The Long Island “Lottery Lawyer” who fleeced his multi-million-dollar jackpot winners drew an unlucky 13 years in prison Thursday, when a Brooklyn judge ordered him locked up in his fraud case.
Jason Kurland, 49, was convicted at trial last year of steering winners’ money into his own merchant cash advance business — and of losing millions of their funds in a Ponzi scheme and a murky deal to sell personal protective equipment to California during the COVID pandemic.
He never told the winners that he was one of the owners of the businesses that he was investing in. He also left them in the dark about the 1% kickback fee that he was receiving.
“Real people have suffered serious consequences of Mr. Kurland’s behavior. I met them at the trial,” Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis said Thursday. “They were lucky winners, but when they met Mr. Kurland, they ended up to be losers.”
The victims included a couple who won a $1.5 billion Mega Millions jackpot and a Staten Island mechanic who scored a $245 million Powerball win.
“The victims believed that Mr Kurland would protect them and further their interests,” Garaufis said. “Mr. Kurland had direct access to their money, and like a burglar, he used the access that he had to pocket the money for himself and his business partners.”
The judge said that the abuse of trust was “grotesque and unfathomable for a lawyer.”
Prosecutors were asking for a sentence on the low end of the federal guidelines of 135 to 168 months, based in large part on a calculation that Kurland’s clients lost more than $60 million dollars.
“To get them to agree to these investments, Kurland lied to the lottery victims time and time again,” federal prosecutors wrote in a May 15 sentencing memo. “Kurland presented these investments as arms-length transactions with third-party companies and purported to recommend them to the lottery victims as their neutral trusted advisor — their attorney, who was there to look…
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