By Melissa Meyers
Assistant Criminal District Attorney in Dallas County
The list of attorney Cynthia Cole’s wrongdoing is long and shocking, especially to other attorneys: forging a federal court order and affixing the signature of a fictitious federal judge, forging a state district judge’s signature on court orders for a nonexistent case, creating an intricate story through emails and text messages of attending court hearings and depositions, fabricating settlement talks and settlement agreements with signatures, and impersonating a federal agent. It was all for the purpose of billing clients for legal work that was never performed. Who would do that? Certainly not a lawyer following any rule of ethics.
Consider that same lawyer, during the same time period, working as a contract attorney for a Dallas law firm, taking over the firm’s administrative duties, conspiring with her own mother, who also worked for the firm, and embezzling over $1.5 million from the business.
While it sounds like an outlandish legal novel, it all really happened, and Cynthia Cole was that attorney.
Cole graduated from Louisiana State University’s Law School in 2001 and moved to the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex to practice bank- ruptcy law and commercial litigation. In 2009, she was working as an associate for a firm in Dallas, billing $350 an hour. While at the firm, she met Scott and Susan Meyers. The Meyerses’ business had just filed for bankruptcy, and they were working with a partner in Cole’s law firm. Additionally, the Meyerses filed suit in Tarrant County against a financial services company, which was a subsidiary of a Fortune 250 company, for fraudulent inducement into a business deal. The Meyerses alleged this business deal caused their company to seek protection in bankruptcy court.
Your eyes may have already glazed over and you might be wondering what this tedious fact pattern has to do with a criminal case. However, the civil law backdrop is the basis for how Cole was able to steal, by deception, over $265,000 from the Meyerses through 2018. The deception itself turned out to be a masterpiece of fiction.
During an overlapping period, Cole also stole over $1.64 million from a law firm where she was employed as a contract attorney. We decided to aggregate what began as two separate theft indictments into one charge.
This case presented several challenges, such as how to present evidence of civil litigation without confusing or boring the jury, consolidate theft cases between two victims for similar but separate thefts, summarize a continuous course of theft that lasted almost a decade, and prove that the substance of the defendant’s deception never occurred.
Theft from clients
In 2010, Cole convinced the Meyerses to fire their original law firm and hire her individually to represent them in their ongoing litigation. They agreed to a fee arrangement where they would pay Cole $6,000 a month. Their company was represented by a trustee for the estate in the bankruptcy court of the Northern District of Texas. By 2011 the company’s bankruptcy and associated adversary proceedings were resolved by settlement agreement between the trustee and the financial services company. The Meyerses had asserted other claims outside of the company’s estate, and due to both the facts of the case and Cole’s ineffective legal strategy, the Meyerses lost. Cole suggested they appeal the bankruptcy court’s ruling, and the case was reviewed by a federal district judge, who dismissed all the Meyerses’ causes of action.
This should have been where Cole advised her clients that their case was over. Instead, she convinced them that their claims were meritorious and they should proceed with further litigation. Around this time, the Meyerses moved out of state and began communicating with Cole primarily by phone, email, and later, text messages.
Cole advised her clients that they should refile their lawsuit in federal court. This advice resulted in another dismissal of the Meyerses’ claims by the same federal judge, sanctions against Cole and her clients, Cole’s disbarment from the Northern District of Texas, and her probated suspension by the State Bar for violating two sections of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. However, Cole did not disclose to the Meyerses the truth about any of it. Rather, over the next four years she lied to her clients on a daily basis, telling them about progress in a new state court case that did not exist, sending them a fabricated “Set Aside Order” that appeared to be signed by a federal judge and which she told them restored their original claims from the adversary proceedings held in bankruptcy court, claiming to represent them with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a complaint against the financial services company and auditor, and billing them for travel expenses to attend nonexistent depositions and settlement meetings on their behalf. She repeatedly instructed the Meyerses not to talk to any third parties about anything related to their case.
