What William Holt’s Disciplinary Hearing Shows About Rhode Island

On May 30th, attorney William F. Holt admitted violating the Rhode Island Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. His hearing before a 3-member panel of the Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Board summarized the violations: ex parte communications with a judge; removing divorce documents from the clerk’s office; filing a motion that misrepresented an order of the court; compounding litigation in multiple courts; and endangering a litigant by enabling her estranged husband to enter her home despite his psychiatric history and guns. 

These kinds of offenses are all too common in Family Court. The uncommon aspects of Holt’s hearing were that a judge finally censured him for fraud on the court and referred him to the Disciplinary Counsel and that the Disciplinary Counsel followed through with charges and negotiated a settlement – the equivalent of a plea bargain. The panel may now recommend to the Supreme Court that Holt’s license to practice law be suspended.

In 1993, when I was executive director of the Women’s Center of Rhode Island, we examined our successes and failures in order to improve our effectiveness helping families escape domestic violence. We gathered a group of mothers who had succeeded in protecting their children from violence at home only to find that Family Court exposed them to greater danger. Their complaints frequently focused on Bill Holt, a protégé of the Chief Judge of Family Court, Jeremiah S. Jeremiah, Jr. 

Holt and Jeremiah belonged to a group we called “the Cranston Cabal” from their years in the administration of Mayor Edward DiPrete, who became governor and then promoted the man he called his “closest friend,” Jeremiah, his executive counsel, to the top position at Family Court.

DiPrete later pled guilty to eighteen felonies, avoiding a trial that would have implicated others in his circle, and went to prison. Jeremiah faced his own ethical issues relating to his Cranston office building and business dealings with his tenants, including Holt, whose favored status with the Chief of Family Court made him a force to be feared.

Among the conflicts in cases I documented, Holt and Attorneys John Tarrantino and Patricia Rocha—the same two who represented Holt at his disciplinary hearing—hammered out a questionable insurance scheme to benefit their clients. They persuaded Rocha’s father, the late Judge Gilbert Rocha, to block the insurance investigators’ access to court records.

Holt’s conduct in that case displayed the same “zealousness” he described to the disciplinary panel on Friday. He called it his “passion for the law.” He described his thrill at strategizing and mental gymnastics. “I had the world by the tail,” he said, before this “tragedy” struck when he was finally censured.  

His colleague of eight years, Catherine E. Graziano, offered a revealing memory at the hearing. She and Holt had met on opposite sides of a divorce case. Later he called out of the blue asking her to join the firm he planned to start. She agreed to think about it, but was astonished when Holt called back to say he had put up his sign on Reservoir Avenue, and it already had her name on it.

His style of coercive control over colleagues and clients apparently affected judges, too. The disciplinary panel heard of a judge who could have censured Holt but merely scolded: “I’m not going to sanction you, but don’t let this happen again.”  

In one case, not part of Friday’s hearing, a mother had planned to sue Holt for malpractice after he had let her divorce order go through despite its reference to a settlement agreement that did not exist. When she complained, Chief Judge Jeremiah would not let her leave court until she had signed that agreement. The court never dealt with the real problems she and her child faced. Her street was shut down for the bomb squad to remove chemical explosives her husband had stored in their basement. Another state later suspended her ex-husband's medical license after his felony convictions for sexually abusive child pornography.

The real tragedy is not Holt’s brush with justice but that Rhode Island’s Family Court functions largely as a patronage mill, rewarding political insiders with appointments as judges, magistrates, and court personnel. The Court seldom gets to the issues that endanger families, and William Holt’s hearing illustrates why.

For years I was told that the Disciplinary Counsel would not charge attorneys for ethics violations like Holt’s unless there was clear financial malfeasance. At Holt’s hearing, Deputy Disciplinary Counsel Barbara Margolis said, “I can’t figure out why he did these things,” because it was “not for personal profit.”

Of course it was. Family Court lawyers in Rhode Island have a limited number of families to charge their billable hours. These common methods of dragging out cases are tools for holding the world by the tail and winning by attrition, not rule of law. 

UPDATE: The Disciplinary Counsel suggested a one-year suspension of Holt’s license, but the Supreme Court imposed a three-year suspension in November 2014, saying he “showed a persistent pattern of deceiving judges.”

After studying Rhode Island divorce cases that cost families hundreds of thousands of dollars, I was astonished when a Florida attorney told me she charges a flat $4,000 plus court fees for divorce and custody cases, and they are usually done within a year. Rhode Island is long overdue for its judges and Disciplinary Counsel to censure and charge the flagrant ethical violations in Family Court.  

The Cabals of Court, Part 2: The Cranston Cabal

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The cavernous marble corridor of Garrahy Courthouse was nearly empty. It was mid-afternoon, and the daily rush had cleared. Attorney William Holt stood, a silhouette against the wall of windows above Dorrance Street.

From the way he stared at me, I suspected he had read my "Overcoming Abuse" column in Sunday's Providence Sunday Journal under an editor's bold headline: R.I. court system further victimizes battered families (July 18, 1993, p. E-1).

Was Holt fuming? Or about to offer me some new disclosure? Both proved true.

Barely able to suppress his rage, he scolded: This is called Family Court, not just because it deals with family issues. But we are family. We attorneys call each other "brother" and "sister." Chief Judge Jeremiah is like a father to us. When he is attacked, we will always come to his defense.

