Christopher Psaila said unfounded accusations from Erika Girardi that his studio overbilled her credit card nearly destroyed his business and devastated him personally. “I lost complete trust in the justice system,” Psaila said.
Secret Service agents in helmets and body armor burst through the doors of Marco Marco’s studio at dawn with guns drawn. Ordering seamstresses outside, about 10 officers rifled through the premises, sending feathers, crystals and bolts of silk, sequins and leather to the ground and scattering hand-drawn sketches of couture designs for ballerinas, circus performers, drag queens and stars like Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Cardi B, Katy Perry and contestants on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Psaila, who handled the business side, said he was so confident that the claim was false that he helped agents log into the company’s accounting software, reasoning, “Let’s solve this here and now.”By the time of the 2017 raid, Erika Girardi had been a client for about three years. She’d been introduced to them by their mutual publicist, who said she was in her early 40s, trying to become a pop star and had a rich husband to foot the bill.
“They didn’t help me accelerate my presence in the gay community. That is done through hard work, making records, doing shows,” she insisted.At her first fitting, Psaila tried to present her with an invoice, but she waved him off, saying the paperwork wasn’t necessary and to keep her credit card on file, he and Morante said.“It never happens that someone would just dismiss the invoice and not look at it at all. That was bizarre,” Psaila said.
Few knew then that his reputation as a champion of the little guy was largely a lie. His firm was pervaded by fraud and he was routinely stealing from clients.The State Bar can conduct depositions of the two former employees as part of its internal investigation into whether insiders helped Girardi sidestep discipline and keep an unblemished law license while he misappropriated money from his clients.
He struck up a friendship with Girardi at a Chamber of Commerce dinner about a decade ago, but his wife’s family had known the lawyer for decades longer, with two relatives interning at Girardi’s firm in the 1990s. He was a regular at Girardi’s annual Super Bowl parties, where police chiefs, sheriff’s, judges and top attorneys — almost all men — downed cocktails while wearing football jerseys over tuxedos.
But as the finalization drew near in the fall of 2016, Rob Savage worried that the settlement was too small and had been reached “without holding Volkswagen adequately responsible,” he recalled.
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