Fall of ‘Model Attorney’ Puzzles Friends, Family

At Loyola University’s 1968 law school commencement, scholarship student Cary Alan Rosen was a class superstar. Editor of the school’s first Law Review, he graduated third out of 131 students, headed for a clerkship with a California Court of Appeal judge.

He went on to join a prestigious Los Angeles law firm and later would establish a lucrative solo practice in Woodland Hills. He appeared, in the words of former classmate Stephen A. Lenske, to be “a model attorney.”

Twenty years after his triumphal graduation, Rosen sat in a Los Angeles County Jail cell awaiting arraignment on possession of cocaine. His arrest in September capped 2 tumultuous years during which he allegedly stole $1.1 million from clients.

Months earlier, the man whose Cadillac once bore the personalized plates “EZCARY”--underscoring how things had always come easy to him--had been stripped of his license to practice law by the California State Bar.

Awaiting Sentencing

“If you want a story about a guy who had it all, was at the top and now is at rock bottom, this is it,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective John Gentzvein.

Today, Rosen, 45, sits in County Jail awaiting sentencing on grand theft charges after spending more than a month as a fugitive. He faces up to one year in County Jail and possibly more, depending on the outcome of the drug charges.

To his friends, family and colleagues, he is a conundrum. They are at a loss to explain his fall, except to speculate that drugs and greed may have fed his downhill momentum.

Rosen’s attorney, Richard C. Chier, said his client “had a lot of demons chasing him.”

“On the surface, he was the perfect father, the perfect husband and the perfect lawyer,” Chier said. “But underneath there was a lot of stuff that was troubling him and eating him up.”

Prosecutors are not so certain that drugs are the root of Rosen’s problems. They believe that years of quietly stealing from clients may have finally caught up with him.

“He’s a glib con artist,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Diamond, a Van Nuys prosecutor who in October unsuccessfully requested $1-million bail for Rosen in a grand theft case. “He’s a sociopath, plain and simple.”

The depth and breadth of Rosen’s alleged crimes have yet to be determined. Since his grand theft conviction, at least two more clients have come forward with lawsuits charging that Rosen stole their money, Chier said.

The storybook portion of Rosen’s life was well under way by his law school Graduation Day 20 years ago. A 1965 graduate of UCLA, Rosen had married his college girlfriend during his second year at Loyola law school in Los Angeles. To support themselves, she worked as a legal secretary and he worked at the U.S. Post Office.

Rosen’s law school classmates remember him as an extremely smart, articulate student.

Lawrence E. Weitzman, who shared a Woodland Hills office with Rosen for 8 years, recalled a study session when both sat down with a 140-page outline of a difficult law text. After 2 hours, Rosen told Weitzman that he knew all the material and was finished.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Weitzman, who practices law from his Chatsworth home. “So I started flipping through the outline asking Cary questions. He knew it. The guy was incredible.”

Upon graduation, Rosen worked as a clerk for Justice John J. Ford of the state Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. In 1969, he joined Ball, Hunt, Hart, Brown & Baerwitz, an influential Long Beach-based law firm with offices in Los Angeles.

In 1970, he and his wife, Linda, had twin sons, separated 2 years later and then divorced. But they remained on good terms.

“Cary always supported us financially so that we were able to stay in our family home, and the kids were able to go to a good private school,” Linda Rosen Clark wrote this year to Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Richard A. Adler, seeking leniency in Rosen’s sentencing for grand theft.

By 1980, Rosen had set up a private practice in Woodland Hills. About this time, he started negotiating the sale of a Thousand Oaks apartment complex owned by Beber-Fizdale Associates, a general partnership, court documents state.

Rosen was hired to collect rental payments from the company managing the property, Pavilion Associates, and distribute them to the owners.

Without the owners’ knowledge, Rosen sold the apartment building in 1980 to Pavilion, which had an option to buy the property for $92,000, court records state. But Rosen let them have it for $72,000, a bargain. One owner’s signature was forged to authorize the sale, and Rosen pocketed the $72,000, according to a criminal complaint filed in the case.

