victims Thursday, court documents said.

Rosen’s mother, Florence Rosen, had asked the court in a letter to sentence Rosen to a drug rehabilitation program, noting that he was arrested Sept. 21 for possession of cocaine.

She wrote that her son, a former Loyola law school scholarship student and editor of the Law Review, had stolen her retirement money and money for the college education of his two children to support his cocaine habit.