Lawyer of the Day: Gerald Hamelburg

By  
on

Like so many ATL Lawyers of the Day that have been honored before him, Gerald Hamelburg falls into the camp of attorneys who practice the law but don’t respect it. Hamelburg has gotten caught up in a “disabled placard abuser” sting.
A similar scam was run in this episode of Desperate Housewives. Gaby Solis (Eva Longoria) takes advantage of her husband Carlos’s blindness to get a disabled parking sticker and score sweet parking spots.
But Hamelburg had it even better — he got to park for free, too. From the Boston Globe:

He lives in one of Wellesley’s most exclusive neighborhoods, owns a $1.8 million Nantucket vacation home, and has a small fleet of luxury cars at his disposal. But when Gerald Hamelburg drives downtown, he doesn’t like to pay his way, according to investigators with the state inspector general’s office.
The Boston lawyer, they say, uses his deceased mother’s handicapped placard to park his Mercedes convertible, free of charge, at meters near the High Street firm that bears his name…
According to an investigator’s report, Hamelburg seemed unclear about what he had done wrong.
“He denied that he was ‘displaying’ the placard,” wrote the investigator, who videotaped this week’s exchange, “and stated that it was merely ‘hanging there.’ He questioned why he was being sanctioned for the use this time, saying that he had used it ‘half a dozen times’ before that and ‘no one’ had ever had an issue with his use of the placard before. [The trooper] asked him why he believed that was an appropriate defense to his having committed a serious violation by using the placard illegally. Hamelburg had no response to his question.”

Not the most impressive defense skills there. We assume that this is his law firm: Greenbaum, Nagel, Fisher and Hamelburg, though he gets no love (or bio write-up) on their website. The Massachusetts crackdown turned up hundred of placard abusers, and Hamelburg wasn’t the only attorney among them: “Among the worst violators were a state lawyer and his wife.”
This may sound cold-hearted, but we can’t help wondering: We understand the disabled getting premium parking spots close to building entrances, but why do they score free parking, too?
Disabled placard abusers targeted [Boston Globe]

Sponsored

Topics