Guilty East Hampton Attorney Sentenced
An East Hampton attorney who pleaded guilty in April to stealing more than $750,000 from a co-worker and two clients of Bainton Lynch, a now defunct East Hampton law firm of which he was a partner, was sentenced on Tuesday to the eight charges he was facing, including grand larceny and identity theft.
Kyle Thomas Lynch had been arrested on Feb. 8, 2017, after a year-and-a-half, multi-agency investigation. He pleaded guilty to all eight charges, six of them felonies.
Justice Mark Cohen of State Supreme Court in Riverside sentenced Mr. Lynch to two to six years, but he is to serve most of the sentence on parole if he completes the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Willard Drug Treatment Program in Seneca County. He would serve the remainder of the sentence in prison if he failed to successfully complete the program or otherwise violated parole.
Among the offenses to which he pleaded guilty are stealing more than $580,000 from the estate of a client, Helen Chalmers, an Orient woman who Mr. Lynch said had died in a fall in her home in 2013. The money was to be held in escrow during a real-estate transaction and later given to community groups and relatives cited in Ms. Chalmers’s will. Instead, Mr. Lynch used the money for himself after unlawfully putting it in his firm’s business account.
He had also pleaded guilty to using the identity of Carl Irace, a former associate attorney in the defunct law firm who now is a well-known lawyer here, to open two credit cards. Investigators found Mr. Lynch had charged more than $60,000 to one card and more than $24,000 to the other.
After Mr. Irace reported Mr. Lynch to authorities, his complaint, along with a 2014 interview that Mr. Lynch gave to The Suffolk Times about Ms. Chalmers, which was contested by some of the newspaper’s readers, led authorities to discover Mr. Lynch’s other crimes, which police said began in 2014 and continued into 2015. Among them, Mr. Lynch stole about $85,000 from an escrow account being held for a third victim, Thomas Rudegeair.
In court Tuesday, Mr. Lynch said he has had suicidal tendencies and been submitting voluntarily to electric shock treatments to correct a “chemical imbalance” for which he also takes medication.
Mr. Irace also was in court when Mr. Lynch was sentenced but declined to comment when reached later by phone. Mr. Lynch’s attorney, Eric Besso of Sayville, also declined comment.