Was a self-help author swindled by a Honolulu man?
A Honolulu man accused of swindling a California psychiatrist and popular self-help author out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and property has been indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to defraud the government, wire fraud, blackmail and witness tampering.
Eric Aaron Lighter, a former Hawai’i real estate agent and owner of a Volcano bed and breakfast, is accused of preparing and filing false tax returns on behalf of San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist Irwin Gootnick and his wife, and then fraudulently grabbing personal control of several Gootnick family trusts.
Gootnick, whose books have been featured on Oprah and other television programs, was then threatened with disclosure of the false tax returns unless he dropped a civil suit seeking to recover the stolen property and agreed to give false testimony in a pending criminal case.
Also indicted was Samuel S. Fung, a Medford, Ore.,-based financial consultant and tax preparer who is accused of preparing fraudulent tax returns and then referring clients to Lighter when they ran into trouble with the IRS.
In 2004, Fung was barred from preparing federal tax returns. He was charged with tax fraud in 2005 for allegedly preparing tax returns containing false information or using sham trusts to shield clients’ income from taxes. The latest charges are contained in a superseding indictment that added Lighter as a defendant and piled on new charges.
The superseding charges were made public last week. Both men are scheduled to be arraigned in U.S. District Court on April 26.
Lighter, reached by telephone in Honolulu last week, declined to discuss the case.
According to the indictment, Fung referred Gootnick to Lighter in early 2004 for assistance in dealing with an IRS investigation of several family trusts. Lighter demanded $10,000 in cash for his services and later asked for and received an additional $50,000 ‘loan.’ Lighter, who is not an attorney nor an accountant, then advised Gootnick that the trusts ‘were fake and that by using them, [Gootnick] had committed fraud’ and could be prosecuted. Lighter advised Irwin that in order to protect his assets from seizure by the IRS, he should first convert the trusts into subsidiaries of a new family corporation and then transfer control of the corporation to Lighter.
Lighter then reportedly shuffled ownership in a series of self-dealing transactions after exchanging shares in the new Gootnick Family Trust Inc. for shares of stock in the Hawaiian Colony Hotel Corporation (HCHC), which Lighter claimed to own and was said to include the ‘air rights’ over a property along Ala Moana Boulevard across from Fort DeRussy. Although Lighter claimed HCHC and the accompanying air rights were worth $25-$50 million, a Hawai’i state court said they were worthless.
Lighter eventually received about $500,000 in cash and reportedly took control of a San Francisco medical office building owned by one of the Gootnick trusts. After gaining personal control of the building, Lighter allegedly tied up the property with fraudulent mortgages from other shell corporations that existed only on paper.
When Lighter refused to return the property, the Gootnick’s filed a civil suit in federal court in California.
After two years of litigation, including several attempts by Lighter to block the proceedings by filing for bankruptcy in Honolulu, the case was settled early this year when Lighter finally agreed to return the cash and property.
Lighter also pleaded no contest to theft in a 2003 Hawai’i case involving similar allegations.
Hawai’i court records show Lighter has been accused of stealing other properties through fraud and theft in several prior civil lawsuits dating back to the early 1990s.
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