Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Feb 12, 2023, 7:21 AM

Interesting background piece...

Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

BY TED CLIFFORD AND JOHN MONK

WALTERBORO, S.C.
Alex Murdaugh and his family had a fleet of tractors to maintain their 1,770-acre rural estate in Colleton County.

At Moselle, as the estate was called, they planted fields of sunflowers to attract game that they hunted with Italian Benelli shotguns and custom AR-15 rifles with infrared scopes.

The family and their friends cruised their fields in golf carts and a pickup truck named “Dolly.” They employed housekeepers, and kept both working dogs and house dogs, among them their lively Labradors Bubba, Bourbon and Grady.

But this Lowcountry Camelot was propped up by debt and fraud, according to prosecution testimony and documents revealed in the third week of Alex Murdaugh’s double-murder trial.

A parade of witnesses have opened a window into the disgraced former attorney’s hidden life, as well as the usually private inner workings of the former family-led law firm in Hampton County — what had been for years an engine of wealth generation for the Murdaugh family and lawyers who worked there.

Much of the testimony in Murdaugh’s trial has come from the 54-year-old’s closest friends and coworkers, who are among the so far 47 state witnesses to take the stand.

All who knew the family personally testified that Murdaugh and his wife, Maggie, enjoyed a loving relationship.

And he loved his sons: Buster, the eldest, and Paul, the youngest.

But none have explained, nor were they asked to by prosecutors, why the former attorney would have destroyed his idyllic life by gunning down his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, at the family’s rural estate dog kennels on the night of June 7, 2021.

Murdaugh faces two murder charges in the killings of his wife and son. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.

Prosecutors allege that Murdaugh, under growing financial pressure, killed his wife and son in order to distract from the discovery of a decade of different kinds of embezzlement from his law firm, his friends and clients.

“He was burning through cash like crazy and he was out of options,” lead prosecutor Creighton Waters told the jury in his opening statement.

The amount of money Murdaugh allegedly stole over a decade is eye-popping, costing his now-former law firm an estimated $5 million to pay back the victims he stole from over the years, the firm’s chief financial officer, Jeanne Seckinger, testified.

Bamberg attorney Chris Wilson, Murdaugh’s close friend and former law school roommate who worked with Murdaugh on cases, testified that Murdaugh left him on the hook for $192,000 in fees that Murdaugh allegedly stole from the law firm.

Murdaugh also is accused of stealing a $3.4 million insurance payout meant for the family of his late housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, her son, Tony, testified. Satterfield died in 2018 after a fall at Moselle.

But it is unknown where much of this money went.

By August 2021, Murdaugh owed Hampton-based Palmetto State Bank $4.2 million, according to documents revealed at the trial and testimony from the bank’s current CEO, Jan Malinowski.

The total, according to the documents and Malinowski, included two loans for Moselle totaling some $1.8 million and a $104,219 loan for land on some islands that Murdaugh made “sporadic” payments on.

There was also a $559,400 loan that Murdaugh had cosigned with his father, former solicitor Randolph Murdaugh, who died in June 2021.

And there were two loans — one for $307,761 and $362,896, owed by two separate LLCs that held real estate in Berkeley County — which the bank had given up trying to collect on and written off of its balance sheet, Malinowski said.

But the mountains of alleged embezzlement didn’t stop Murdaugh’s expensive lifestyle, the jury heard.

He bought two $4,500 .300 Blackout rifles for Buster and Paul for Christmas gifts.

Moselle was a magnet for dozens of Paul and Buster’s young friends.

It was a place where they could relax, use the family’s guns to hunt everything from hogs to turkeys and dine with the Murdaughs. Many of those friends considered the Murdaughs a second family, they testified in court. If they tired of Moselle, they could always go to Edisto Beach, where the Murdaughs had a cottage.

In 2021, Murdaugh bought Maggie a 2021 Mercedes SUV, taking out a $91,368 loan to do so.

In the trial’s third week, the prosecution has leaned heavily on testimony about Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes, which Judge Clifton Newman allowed into evidence over the defense’s objections that they would inflame the jury against Murdaugh and would offer an illogical motive for the killings.

The battle over motive became more urgent by the week’s end, as the prosecution’s forensic evidence — threaded in between testimony about gunshot residue, spent rifle casings, cellphone and vehicle data — didn’t explicitly place Murdaugh at the scene of the murders.

A TSUNAMI OF DEBT

A few months before she was murdered, Maggie expressed concern about a wrongful death lawsuit filed in the 2019 boating death of Mallory Beach, according to testimony.

Paul, her youngest son, was accused of driving the boat drunk at the time.

Buster and Murdaugh were among the defendants.

Blanca Turrubiate-Simpson, 55, a housekeeper for the family, testified on Friday that Maggie said she needed to talk to her.

Murdaugh was taking a nap in a bedroom at the family’s property, so they went into the “hunt room,” where Maggie shut the door, Turrubiate-Simpson said.

“She felt that Alex was not being truthful with her about that (boat crash) lawsuit,” Turrubiate-Simpson testified.

Maggie told her that she thought the Beach family was seeking $30 million.

“We don’t have that kind of money,” Maggie said, according to Turrubiate-Simpson. “We’ll start over. I just want it (the lawsuit) gone.”

