By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
Disbarred for allegedly stealing from a disabled client and then faking evidence during the ensuing ethics investigation, Portsmouth attorney Justin P. Nadeau is going back to court as a defendant.
Police arrested Nadeau Wednesday on charges of theft by deception, forgery, multiple counts of falsifying physical evidence, and financial exploitation of an elderly, disabled, or impaired adult.
The case is based on information that came out during Nadeau’s ethics investigation before the state Professional Conduct Committee. Nadeau was ultimately disbarred after he was allegedly caught falsifying evidence during the PCC investigation.
“It’s difficult for me to imagine something worse for a lawyer to do,” one PCC member said, according to the court records.
Nadeau went before the PCC after he was hired by a client impaired by a traumatic brain injury, Exeter woman Shawn Fahey. According to court records, Nadeau asked Fahey to give him close to $300,000 in loans in 2018. Nadeau allegedly secured the loans with a condo he did not own, as well as the anticipated proceeds from a pending defamation lawsuit he had against the Portsmouth Police Department.
Nadeau allegedly told Fahey until the defamation lawsuit was resolved he was “strapped for cash.”
The lawsuit against Portsmouth police arose from an arrest of Portsmouth man who was allegedly found with quantities of marijuana, Ecstasy, amphetamines, a loaded gun, and $42,000 in cash. According to police, Nadeau was handling an $85,000 marina investment for the man before the arrest, though the marina deal never closed. Nadeau brought the lawsuit when police opened an investigation into whether or not he was laundering drug money. The defamation case was settled in 2019.
Nadeau also allegedly hid the $165,000 he collected after he sent Fahey to a Massachusetts attorney to handle her injury case, according to the PCC investigation. Nadeau reportedly collected referral fees from the Massachusetts attorney as well as other money related to Fahey’s case.
Nadeau slow-walked producing documents related to the case for the PCC, according to court records. After months of stalling, Nadeau destroyed his computer before the hearing, according to court records. Nadeau claims he made all the appropriate conflict of interest disclosures and eventually produced printed copies of the letter he claimed he sent Fahey.
However, James Berriman, the computer expert hired by the PCC, looked through Nadeau’s office server and found the dates on the documents Nadeau gave to the committee were fake, and the documents were created well after he took the money from Fahey.
“As a member of the PCC observed at oral argument before the PCC, ‘the Berriman Report and the spoliation of evidence, in my mind . . . is one of the most significant violations I have seen in decades of practice before the ADO before joining this committee,’” a New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling states.
Nadeau appealed his disbarment, but the Supreme Court ruled in April that he crossed too many lines to be allowed to continue as a lawyer. The Supreme Court found that Nadeau engaged in a “deliberate, multi-year effort to deceive the disciplinary authority.”
Nadeau tried to make a go of it in politics in the early 2000s, and ran an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for Congress as a Democrat.
Nadeau’s father, J.P. Nadeau, agreed to resign from the New Hampshire Bar Association in 2009 after he was investigated for a conflict of interest for representing a construction company involved in a dispute with Justin Nadeau.
Justin Nadeau is due in Rockingham County Circuit Court in Portsmouth for an arraignment on Sept. 9
