Lawyer Gets 2 Years in Insurance Fraud Case : Courts: The Granada Hills man is the last major defendant to be sentenced in ‘the Alliance’ scam involving a ring of L.A.-area attorneys.

A former San Fernando Valley lawyer who enlisted other attorneys in “the Alliance” insurance scam and then became the star witness against them was sentenced Tuesday to two years in prison for his role in the fraud and legal corruption case.

Marc I. Kent, 42, of Granada Hills, shook his head and lowered his eyes disconsolately as U.S. District Judge Judith Keep pronounced sentence, rejecting a plea to limit Kent’s punishment to a year in a halfway house.

“I can’t negate what a key player he was in a serious violation of the public’s trust,” Keep said.

“Mr. Kent was a big fish speaking against others who were not so big in the conspiracy,” Keep said. “He recruited so many in this organization, trading on his friendship with them.”

Keep said Kent’s role as a government witness “is the only reason, frankly, I give him two years” and not more. Kent had pleaded guilty to two mail-fraud counts, each punishable by five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Keep also ordered Kent to pay a $5,000 fine and placed him on five years probation following his incarceration. He is to surrender Nov. 22 at an as-yet unspecified federal prison.

Kent was the last major defendant to be sentenced in the Alliance case, which involved a ring of Los Angeles-area attorneys who worked together to manipulate civil litigation to extract huge legal fees from insurance companies.

Altogether, 12 lawyers and six law firm employees and clients were convicted or pleaded guilty in the case, one of the largest prosecutions of attorneys in U.S. history.

Other sentences have ranged from probation and fines to 46 months in prison.

Kent’s sentencing came nearly two years to the day after his October, 1989, guilty plea. Kent also resigned from the State Bar, and even prior to his plea began implicating others, including seven other Alliance lawyers he had helped recruit.

Several of them entered pleas of their own, and four attorneys were convicted in June after a lengthy trial at which Kent was a key witness.

Kent also has assisted separate probes by insurance companies and the State Bar, which is investigating about 50 lawyers for possible ethical violations in connection with the scheme, a State Bar official said.

The Alliance was the name used by prosecutors for a ring of attorneys who used the court system to bilk insurers of millions of dollars in legal fees for needless litigation.

From 1984 to 1988, the lawyers initiated or took control of at least 10 civil litigations in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties in which insurance companies were obliged to pay defense fees for policyholders who had been sued.

Unlike staged traffic accidents or other such scams, the disputes in these cases were real. But after gaining a foothold, prosecutors said, the lawyers worked together to resist settlements and to manufacture new legal controversies to make the cases grow in size and cost.

Kent said he was recruited for the scheme in 1984 by Lynn Boyd Stites, the fugitive attorney who allegedly headed the Alliance.

Authorities said Stites essentially franchised litigation, providing insured clients and legal strategy to his attorney-recruits in return for a large fixed percentage of their insurance billings.

Kent had such an arrangement and, purportedly acting for Stites, solicited many of the others who took part in the scheme.

Kent’s attorney, Michael Lipman, arguing for a lighter sentence, said his client had made “remarkable strides” in making peace with himself and the “institutions he harmed with his prior conduct.”

Kent had suffered through the “very painful” experience of implicating those “that he himself had been responsible for bringing into the conspiracy,” Lipman said.

But he had always been “completely candid, open and truthful” with the government, which would not have obtained “the vast number of guilty pleas that it got . . . without Mr. Kent’s assistance,” Lipman said.

Speaking in a quavering voice, Kent told the judge he had been “humiliated and embarrassed” and had been trying for more than two years “to do everything I could to regain my dignity.”

He spoke of his dying father and the “immeasurable . . . pain” of feeling “his shame for me.” He also talked of his need for his family and of his “two small children who need a father.”

Assistant U.S. Atty. George Hardy, who recommended a two-year prison term, said he would like to support the plea for leniency “if for no other reason than to encourage the kind of cooperation” Kent had shown. “He performed admirably, he testified truthfully . . . and he’s been through a lot,” Hardy said.

But “Kent was at the top end of this organization,” Hardy said. “He exercised control and management.” At one point, Hardy said, he even moved to expand the scheme by insuring failing businesses and arranging for the principals to be sued so Alliance lawyers could be paid to defend them.

Keep agreed that Kent’s involvement was “massive” and “intense.”

This was “more than a money-making scheme,” she said. It was a violation “of the public’s trust in lawyers--which is not good, anyway,” she said.

That “concerns me so much more than all the money that was taken from insurance companies.”