By 2021, the family had sold their house in the town of Hampton, still holding ownership of a beach house at Edisto, appraised at $730,000 in 2021, and Moselle, appraised at 3.3 million in 2015, according to Palmetto State Bank records.

“I believed that he was making lots of money,” said attorney Mark Tinsley, 52, the attorney suing Murdaugh on behalf of the Beach family.

A majority of the legal cases filed in the Hampton County courthouse, in Murdaugh’s home town, were filed by Murdaugh and his fellow attorneys — another indication that Murdaugh had to be doing well, Tinsley testified.

Tinsley was incredulous when Murdaugh’s attorney, Danny Henderson, told him that Murdaugh was “broke” and “maybe could cobble together $1 million,” Tinsley said.

Court testimony has revealed just how precarious the Murdaughs’ finances were.

On June 7, 2021 — the day of the murders — Murdaugh had only $70,000 spread across six Palmetto State Bank accounts.

While this was a princely sum in Hampton County, where the U.S. census says annual income for an individual is around $20,253, it was a poor showing for an attorney who regularly made seven figure bonuses, according to his law partners.

Palmetto State Bank documents show the Murdaughs carried credit card debt, and repayment on loans for the Edisto Beach house had been 30 days late on three occasions. Repayment on Moselle had been 30 days late on one occasion and 60 days late on another.

They owned multiple boats, cars and numerous properties and employed a housekeeper, Turrubiate-Simpson, who ran errands, cooked and washed clothes for Maggie and the rest of the family.

Prosecutors have said that Murdaugh’s finances took a turn for the worse after a bad land deal around the 2008 recession. Along with several partners, Murdaugh invested in land on islands around St. Helena, hoping to flip it, law firm partner Ronnie Crosby testified.

“That market went bad,” Crosby said, and Murdaugh was left shouldering the loans.

In August 2021, Murdaugh still owed $104,219 on the investment.

‘THE BIG DOG’ AT PMPED

Murdaugh’s former law firm in Hampton — Peters Murdaugh Parker Eltzroth & Detrick, or PMPED as it was known — was “a big firm, with a big reputation,” Murdaugh’s attorney friend Wilson testified.

“(Alex) was one of the biggest dogs in that firm, one of the biggest producers that they had,” Wilson testified.

Murdaugh was “a very good lawyer,” said Crosby, who testified Tuesday. He was “very, very good at reading people, very good at understanding people and good at making people believe that he cared about them.”

A general practitioner, Murdaugh worked many personal injury cases. He could be distracted, many witnesses testified, and it was hard to keep his attention. He was a “Tasmanian devil,” said Annette Griswold, his paralegal.

He would leave in the middle of depositions to take phone calls, multiple witnesses testified.

“Getting a full conversation in with him was difficult,” Wilson said, but when he was focused he was “able to get it done.”

Murdaugh excelled at strategizing against insurance firms, according to Crosby.

“Lawyers in the firm were often amazed at the results he got,” he said.

Partners at PMPED, founded by Murdaugh’s great-grandfather, could expect to make $125,000 a year in salary.

But the majority of their compensation came as an end-of-year bonus. Each December, the law firm added up all fees and settlements collected over the year and divided it up among the partners, less overhead, based on how much each partner brought in, testified Seckinger, the firm’s CFO.

The accounts were completely cleared out to avoid additional taxes, said Seckinger, so in January partners would typically lend money back to the firm so that it could operate. Murdaugh never participated in these loans, Seckinger said.

“We were a very close-knit group of lawyers,” Crosby said. “We have a very family-like environment.”

But it was that very culture of “trust and brotherhood” that may have enabled Murdaugh’s theft from the firm, Seckinger said.

Between September 2020 and his eventual firing in September 2021, Murdaugh was approached several times about missing fee checks and what appeared to be attempts to hide assets because of the pending litigation in the boat case.

But over that year, concern grew.

“We wanted our suspicions to be wrong,” said Griswold, who described how she “loved” Murdaugh and how the employees of the firm went into “mama bear mode” after the killings.

On each occasion, the choice was made to “sweep it under the rug,” Seckinger said. She said Murdaugh came up with quick explanations, and various partners chose to believe what he said.

As a final measure of Murdaugh’s fall from grace, the firm changed its name last year and recreated itself as a new legal entity. It is now known as Parker Law Group.

Ted Clifford: 631-810-9272, @ted_clfrd

John Monk: 803-771-8344, @jmonkatthestate

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He was a Clemson grad, then went to cooterville to obtain a law degree. Once you become a coot you can’t come back. Harpootlisn luved and practiced in cootlumbia.
He loved his gamecoots.

More info on Harpootlisn:

Democratic Party presidential primaries
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During the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Harpootlian stated that he was a "Joe Biden guy."[22] He endorsed Bernie Sanders for president on February 3, 2016, comparing Sanders' passion with the kind Obama exuded in 2007 when they had first met."[23] In 2020, Harpootlian endorsed Joe Biden for president, stating "If the Democratic Party believes nominating a socialist is the way to win in November, they need to start drug testing at the national committee" in reference to Sanders.[24]

Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

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Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Not your typical

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Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

that must have been good shots to kill a dove with an AR 15***

benelli shotguns are great.

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

He probably does know a few

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

Re: Murdaugh trial reveals lavish spending and debt

TigerBoard POTD