Lawyer Threatens Federal Receiver, Earns One-Way Trip To Sanctiontown

What started, allegedly, with a wrongful burial ended with hand-scrawled intimidation and a sternly worded sanction order from a federal judge.

That sounds about right for an SEC matter.

According to the SEC, Detroit Memorial Partners was running around issuing $19 million in fraudulent promissory notes, just like you’d expect from a cemetery management company. Fast forward a bit and DMP is in receivership.

Which brings us to the case of Mr. Abdul Charara and Mr. Waad Charara, who own a plot in a DMP cemetery that’s become a little too crowded with the deposit of someone else’s remains. In challenging this upsetting turn of events, they hired Tarek Baydoun of Meridian Law Group to get relief. Baydoun set out to zealously represent his clients… perhaps a tad too zealously. Per a letter Baydoun wrote and cited in a recent opinion:

Common sense tells me that the viability of your business is now at stake, and a quick resolution with both families was in your interest, more than anyone else. As of yet, we have not received any assurances that you will do anything, let alone the right thing by these families and this community. I have assured everyone involved of my intent to shame the cemetery, its management and owners in a very public way until they do right by my clients and assure them that this cannot happen ever again.

You had me right up until the “intent to shame… in a very public way” stuff. Apparently, the letter goes on to suggest Baydoun hired investigators to dig up (unintentional pun!) other controversies about DMP, which he would deliver to the media.

Attached to the May 15th Letter were some of the documents purportedly obtained during Mr. Baydoun’s investigation. On the page that preceded these documents Mr. Baydoun wrote, by hand in large letters, taking up half a page, the underlined statement:

Well that was — dare I say? — the final nail in this coffin. Judge William Duffey Jr. even saw fit to insert an image of the note directly into his decision, because just describing it fails to give it proper justice. It looks more at home in a ransom note than a letter between attorneys.

Judge Duffey then gets down to business:

Mr. Baydoun’s correspondence with the Receiver was harassing and extortionate in nature, and hindered and interfered with the Receiver’s ability to administer the receivership estate by forcing the Receiver to address Mr. Baydoun’s baseless, inappropriate, and extortionate threats. Mr. Baydoun’s first communication with the Receiver included the threat that Mr. Baydoun intended to “shame the cemetery, its management and owners in a very public way until they do right by my clients and assure them that this cannot happen ever again.” (May 15th Letter at 1). The threat made to extract payment on the Claim was extraordinary, and disturbing, conduct by a lawyer.

Baydoun will now be paying the Receiver’s fees that “he would not otherwise have incurred in this action but for Mr. Baydoun’s contempt.”

Looks like the “public shaming” gambit has kind of boomeranged.

UPDATE: Baydoun objected to the Receiver’s fee application noting that his wife is pregnant, he has “very limited resources” and “struggles like most Americans.” As a tipster notes, Baydoun drives a $100,000 Tesla… like most Americans.

(Want to read the whole opinion? Go to the next page because WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED)