An associate of accused murderer Alex Murdaugh has been charged with helping the disgraced legal scion steal funds from two children whose family members were killed in a tragic car crash.
Russell Laffitte, the former CEO of Palmetto State Bank, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday on five counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud, and misapplication of bank funds.
Mr Murdaugh worked as a personal injury lawyer for Alaynia Spohn and Hannah Plyler when their mother and brother were killed in a car crash back in 2005.
He negotiated a large payout for them and brought Mr Laffitte, a longtime acquaintance of the powerful Murdaugh family, on board as the girls’ conservator, with much of the funds frozen until they became adults.
But, when the children turned 18, they allegely discovered that much of the money had gone.
Mr Laffitte is accused of scheming with Mr Murdaugh to steal $355,000 of the funds for himself and another $990,000 for the disgraced attorney, according to the federal indictment.
According to the indictment, Mr Laffitte knew that the funds were being used by Mr Murdaugh to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in overdraft on his personal account and knew that Mr Murdaugh used funds stolen from other personal injury clients to pay back the loans.
The scheme to pillage the funds from the two girls is believed to have gone on for more than a decade from July 2011 to October 2021.
Mr Laffitte also acted as a conservator for some other clients of Mr Murdaugh and allegedly conspired to defraud them too.
In total, he collected more than $391,000 in fees for acting as a personal representative and conservator to Mr Murdaugh’s clients.
Mr Laffitte is also accused of willfully misapplying bank funds on two separate occasions.
In July 2021, he allegedly misused bank funds to give Mr Murdaugh an unauthorised $750,000 loan for “beach house renovations and expenses” which he knew would actually be used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in overdraft on Mr Murdaugh’s personal account.
In October 2021, he then allegedly fraudulently transferred a further $680,000 to Mr Murdaugh.
According to the grand jury indictment, Mr Laffitte and Mr Murdaugh – who was named in the court documents as “the Bank Customer” – “knowingly and intentionally devised a scheme and artifice to obtain money from the Bank Customer’s personal injury clients”.
The charges against Mr Laffitte mark the first time any federal charges have been brought against anyone in the escalating scandals surrounding Mr Murdaugh.
Mr Laffitte was fired from Palmetto State Bank earlier this year as details of the alleged scheme came to light and he is already facing state charges over the alleged scam.
If convicted on the federal charges, he faces 30 years in prison.
Attorneys for Ms Spohn and Ms Plyler said that the girls “viewed Russ Laffitte as a father figure and trusted him to navigate the waters ahead for them and to guide them”.
“It is difficult to express the emotions and disappointment of learning years later that those who had sworn to protect the Plylers chose instead to prey upon them,” lawyers Eric Bland and Ronald Richter said in a statement.
“Russ Laffitte and Alex Murdaugh plundered their conservator accounts and treated it like their own personal slush fund.”
The two alleged co-conspirators both come from powerful families in Hampton County.
Mr Laffitt’s family launched the bank in 1907, just three years before Mr Murdaugh’s great-grandfather founded the family law firm.
The families and their two entities have had working relationships for years.
The charges against Mr Laffitte came the same day that Mr Murdaugh appeared in court charged with the murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul.
He pleaded not guilty to the brutal 2021 double murders as prosecutors hinted that his motive is tied to his string of white collar fraud and drugs scandals.
Mr Murdaugh’s legal team consented to him being held on no bond, in light of the fact he is already being held on $7m bond in a slew of other cases – an amount that the financially-ruined attorney has no way of meeting.
Mr Murdaugh has had a spectacular fall from grace over the last year and found himself at the centre of a twisted tale involving unsolved murders, millions of dollars of allegedly embezzled funds, a suicide-for-hire plot and several mysterious deaths that are now under investigation.
The 53-year-old attorney is facing more than 80 charges over various alleged schemes, murders and a bizarre hitman plot.
The white collar fraud charges include accusations that he stole more than $8.5m from his clients including $4.3m from the family of his dead housekeeper Gloria Satterfield.