What if your family is dysfunctional? I asked. Can you make changes from the inside, or do you need our help from outside?

He said he had to think about it, which seemed promising.

Bill Holt became the first attorney that our Mothers on Trial support group recognized as a key player in The Cranston Cabal, conceived in the hurly-burly of Cranston City Hall during the years Edward DiPrete was mayor, from 1978 to 1984. Holt had proven his value as DiPrete's administrative assistant during a liquor licensing imbroglio in the early 80s.

Jeremiah S. Jeremiah, Jr., had paid his political dues as Republican chairman in Cranston. He spent fifteen years as assistant city solicitor and six more as solicitor while Edward DiPrete was mayor.

After DiPrete became governor in 1985, Jeremiah advanced to the statehouse as his executive counsel. Two years later, when DiPrete's turn came to fill a vacancy on Family Court (before legislative reforms established the Judicial Nominating Commission), the governor tapped Jeremiah. Barely a year later, in 1987, DiPrete acknowledged Judge Jeremiah as his "closest friend" and made him chief of Family Court.

The Cranston Cabal also produced Kathleen A. Voccola, who became Cranston's first woman city lawyer when DiPrete named her to fill Jeremiah's former position as assistant city solicitor in 1979. Governor DiPrete made Voccola the first woman to serve as the state's liquor control administrator, saying the appointment was in line with his "continuing efforts to place qualified women in positions of authority and responsibility."

Voccola was not the first woman that Republicans invited to serve as sacrificial lamb by running her against popular Attorney General James O'Neil in 1988. She lost that race as expected, but a year later, DiPrete made her a judge on Family Court.

By then an ethics complaint had been lodged against the governor for steering state contracts to campaign contributors. Nearly a decade passed before DiPrete made a plea deal to protect his son from prosecution and went to prison himself for bribery, extortion and racketeering in 1998. The whole truth has never emerged, and DiPrete's friends on Family Court escaped unscathed.

Jeremiah skated away from his own brush with the Ethics Commission. He and Voccola sat on the Governor's Juvenile Justice Commission, where she made, and he seconded, a 1997 motion that awarded $56,000 in federal money to a police organization that sublet space from attorney Holt in Jeremiah's Cranston office building and paid some of that rent directly to Jeremiah.

"Holy mackerel!" Jeremiah exclaimed to the press when his conflict of interest became public. "I never even thought of that."

By the time a grievance against him reached the Commission on Judicial Tenure and Discipline in 1998, Voccola had been named to that body, and the Commission found no basis for the complaint.

In 1999, the Ethics Commission also exonerated Jeremiah, rejecting the recommendation of its own staff, who had urged a full-blown ethics trial and provided 64 pages of findings and exhibits.

Rhode Island has a tradition of powerful families with modest headquarters, like the godfather, himself--Raymond Patriarca's mob headquarters at Coin-O-Matic, 168 Atwells Avenue, Providence. Jeremiah's unpretentious office building at 995 Park Avenue gave no clue to the power he wielded. His tenants, like Holt and attorney Patricia Murray-Rapoza, seemed to gain preferential treatment and prominence at Family Court, where lawyers jockey for rich litigants in custody cases that can provide oodles of billable hours until children turn 18.

Consider the Textron Case, where a wealthy vice president, accused of being a "sexual predator," reached a settlement with help from his attorney, William Holt. Patricia Murray-Rapoza had followed Holt as property manager for Jeremiah and bought the building from him on May 2, 2001. This might have relieved Jeremiah of embarrassing conflicts if he had not agreed to take back the mortgage. The Chief and Murray-Rapoza joked in court about the regularity of her payments to him.

On May 18, 2001, Judge Voccola appointed Murray-Rapoza to be guardian ad litem for two young sisters. One girl turned out to be daughter of the Textron vice president, and Holt launched a custody case against the girl's mother in Family Court and a law suit in Superior Court demanding that she return a diamond ring her boss had given her.

Holt described the woman as a "gold-digger" without appreciating the irony of how that word may fit him as well and other lawyers on the case. At one point, two divorce lawyers became so jealous of the money doled out to Murray-Rapoza that they crafted a document identical to hers and got Judge Gilbert Rocha to sign it, giving each one $5,000 of marital assets and creating three guardians ad litem for two children.

When Chief Judge Jeremiah assigned the case to Judge Rocha, he must have known the judge's daughter, Patricia Rocha, was Textron's attorney, who had worked with Holt on the settlement for his client to leave the company in 2001 by claiming the man was legally blind and therefore entitled to enormous payouts from disability insurance.

And when the insurance company's lawyers arrived in Rhode Island, seeking a transcript relevant to the man's two-million-dollar disability claim, Judge Rocha sent them home without it. They returned a month later with a formal motion to get the public record.

While both Holt and Murray-Rapoza contended the man was legally blind, neither Social Security nor the insurance company agreed. Indeed, the evidence of deceit led U.S. District Court Judge Mary Lisi to deny his bid for U.S. citizenship in 2006 on grounds that he "has not established the statutory prerequisite that he 'has been and still is a person of good moral character'" ("Memorandum and Decision," CA 05-398ML, p. 9).

Since that time, the man has secured U.S. citizenship and will return to Family Court next month. I described this case more fully in August 2010. (In the index below, click on 3. A, B, C, D, E.)

It is time for the General Assembly to examine the exorbitant waste of public funds and the damages done by the cabals of Rhode Island Family Court.