A former Manhattan Beach attorney who was disbarred for misappropriating clients’ funds and using some of the money for gambling pleaded guilty Monday to four felony counts.
Sergio Valdovinos Ramirez, 36, is facing two years in state prison, along with a $100,000 fine and more than $300,000 in restitution in connection with his plea to three counts of grand theft and one count of writing a check with insufficient funds.
He is due back in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom Sept. 21 for sentencing.
A State Bar fund has paid the victims just over $310,000 in restitution, but there may be additional restitution requested, Deputy District Attorney Daniel Akemon told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Olivia Rosales.
“Sergio took an oath to treat all of his clients with dignity and respect and instead he used his license to practice law to defraud people,” one of his victims said in a statement read in court on her behalf. “He not only gambled with the money that was paid to help people. He chose to gamble with human lives as well.”
The woman said her own mother had cancer “while Sergio was concocting stories about having cancer and being in the hospital.”
Another of his victims said it was especially heartbreaking that she knew the defendant before the crimes came to light.
“It is deeply disappointing that someone entrusted with the law and with helping vulnerable people chose instead to exploit that trust for personal gain and addiction. That betrayal is difficult to reconcile,” she said in a statement read in court on her behalf.
The California Supreme Court ordered Valdovinos Ramirez to be disbarred in 2024, with the criminal case also filed against him that year.
He had been admitted to the State Bar in 2017, with disciplinary charges filed against him just under five years later in State Bar court, according to State Bar records.
An opinion filed by a three-judge panel from the State Bar’s review department noted, “Often, as soon as he received entrusted funds, he would deplete his bank accounts and use the entrusted funds for his own purposes, which included gambling. This misconduct was exacerbated by the additional dishonesty in which he engaged.”
The panel noted in the opinion that he “lied to his clients to stall the discovery of his misappropriation and his failure to follow through on work he had assured clients he had performed,” and that “a key part of this cover-up was to issue numerous checks with insufficient funds to several clients.”
The panel added that he informed a hearing judge he was undergoing chemotherapy, but never provided medical documentation to back up that claim. The panel found that the “simple truth” is he “repeatedly lied.”
An investigator testified that he conducted a search for the physician whom Valdovinos Ramirez said was treating him at City of Hope and there was no doctor by that name or any similar name and no record of him receiving treatment there, according to the opinion.
“Mr. Valdovinos Ramirez cheated his clients out of their funds, in part, to feed his gambling habit. He then showed no remorse and lied about a life-threatening illness to avoid taking responsibility for his misconduct,” the State Bar’s Chief Trial Counsel, George Cardona, said in an October 2024 statement. “Disbarment is entirely appropriate in this case.”