Federal officials on Wednesday indicted convicted South Carolina killer Alex Murdaugh for a host of financial crimes and, in a separate document, charged an alleged accomplice in a scheme involving the theft of some $4.3 million in insurance proceeds.
A 28-page indictment charged former lawyer Murdaugh, 54, who was once one of the state’s most prominent lawyers, with 22 counts of financial crimes, including money laundering, conspiracy, bank fraud and wire fraud.
“Alex (Murdaugh) has been cooperating with the U.S. Attorneys’ Office and federal agencies in their investigation of a broad range of activities,” Murdaugh’s attorneys state Sen. Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, said in a statement. “We anticipate that the charges brought today will be quickly resolved without a trial. “
Another federal court document made public Wednesday said Murdaugh’s accomplice, suspended Beaufort lawyer Cory Fleming, has also agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the $4.3 million insurance theft scheme stemming from the death of Gloria Satterfield, the Murdaugh family’s former housekeeper who died in a 2018 fall at their Colleton County estate.
The scheme in which Fleming, Murdaugh’s former law school classmate, was charged involved the unlawful diverting of insurance proceeds from Satterfield’s death to Murdaugh and Fleming, and away from the rightful owners.
Murdaugh was named throughout Fleming’s eight-page charging document, but was not charged in that document.
Fleming, 54, could be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison on that charge.
Fleming is expected to plead guilty at 2 p.m. Thursday in Charleston’s federal court before Judge Richard Gergel.
The plea agreement signed by Fleming Monday was also signed by his Columbia attorney Debbie Barbier and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of South Carolina, as represented by federal prosecutors Emily Limehouse, Katie Stoughton and Winston Holliday.
Barbier declined immediate comment.
Murdaugh, Fleming face new financial crimes
Murdaugh’s crimes date back to 2005, and many allegations in Wednesday’s indictment involve his longtime friend and former Palmetto State Bank CEO Russell Laffitte, the indictment charges.
Murdaugh and Laffitte employed various schemes using Laffitte’s bank to divert money from Murdaugh’s personal injury legal clients to themselves, the indictment said.
Laffitte, who was convicted of federal bank fraud in a jury trial in November 2022, was repeatedly named as a co-conspirator in Murdaugh’s indictment but not charged. Laffitte has not yet been sentenced for his November fraud conviction.
Murdaugh stole more than $6 million while committing his alleged crimes over the years, the indictment charges.
“Trust in our legal system begins with trust in its lawyers,” South Carolina’s U.S. Attorney Adair Boroughs said in a statement. “South Carolinians turn to lawyers when they are at their most vulnerable, and in our state, those who abuse the public’s trust and enrich themselves by fraud, theft and self-dealing will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
The federal charges naming Murdaugh, one of South Carolina’s most notorious criminals, and his longtime friend Fleming, are the latest twists in the sprawling Murdaugh crime saga, which for nearly two years has been marked by dramatic turns.
It was not immediately clear why federal authorities charged Murdaugh and Fleming at this time as participants in a federal fraud scheme. Both have been indicted by state law enforcement officials, though neither has yet been tried.
A lawyer close to the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the federal laws involved have a statute of limitations, and that federal authorities may have wanted to charge Murdaugh and Fleming “to act as a backstop” in case there are any appellate issues with the state charges down the road.
Murdaugh and Fleming have already been indicted for allegedly violating various state financial and anti-fraud laws by a state grand jury under the control of the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office.
Many of the alleged details in the new charges appear to be similar to those details alleged in state grand jury indictments.
On the state charges, the S.C. Attorney General’s Office plans to take Fleming to trial Sept. 11 in Beaufort for his part in the alleged theft scheme involving Satterfield’s death.
However, Fleming’s new guilty plea on federal fraud charges on roughly the same underlying facts involving Satterfield may influence whether he stands trial in Beaufort County.
The S.C. Attorney General’s Office had no immediate comment Wednesday on what effect expected guilty pleas by Fleming and Murdaugh on federal crime charges will have on the state’s intended prosecutions of the pair.
Eric Bland and Ronnie Richter, who represent Satterfield’s heirs, said Wednesday, “Today has been a great day for justice in South Carolina related to the ongoing criminal investigations into Alex Murdaugh and Cory Fleming. Bottom line, (you) can’t run or hide from justice. “
Bland told The State newspaper he is glad that Fleming and Murdaugh are now cooperating with federal authorities, saying “this cooperation and the fruit it yields will be interesting.”
Alex Murdaugh in SC prison for double-murder
Murdaugh is already serving two consecutive life sentences in state prison for the June 2021 double murders of his wife, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul.
Murdaugh, who initially told police he found their bodies at the dog kennels on the family’s Colleton County estate, Moselle, on June 7, 2021, and claimed he didn’t know who killed them.
Murdaugh’s trial started in January in Walterboro, stretching six weeks until early March, when a Colleton County jury took three hours to find Murdaugh guilty of two counts of murder.
Right before he was sentenced to prison by Judge Clifton Newman, Murdaugh claimed he was innocent, which Newman rejected.
An unusual feature of the murder trial was testimony by approximately 10 state witnesses, who said Murdaugh had committed numerous financial crimes, though Murdaugh had not yet been found guilty of any of those charges.
Normally, evidence in criminal trials is confined to the charges at hand.
But S.C. Attorney General’s lead prosecutor, Creighton Waters, convinced Newman allow financial crimes testimony, arguing that the looming threat that his financial crimes were going to be exposed was the motive that led Murdaugh to kill his wife and son to divert attention from himself to a mysterious murder.
“To properly evaluate motive, the jury will need to understand the distinction between who Alex Murdaugh appeared to be to the outside world — a successful lawyer and scion of the most prominent family in the region — and who he was in real life only he fully knew — an allegedly crooked lawyer and drug user who borrowed and stole wherever he could to stay afloat and one step ahead of detection,” Waters in a pre-trial filing last December.
“The clouds of (Murdaugh’s) past were gathering into a perfect storm that was going to expose the real Alex Murdaugh to the world — and which would mean facing real accountability for his life,” Waters wrote.
Descriptions of those alleged financial crimes had been revealed in numerous indictments over the past two years.
Since November 2021, Murdaugh has been named in 20 state grand jury indictments containing 101 separate charges against him in allegations that he fleeced numerous victims of $8.7 million. The victims included his law partners, his clients, his friends and even his own brother.
Various charges include money laundering, breach of trust (embezzlement) and computer crimes. Indictments said he used two accounts at two banks — Bank of America and Palmetto State Bank — to carry out his schemes.
Other state grand jury indictments charge him with evading state taxes of $619,391 that he was supposed to pay on unreported income of more than $9 million of unreported income from years 2011 to 2021.
