Suspect in retaliation attack on Center City lawyer is ordered detained until trial

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the brother of Par Funding founder Joseph LaForte imprisoned until his trial on charges he attacked an attorney who was investigating the assets of the embattled Philadelphia-based merchant cash-advance firm and its owners.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard A. Lloret called James LaForte, 46, of New York City, a danger to the community and said that the Feb. 28 assault on lawyer Gaetan Alfano was enough to keep him behind bars.

Prosecutors had also alleged that LaForte threatened several potential witnesses tied to ongoing civil and criminal investigations into his brother’s company in the days after that incident.

“This is a defendant who I’m convinced, in fact, committed the assault … in broad daylight,” Lloret said during a hearing Thursday. “The fact that he conducted himself in this fashion leads me to conclude he was absolutely aware of the risks of getting caught.”

» READ MORE: Witnesses tied to Par Funding investigation were threatened after attack on lawyer investigating the firm, feds say

James LaForte’s arrest earlier this month is the latest twist in a long-running investigation into Par Funding’s operations and owners.

From its offices in Old City, the firm made its money by raising funds from investors and then lending them out to cash-strapped small-business owners who did not qualify for loans from traditional banks.

Government lawyers have called Par’s investment wing a scam and accused Joseph LaForte and the company’s other principals of bilking investors out of more than $500 million. As for the company’s lending and collections wing, prosecutors have likened Par’s operations to old-school Mafia loan-sharking dressed up in a business suit.

Threats of violence, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew T. Newcomer said during Thursday’s hearing, were “sewn into the fabric of Jimmy and Joe’s business model.”

The attack on Alfano, he added, was just the latest and most brutal example.

It “was a message sent to all of the witnesses, all of the lawyers who dared cross the LaFortes,” said Newcomer. “And that message was: ‘We’re coming for you. Be scared.’”

Alfano, 67, a partner at the Center City firm Pietragallo Gordon Alfano Bosick & Raspanti LLP, represents a court-appointed attorney charged with investigating the LaFortes’ assets and those of their company to satisfy a $218 million judgment entered against Joseph LaForte and his wife, Lisa McElhone, last year in a civil case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The day he was assaulted, he had been participating in an online court hearing on topics including whether the couple should have to give up their Haverford estate to help pay off that debt.

Prosecutors say James LaForte — donning a mask and a gray hoodie — stalked Alfano as he left his offices near 18th and Market Streets that day, ambushed him, and then hit him over the head with a flashlight.

He left the attorney bleeding on the street with injuries that required seven staples to his head, Newcomer said.

Other parties involved in both the SEC case and an ongoing criminal investigation into Par Funding and its owners were also threatened in the days that followed.

Perry Abbonizio, a Par Funding insider who pleaded guilty last month to conspiring with the LaFortes to defraud investors and who has been cooperating with the ongoing investigation, told investigators he received a call on March 2 from a man with a New York accent who told him to “retract those lies or we’re coming for the girls” — an apparent reference to Abbonizio’s adult daughters.

One of the daughters also received a threatening call that same night, with the caller warning her that he knew where she lived, prosecutors said.

Around the same time, the same anonymous number — and same man with a New York accent — called a potential witness in the case, whom prosecutors have not identified in court filings.

“We’re coming after you,” the caller said, according to government court papers. “We’re going to split your head open.”

In court Thursday, LaForte’s lawyer, Thomas S. Mirigliano, opened his defense with an attempt at a joke.

“Although I have a New York accent,” he said, “it was not me who made those calls.”

Prosecutors insisted that they know who did.

When they first notified the court of the threats last week, they said they could not yet say who had been behind them. On Thursday, they pointed the finger squarely in LaForte’s direction.

When LaForte was arrested March 6 in the attack on Alfano, investigators found a folded-up notecard in his pocket with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of Abbonizio and his family members as well as the other threatened witness.

“It was a witness-tampering cheat sheet — or a to-do list,” Newcomer said in court Thursday.

For his part, Mirigliano did little to push back against those claims, saying only that the government’s case was “weak” while acknowledging he had not yet had an opportunity to review any of the evidence against his client.

He urged the judge to release LaForte on a $500,000 bond and place him under house arrest until his trial.

Should he be convicted of the assault on Alfano, LaForte faces up to 25 years in federal prison.

Joseph LaForte remains free on bond awaiting trial on an unrelated weapons charge tied to a cache of firearms FBI agents found while searching his home as part of their larger criminal investigation into Par.

Both LaFortes maintain their innocence. And while prosecutors have signaled that further charges against Joseph LaForte and others are likely in connection with Par Funding’s operations, neither of the brothers has been indicted for defrauding investors or threatening borrowers who failed to keep up with their payments on Par-issued loans.