- 72 -
account of respondent’s increased litigation risk resulting from
Chicoine and Hallett’s efforts to suppress the evidence
discovered in the IRS raid on Kersting’s office. Other Kersting
petitioner clients of DeCastro and Chicoine and Hallett obtained
20-percent reduction settlements from McWade prior to the Court’s
1988 opinion in Dixon I, and some other nontest case petitioners
thereafter obtained such settlements. The Thompsons’ payments to
the IRS in late 1986 and in 1987 were made to satisfy their
obligations under the approximately 20-percent reduction
settlement arranged by McWade and DeCastro.
DeCastro thereafter played on the fears of Sims and McWade
that he would walk away from the test case trial to extort the
additional reduction agreed to in late 1988 and early 1989 that
would generate the refunds that were to be used to pay his fees
for providing legal representation to the Thompsons at the trial.
The new Thompson settlement had no rationale quantifiably related
to the hazards of litigation or the merits of the case; it was
based on the opportunistic estimates of McWade and Decastro of
what was needed to bring about a particular financial result that
has little or no congruence with the situation in which the
petitioners before the Court now find themselves. The fact that
the Thompsons had already made the payments required by the
earlier 20-percent reduction settlement provided the fund that
was ripening for the taking under the new settlement. As it
Page: Previous 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 NextLast modified: May 25, 2011