Rosen hid the sale from the Beber-Fizdale investors by sending them bogus financial reports detailing rents collected. When some investors complained that they had not received payments, Rosen said he was merely tardy. Occasionally, he would send checks that he said represented rental collections, said Michael R. Mizel, attorney for some of the Beber-Fizdale investors.

The surreptitious sale was finally uncovered in 1986 after the death of one of the Beber-Fizdale partners, Joseph Beber, resulted in a review of his financial affairs. His widow and daughter discovered that his estate was missing some money, demanded back payment from Rosen and consulted Mizel, a former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney.

After sitting through two interrogation sessions and failing a lie detector test, Rosen admitted that he secretly sold the apartment building and kept the money, according to police reports. He needed the money to solve his financial problems, he said.

New Home

Rosen told police that he planned to pay back Beber-Fizdale investors but was short of money. Meanwhile, friends and colleagues saw little evidence that Rosen was having financial troubles.

He moved into a new Agoura Hills home with his third wife in the early 1980s and drove cars that included Cadillacs and a Lincoln Town Car, Weitzman said. He bought his sons, now 18, a new mini-truck and scuba diving gear.

With the aid of a real estate broker’s license, Rosen had the qualifications sought in 1984 by Richard Brown, a general partner of Prudhoe Uplands Associates, a collection of 20 investment groups that owned Alaskan oil and gas leases.

Brown represented 625 investors, mostly retirees and small-business people who had purchased leases for land near the oil-rich fields of Prudhoe Bay. Many had bought the leases from telephone solicitors who were later shut down because of what the Federal Trade Commission called unscrupulous sales practices.

But most of these leases were valuable, and the small investors had no idea how to gain title to their land. They hired Brown, a Westlake Village energy investment manager, to guide them through the maze. An unsuspecting Brown hired Rosen.

By November, 1986, it appeared that Rosen was about to secure the deeds for the investors. All he needed to do was send a $285,000 rental payment to the Alaska government by Dec. 1. The payment would give the investors final title to land worth more than $10 million, Brown said.

Checks Bounced

On Dec. 12, an Alaska attorney called Brown to say that all of Rosen’s checks had bounced. The $285,000 was missing and the Prudhoe Uplands investors had lost their claim to the land.

“I called Rosen right away and asked him what in the hell was going on,” Brown said. “He said there was no problem, everything was under control, that the bank had made a mistake and that he had a letter from the bank to prove it.

“He told me not to get in touch with the partners because he would straighten everything out,” Brown said. “I believed him. I had no reason to doubt that he was telling the truth. Besides, we were personal friends. If he had told me the moon was made of cheese, I would have believed him.”

By this time, the court date for Rosen’s grand theft trial was approaching. In June, 1987, Rosen pleaded no contest to the charge of stealing $92,000 from the sale of the apartment building. His admission was the legal equivalent of a guilty plea. In exchange for his admission, fraud charges were dropped. Although he pocketed only $72,000 in the sale, he was held responsible for the full $92,000 since that was the amount the owners would have been due.

Restitution Ordered

The court ordered Rosen to pay back the $92,000. If he completed restitution by a certain date, he would face no more than 1 year in County Jail.

In October, 1987, Rosen’s license to practice law was suspended indefinitely by the California State Bar because of the grand theft conviction. But Rosen failed to notify his clients and continued to represent the Prudhoe Uplands investors for several months before they discovered it.

In March, the Prudhoe Uplands partners filed a lawsuit against Rosen alleging fraud and negligence. The investors asked for restitution of the $285,000 rental payment, $10 million for the Alaska land and $5 million in punitive damages.

Rosen never showed up in court to answer the charges, and Adler, who also presided over Rosen’s criminal case, awarded the investors a $13.8-million judgment in August.

“He didn’t retain counsel to represent him because he was having a very difficult time dealing with the cases,” said Chier, who represented Rosen only in the $92,000 grand theft case.