These lies were documented in the thousands of emails and text messages between Cole and her clients. We found fabricated settlement agreements with forged signatures Cole sent the Meyerses, detailed descriptions of testimony that Cole claimed took place at depositions in New York City and Boston, and travel expense requests to attend such depositions and meetings. It was clear from their communications that this nonexistent legal matter not only cheated the Meyerses out of their money but consumed their daily lives for years on end. As time went on and the lies became more and more outlandish, Cole resorted to even more desperate measures. In the summer of 2018, she forged multiple orders from a Tarrant County district judge. Cole claimed she had settled with the financial services company’s insurance company for $8 million and was working with the Texas Rangers and the Special Agent-in-Charge (SAC) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) Dallas office to obtain the funds from a local bank. Cole created a fake email address for the SAC and emailed the Meyerses as that agent. In September, she told the Meyerses she was finally in possession of an $8 million cashier’s check that she would deliver to their banker in Chicago. They paid for her travel but after several days and many more excuses, Cole told them she had to return to Dallas without delivering the check.
Cole’s increasingly suspicious behavior finally overwhelmed the Meyerses’ long-running trust in her. Mr. Meyers tried to email the FDIC agent at the fake email address Cole had provided. When the email bounced back, he picked up the phone and called the agent at the number listed on the FDIC website. It took only a few minutes for the agent to realize that the Meyerses had been defrauded and only a few more hours to confirm that the Meyerses had no cases pending in federal court or Tarrant County and that the SEC did not have any cases involving the lender or auditor. Cole’s house of cards collapsed. Everything Cole had told the Meyerses for the past four years had been a lie.
Theft from a law firm
While Cole’s fraud and deception against the Meyerses was egregious due the extreme measures she took to swindle clients who trusted her as an advisor and advocate, during this same time she stole exponentially more money from a law firm for which she did contract work. In 2013, Cole’s primary client was the Meyerses. Although she was still billing them for legal work at that time, she knew that their legitimate legal claims were over and she would need to find a new source of income. In January of 2014, Cole filed for bankruptcy. That same month Cole’s mother, who worked as a paralegal for an insurance defense law firm in Dallas, introduced Cole to the sole partner of the firm, who hired her as a contract attorney.
In March, the law firm let its office manager go, and Cole and her mother offered to take over payroll, accounts receivable, and accounts payable, leaving the partner to act as the rainmaker. Cole then fired the firm’s certified public accountant (CPA). As a contract attorney, she was now responsible for paying herself as a vendor. From that point on, Cole began issuing herself additional, unearned checks on a more and more frequent basis. According to billing records, Cole earned $127,660 in 2015 for hours billed, but she paid herself $563,646. In 2016, she paid herself $731,153 while the partner, who was working more than ever before to keep the firm afloat, was paid less than $200,000.
As the firm struggled and the partner made less and less money, Cole blamed his loss of income on changes to insurance company billing practices. Cole and her mother, who was claiming and receiving an additional 80 hours of overtime each pay period, kept the partner in the dark. They hid the firm’s bank statements in locked offices, withheld payments to vendors until they were in collections, bullied office staff, and hired and fired multiple employees to help get invoices out the door to clients, but they would not accept offers from those same employees to reconcile the firm’s books. As part of Cole’s theft, she also issued herself checks with the notation “petty cash” for thousands of dollars.
Finally, in September 2017, an employee Cole had fired sent the partner and his wife a letter in the mail detailing the amounts of petty cash she knew Cole had taken. It was over $100,000. When the partner and his wife started asking questions, Cole became verbally combative. They reached out to a CPA, who told the partner to go directly to the bank and get the statements himself. A cursory review by the CPA indicated theft. By this time Cole had stolen over $1.5 million. She and her mother were terminated on November 1, 2017. That same day, she texted the Meyerses asking for $25,000. They paid it and agreed to begin paying a monthly retainer of $10,000 in addition to Cole’s “travel expenses.” It would be almost another year before the Meyerses found out about Cole’s deception.
