Legal Ethics

Lawyer's $2M Scam Revolved Around People Actually Wanting Philadelphia Eagles Tickets

Some years that's a safe bet. Other years...

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(Photo by Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images)

New Jersey disbarred Frank N. Tobolsky in 2018 after catching him trying to raid his clients’ escrow account. But skimming $32,000 out of escrow actually amounted to small potatoes for Tobolsky, who just pleaded guilty to wire fraud arising from a $2.4 million phony seat licensing scheme.

Personal seat licenses are a shady scam in the first place, but they exist to help wealthy team owners fleece the fans so they are entirely legal. Instead of buying season tickets, fans must first buy a license to a seat that then gives them the right to purchase season tickets. If they don’t renew their season tickets, they forfeit the right to the seat rendering the whole thing functionally just a giant surcharge on top of your tickets designed to guarantee that, along with the massive tax breaks the teams con cities into granting, the owners never have to actually spend their own money to build a new stadium. As Bleacher Report once put it, “Broken down quite simply, a personal seat license is the dumbest purchase you will ever make: a payment that allows you to pay for something else you want.”

The problem is, when you bless an arcane, shady process as legal, you just make it easier to plausibly conceal arcane, shady, illegal activity.

As many fans don’t have the kind of upfront payment required to buy these seat licenses, they could theoretically take out loans for it, which is where Tobolsky came in. Starting in 2013, he convinced an investor to give him $2.4 million to use in a seat licensing loan program that would use the seats themselves as collateral. Alas…

But prosecutors say there were no Eagles fans taking loans or seat licenses being held in collateral.

Philadelphia has diehard sports fans and will all claim to stick by the team through thick and thin, but realistically no one wants to shell out thousands of dollars on a dud. When Tobolsky kicked off this scam, the team was coming off a 4-12 season. The rub of a scam like this is that its plausibility ebbs and flows with the fortunes of the team. And yet this investor remained credulously committed to the bit for years. It probably looked like a decent investment when the team finally won a Super Bowl. Less so when the team sank to the bottom of the NFC East.

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In any event, Tobolsky clearly hoped to earn a return on that money that he could pass off as interest earned from borrowers. Unfortunately, he tried to secure that return at the casino which worked out poorly for him.

Tobolsky did return some of the money to the investors as purported profits from the business, but prosecutors say he used a substantial portion for personal expenses, including big withdrawals at casinos.

Yeah, that’s not going to work.

Disbarred lawyer with ‘crippling’ gambling problem admits stealing nearly $2 million in Philadelphia Eagles’ seat-license scam [MarketWatch]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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