U.S. District Court Judge Julie Carnes might have found Mitchell Gross more believable on Thursday had he not already pleaded guilty to bilking at least four people out of millions of dollars.
So when Gross made a pitch for a lower sentence, asking for drug and alcohol treatment while in prison, which would have knocked a year off his punishment, Carnes was unmoved.
Instead of giving him less prison time, Carnes maxed out Gross' sentence.
"His problem is not drugs or alcohol," she said. "He is evil. And, if there is a cure for evil, I don't know what it is."
Carnes sentenced Gross, 63, to the maximum sentence under the federal guidelines of 151 months. She also ordered him to serve an additional three years on probation after release. During that time, he is required to report any financial transaction —outside of normal shopping — to his probation officer and also provide the officer with the name of any woman he dates.
The judge heard from three victims, two women — former Gross lovers — and one man, who describe how the lifetime con man had wormed his way into their lives and ravaged their finances, their families and their minds.
Gross, a novelist of little repute whose pen name was Mitchell Graham, had sold his female victims on investments schemes — providing them with fraudulent statements from the fictitious Merrill Company. One of the victims, a Cobb County woman who began a relationship with him in 1990 that lasted more than a decade, said that he made her fear for her life by telling her she had been targeted for death by the "dirty trick" team of a corporation. He told her he was with the CIA and he had a squad of men protecting her. She ended up giving him at least $1.4 million, according to federal investigators.
A Florida woman, who got involved with him in 2006, sent almost $3 million to the Merrill Company and later, after discovering his fraud, forgave him because he claimed he had a personality order and needed treatment.
In another scheme, he pretended to represent a couple in a lawsuit and charged them $2.2 million in legal fees, supplying dummied up court orders and legal filings. Gross, once a Georgia lawyer, had been disbarred in 1991.
All the victims, now in their 6os, described how Gross' schemes had caused them health problems, ruined their retirements and devasated their finances. The Cobb County woman said her own son and daughter — who were exposed to Gross for years as kids — now shunned her.
The victims were not uneducated. One was a lawyer, another a successful real-estate agent and the third a wealthy businessman.
Gross referred the two women to his "genius" investment adviser, "Michael Johnson." His voice on the phone was a bit odd, he said, because it had been affected by a larynx operation. The women never met Johnson but they sent him millions after cashing in retirement accounts, emptying children trust funds and selling acres in East Cobb.
Johnson didn't exist. Gross simply impersonated him.
"I don't think I have the power to say you can never have a date with another woman," Carnes said. "I wish Ihad."
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