Proving a negative
One of the biggest challenges in our trial preparation was determining the best way to present evidence that the legal work Cole claimed she had done for the Meyerses was never performed because the underlying cases and investigations never existed. How do you prove that a deposition didn’t occur? How do you prove that a defendant didn’t stay at a hotel in Boston when she never identified the hotel or submitted receipts?
My trial partner, Mark Penley, and I started with the court documents—or lack thereof. We ordered all the bankruptcy and civil court documents related to the legitimate litigation with the Meyerses’ business from 2009 through 2015, including all appeals to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. From there, my trial partner called the financial services firm’s assistant general counsel. It just so happened that the Fortune 250 firm has a small in-house legal department, and the attorney who oversaw the outsourcing of the bankruptcy and civil court litigation as its litigation counsel still worked there and still remembered the case. He is now head of litigation. He researched the firm’s internal database and told us that no legal work had been performed on the Meyerses’ matter since 2013, except for the perfection of judgments for the sanctions. As head of litigation, he said he would know if the bankruptcy settlement had been set aside, if the company had been party to a lawsuit in Tarrant County, if the company had authorized a multimillion-dollar settlement, and certainly if the CEO of the company had been deposed by the SEC.
From there, we reached out to officials at the auditing company, who provided us with substantially similar evidence. They had no internal records of this legal matter since 2012. Had the SEC prevented them from taking any new clients, as Cole claimed, the legal department would have been aware.
We next contacted the general counsel’s office for the insurance company, the one Cole said had issued the $8 million check in 2018. Once again, no one there had record of any such settlement, nor did this company ever write insurance policies. Rather, it is an insurance broker that connects corporate clients with insurance com- panies. Additionally, we had records from the Tarrant County court to say that no case associated with those parties existed, and the judge to say that he never signed those orders. We were glad there were enough real characters peppered throughout Cole’s fiction that multiple witnesses could testify that none of the legal events Cole had described to the Meyerses since 2014 had actually occurred.
Aggregation of offenses
The theft from the law firm was discovered in the fall of 2017 and was filed with our office shortly after that. The case was indicted as a Theft of Property Greater Than $300,000 in August 2018, and Cole was arrested within a few days. In fact, she communicated with the Meyerses so frequently that it was easy to determine from a review of their text messages when Cole was arrested, because she was silent for the better part of a day until she could make bond. Once she resumed communications, Cole told the Meyerses that she had been in a car wreck while traveling with the federal magistrate and FDIC agents and had to go to the hospital to get checked out. Once the theft from the Meyerses was discovered in September 2018, the real FDIC agent referred it to our office because we already had charges pending against Cole. The second case was subsequently indicted as a Theft of Property Between $150,000 and $300,000.
During trial preparation, the initial plan was to join the two cases for trial under §3.02 of the Texas Penal Code. The theft from the Meyerses was outrageous and we had Cole’s lies in writing, but the theft from the law firm was a much larger amount of money and a first-degree offense. The defendant had a right to sever, however, and we were unsure if she planned to exercise it. While we felt that the evidence from one case would be admissible pursuant to Texas Rules of Evidence 404(b) to show motive, opportunity, intent, plan, absence of mistake, or lack of accident, we preferred not to leave that as a discretionary issue that may not be ruled on until the middle of trial.
Section 31.09 of the Texas Penal Code states that “when amounts are obtained … pursuant to one scheme and continuing course of conduct, whether from the same or several sources, the conduct may be considered as one offense and the amounts aggregated.”[1] While both of the individual offenses were charged using the aggregate language to capture each instance Cole stole from the Meyerses and the law firm, they had always been separate schemes in my mind. Yet it did not feel like we could provide the jury with an accurate version of Cole’s culpability without presenting evidence of how the thefts were intertwined. Caselaw described the legislative intent behind §31.09, stating that common law restricted scope of theft to a single victim and a single time and place; if more than one victim or more than one time was involved, more than one theft was committed.[2] This usually means a thief who, “pursuant to one scheme or continuing course of conduct,” stole X amount from various victims at different times could not be as severely punished as a thief who stole the same amount from one victim at one time, even though the Legislature considered these two thieves to be equally culpable.[3] Relevant caselaw also stated that the terms “scheme” and “pursuant to a continuing course of conduct” were terms of common understanding.[4]
The evidence of a continuing course of conduct was clear from our timeline. We chose March 24, 2014, as the start date for our aggregated offense. This was the date Cole submitted her last invoice to the law firm. Although she was a contract attorney, once she took over the administrative duties, she never submitted another invoice for her legal or administrative work to the firm. Within a week, Cole was telling the Meyerses about a trial date for their nonexistent Tarrant County civil case. She billed the Meyerses through February 2015. At that time, Cole told them that since she had a full-time job, she would ask them to cover only her expenses.