“At the time, he was emotionally overwrought at the prospect of possibly going to jail,” Chier added.

Rosen’s first wife, Linda Rosen Clark, who has remarried but stayed in contact with her former husband, had by this time noticed a change in him.

“Cary, who used to be the biggest mother hen with the boys and was active in the high school parent groups and the Agoura community, suddenly wasn’t around as much and nudging the boys to do their schoolwork,” she wrote in her letter to Adler.

Then evidence of drug problems surfaced, according to deputies at the Sheriff’s Department’s Malibu substation, who gave this account in a report:

On Sept. 21, 1988, a guest at the Agoura Ramada Inn tried to pay a bill of more than $800 with two bad credit cards. The guest was Rosen and, after an animated conversation with deputies and the hotel manager, Rosen asked to leave so that he could bring back a friend who would pay the bill.

After Rosen left, the hotel manager asked the deputies to accompany him to Rosen’s hotel room. The deputies said the manager was afraid that Rosen would double back to the room and take his things without paying the bill.

Inside, the men said, they found pipes used to smoke cocaine, a propane torch that was probably used as the heat source for the pipes and 13 grams of cocaine worth about $1,300.

Rosen returned and a friend paid the bill. Deputies arrested Rosen and the other two occupants of his room, Jeffrey Dale Hawthorne, 32, and Candace Lynn Purcell, 30, both of Woodland Hills, on charges of possession of cocaine and being under the influence of drugs. The friend who paid the bill was not arrested.

Rosen said he did not have $2,500 for bail and made a series of desperate telephone calls to such friends as Weitzman and Stephen Fizdale to raise the money. No one came to his rescue.

“By that point, most of his friends had given up on him. It was difficult, but we had to walk away,” said Fizdale, who was involved in the Beber-Fizdale investment group.

While in jail, Rosen was hit with another blow--a $750,000 lawsuit charging that he secretly sold another piece of Thousand Oaks property in 1988. Westlake Village attorney Bruce Gordon Jones believes that Rosen used some of the profits to repay the Bebers because Rosen’s first restitution payment came shortly after completion of the latest sale.

After his arraignment on the drug charges, his mother, Florence Rosen of Camarillo, came up with the $2,500 on Oct. 4 to free her son.

The following day, Rosen returned to the Van Nuys Courthouse for sentencing in the $92,000 grand theft case. He told Adler that he had repaid $60,000, but could not muster funds for the remaining $32,000.

Adler was ready to sentence Rosen, but hesitated because Chier, Rosen’s attorney, was unable to attend. Adler ruled that the hearing should be postponed for a day.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Diamond asked that Rosen be held on $1-million bail, an unusually high amount, which was necessary, he said, because of Rosen’s cocaine arrest, his failure to appear in court in the Prudhoe Uplands case and his failure to notify clients that he had been suspended by the State Bar.

But Adler was reluctant because Chier was not there to argue in Rosen’s favor. Instead, the judge set bail at $10,000.

Defendant Vanished

Rosen turned in the courtroom to plead with his mother for bail money. For the second time in 2 days, Florence Rosen agreed. Her son disappeared for more than a month.

While on the run, Rosen would occasionally call friends and family members but never disclosed his location. During one conversation, he told his mother that he wanted to enter a drug rehabilitation program.

She blames his troubles on cocaine and suspects that it was a drug habit that led him to loot even her retirement savings and his childrens’ college education fund.

Last week, she accompanied her son to Malibu Municipal Court, where he surrendered at a hearing on his cocaine charge. He was arrested for the grand theft conviction and sent to the County Jail. Bail was set at $10,000, but this time his mother refused to put up the money.

Fizdale, a friend who was an investor in the apartment complex that Rosen secretly sold in 1980, asked Rosen how he could have allowed the episode to occur.

“He sighed and said that it was a long story and that someday we would have to sit down and have a drink so he could explain it,” Fizdale said. “That day has never come, and it probably never will. I don’t believe he has an explanation.”