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By Kenneth C. Rossignol
ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN (Jan. 24, 2010) — Besides the pending criminal charges against Leonardtown attorney John A. Mattingly Jr. there could be as many as four additional local lawyers facing criminal charges when two grand juries finish hearing from a parade of victims.

Reviews of charging documents and motions filed in Circuit Court along with discussions with defendants and investigators reveal several new disclosures in the case.

St. Mary’s County Deputy Attorney David Weiskopf has been identified as the person who delivered the money to the offices of attorney Dan Slade. Slade, who is constantly characterized as not being involved in any criminal conduct, refused to take the money, although one witness claims that she watched as he took photos of the $20,000 in cash with his cell phone as he tossed it in the air.

Slade allegedly told Weiskopf to take the money, intended to be a legal fee, from Terry Clarke back to John Mattingly’s office.

Slade reportedly told Weiskopf that it was unethical to receive the cash and if Clarke wrote a check to him for the fee, he would take the case. Later Slade reportedly became frustrated with the continued disclosures of details of the case involving Clarke’s indictments on reckless endangerment and firearms possession by a convicted felon to Mattingly by Clarke.

At that point, Slade terminated Clarke as a client and refunded all of his money and withdrew from the case.

Clarke then obtained Shane Mattingly as his attorney, entered into a plea agreement with the prosecutors and agreed to cooperate with the investigation into allegations of obstruction of justice and intimidation and bribery of witnesses by John Mattingly and Daniel Brown.

Shane Mattingly told ST. MARY’S TODAY that his client, Clarke, was cooperating with the police and knew that his cooperation was vital to determining what sentence he would receive from the court. The most serious charges against Clarke were dropped while Clarke pleads guilty to a less severe charge.

Charges involving the handling of the law clients of John Mattingly are also under review, his dealings with his former law partners, Sam Baldwin and Janice Briscoe as well as Weiskopf.
AS the probe has continued into Mattingly’s affairs, other allegations involving other attorneys have come to the attention of investigators.

St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Captain Daniel Alioto is leading the investigation and Captain Alioto said that he while charges are now placed in the cases involving Mattingly and Daniel Jason Brown, that many more cases are being investigated and other attorneys are likely to be charged.

Alioto said that the allegations of fraud, forgery and theft go back for years and often involved poor black residents of St. Mary’s, Calvert, Charles, Prince Georges and Anne Arundel counties.
The participation of various federal agencies may include the FBI and the IRS, looking for unreported income.

The shielding of illegal gains from drug dealing by the creation of a sham company is one focus of the investigation into John A. Mattingly and the transfer of land from drug dealers Wendell Ford and Corey Butler. Shane Mattingly also represented the pair in obtaining property seized from Ford in a search warrant raid in 1999. When Judge John Slade ordered the property, which became known as The Loot, returned to Ford, it was revealed that the property was stolen by a corrupt police captain, Steven Doolan, who gave it to his stepson.

Doolan’s wife was the campaign treasurer for St. Mary’s States Attorney Richard Fritz and was never charged with theft by Fritz or then-Sheriff David Zylak. The police would never have known the whereabouts of The Loot were it not for a news story in ST. MARY’S TODAY which triggered an investigation by the Maryland State Prosecutor, which found out who stole The Loot.

Fritz is still states attorney but Zylak was defeated in the 2006 election. John Mattingly, learning that the investigation into the actions of himself and Brown into attempting to bribe witnesses into the case against Clarke, allegedly concocted a plan to announce he was running for states attorney in order to get Fritz to back off from Grand Jury indictments against him and Brown.
Mattingly hoped that news stories would cause Fritz to look as if he was trying to indict his political opponent, a typical maneuver in past local elections.

On February 9, 2009, Mattingly, in a news story in ST. MARY’S TODAY, story announced he was running for office. Mattingly never filed as a candidate until Sept. 23, 2009, the day before police served a search and seizure warrant on the home of Daniel Brown, premises he rents from John Mattingly’s mother.

John Mattingly, Brown and Weiskopf all say that they did nothing illegal and Shane Mattingly says he never got the $20,000 cash, while Weiskopf is quoted by investigators as saying he saw the bribe money.

Brown claims that he used his own money to attempt to get the people that Clarke shot at in a Dec. 29, 2007 incident to come to a civil settlement.

Weiskopf was disbarred by consent when substance abuse caused him to lose control of his professional life. After receiving rehab treatment, Weiskopf worked for Clarke as the manager of the Tiki Bar at Solomon’s Island.

Should Weiskopf be indicted and convicted of any criminal conduct in this affair, he would be eligible to be disbarred again and would lose his post as Deputy County Attorney.

Other land deals where property owners who had inherited property, usually uneducated and poor blacks, were allegedly scammed, are the subject of some of the pending indictments and the continuing investigation.

John Mattingly has filed a lawsuit in Federal Court with a hearing on motions to be held Feb. 19th in Greenbelt. Mattingly alleges that Fritz and Assistant States Attorney Daniel White illegally seized his law files which were in storage in the basement of Brown’s premises when a court authorized search warrant was served. Mattingly and Brown said the files were kept in a separate room and locked, while police say that isn’t true. Mattingly says his files were seized due to his filing for office the previous day.

A malpractice lawsuit is pending in Federal Court filed against Leonardtown attorney Daniel Guenther for acts he allegedly committed in handling a case involving the purchase of real estate. The civil case also involved Judge Karen Abrams allegedly favoring Guenther’s clients and not revealing to all parties that Guenther rents his office from her.

Yet another case involving a local attorney, Julian J. Izydore, alleges that he failed to give competent representation to a murder defendant who ended up with a life sentence. Martin Abell’s family is seeking to have a new trial granted and is frustrated that the courts are refusing to grant a new trial. Izydore, at the time of Abell trial, had been the subject of a police lookout for being suicidal and was also allegedly out of control as he worked at cleaning out the estate of a client.

Isydore was disbarred, moved out of state and convicted in 2008 on theft charges. He was sentenced to five years of supervised probation and now lives in Georgia.

Oddly enough, the client Izydore stole from was St. Mary’s Deputy Randy Wood who illegally gave his firearm to Clarke, who used it to shoot at duck hunters and caused this entire affair of illegal conduct to be revealed…or perhaps a glimpse into what may be generational illegal conduct by local attorneys and land scams targeting the poor and uneducated.