Cole continued stealing from the law firm until she was terminated on November 1, 2017. That same day, she asked the Meyerses for $25,000. Soon thereafter, Cole billed them for her prior “travel expenses” and requested a monthly retainer going forward along with their payment of her expenses.
Rather than looking at the theft from the law firm as a pure embezzlement case, we considered the fact that Cole was a contract attorney for the firm rather than an employee. This distinction meant that the firm itself was Cole’s client. If the scenario is viewed in this light, it is clear that Cole’s scheme was to steal from her clients. Therefore, I reindicted the two cases into one large aggregate Theft of Property Greater Than $300,000.
Our trial strategy was to present the Meyerses’ portion of the case first. From the limited information I received from the defense, it was clear that Cole wanted to fight the law firm case. The sheer magnitude of the amount of money Cole paid herself compared to what was spent on all other payroll and firm expenses made it clear that she had unlawfully appropriated the money. Yet, she had not put the offense in writing as she had with the Meyerses, and the firm had more employees and office drama for her to try and deflect from her actions. We knew that once the jury had an opportunity to review the emails and text messages between Cole and the Meyerses that we planned to highlight, her credibility would be in tatters by the time she began to defend the law firm portion of the case.
Trial approaches and a plea
Once the Meyerses discovered the truth about Cole and their nonexistent legal cases, they approached an attorney who assisted them in filing a Texas State Bar grievance against Cole in 2019. Cole never responded, resulting in a Default Judgment of Disbarment. We were thankful knowing that regardless of the outcome of our criminal case, Cole would not be practicing law again.
As trial approached, we grew more confident in and excited about our case. Our financial analyst, Connor Walsh, prepared graphs, charts, and other exhibits that clearly summarized the evidence in a handful of PowerPoint slides. We were also able to determine, based on point-of-sale transactions in Cole’s debit card records, a long list of business trips for which Cole charged the Meyerses while she was in a completely different location. Additionally, because we had obtained Cole’s call detail records from AT&T, we had a map showing her physical location near her home in a Dallas suburb as she texted with the Meyerses while on her supposed trip to Chicago in September 2018.
A week before trial, Cole was supposed to appear at a pre-trial hearing. She had not appeared by mid-morning. However, she reported to her attorney that her flight had been canceled and she was stuck at an airport due to the widely reported delays caused by the Federal Aviation Administration. When pressed for proof, Cole sent her attorney a screenshot of an airline reservation from Dallas to Houston from two days prior. Not only did this screenshot not sufficiently verify where she was or that her return flight had been canceled, we strongly suspected that the screenshot had been forged. That afternoon, we obtained information from the airline that the reservation number Cole had provided was actually for a ticket issued in 2017 in the name of her mother. We filed a motion to hold Cole’s bond insufficient, and she was taken into custody when she appeared in court the following morning.
One week later, the defendant had hired a new attorney and entered an agreed plea of guilty to one aggregated first-degree theft charge in return for 15 years in prison. Both the Meyerses and the law firm partner were present and made victim impact statements, noting the years of trust they had placed in Cole and the betrayal they received in return.
This true story is stranger than any fiction.
Endnotes
[1] Tex. Penal Code §31.09.
[2] State v. Weaver, 982 S.W.2d 892, 894 (Tex. Crim. App. 1998).
[3] Id.
[4] Sendejo v. State, 676 S.W.2d 454, 456 (Tex. App.—Fort Worth 1984, no pet.).