Newport Beach Con Man Is Guilty of Posing as a Lawyer

A Newport Beach con man with a 30-year history of swindling millions of dollars from his victims has been found guilty again, this time of posing as an attorney, officials said Friday.

Harold David Goldstein, 57, was convicted this week of two counts of lying under oath that he was a lawyer, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Jeannie Joseph. He could face up to five years in prison.

“He’s never been an attorney in any state or country, never been to law school,” Joseph said. “He learned about the law while serving time in his own cases.”

Goldstein was arrested in February in Las Vegas, shortly after he opened a fake law firm and hired five attorneys. One of them grew suspicious and called police after he saw a letter Goldstein had written to his probation officer.

Goldstein took the identity of attorney David Marty Goldstein, who practices in Redwood City.

During a three-day trial in federal court in Santa Ana, Goldstein testified that he has 12 years’ experience of writing appeals and other legal documents while serving time for mail fraud.

Goldstein was first convicted in the early 1970s of defrauding 13,000 commodities investors out of millions of dollars. In 1976, he was convicted of mail fraud for selling $1 million in phony gold contracts.

And in the 1980s, he was convicted of bilking $4 million from small businesses seeking loans from a phony overseas bank he and a partner had established.