Disbarred Lawyer Funded Gambling with $2.4M Philadelphia Eagles Season Ticket Scam

A disbarred New Jersey lawyer pleaded guilty this week to defrauding an investor in a bogus business concern that purported to extend loans to City of Brotherly Love Eagles fans.

Instead, Frank Tobolsky spent most of a $2.4 meg investiture on personal expenses and a “crippling” gaming habit.

Prosecutors said Tobolsky, 59, told the sole investor the business sector would use Eagles fans’ sit down licenses as collateral to untroubled the loans. The victim sent the money to Tobolsky inwards tranches between 2013 and 2016.

A personal sit license, or PSL, entitles a sports lover the right wing to purchase season tickets for a specific sit down inward a stadium. The holder tin sell the licence to someone else if they no more yearner need to purchase a ticket.

But no loans were ever issued. Some of the money was returned to the dupe as purported profits, but Tobolsky spent almost $2 zillion of the fund, often of it at Atlantic Ocean City’s gaming tables.

Theft by Deception

Tobolsky was separately supercharged in 2018 for theft past dissimulation for the fraudulent sales event of an Eagles place license. The former attribute attorney advertised a non-existent licence for sale online, afterward depositing the victim’s $9,400 defrayment into his account statement at the Golden Nugget.

As a first-time offender, he was permitted to get into a pretrial conference deflexion program, according to Atlantic County judicature records. This is typically a rehabilitative computer programme that allows a defendant to perform community service of process instead of sledding to prison.

Tobolsky was barred from practicing jurisprudence inwards November 2017 by the New Jersey Supreme Margaret Court for misappropriating $32,500 of a clients’ pecuniary resource held inwards escrow. The money had been placed inwards his care in cash advance of a attribute deal. But inwards March 2013, he siphoned it into his own personal account, which at the clip contained just now $5.

In his defence force on that occasion, Tobolsky told the homage he suffered from a determined gambling problem. He also claimed anxiousness and impression that sometimes caused him to follow “literally… out of [his] mind.”

He described this as a “crippling” mental illness, adding the allegations against him were “inextricably linked to [his] weakened capacity, stress, and duress.”

Tobolsky’s History of Gambling Addiction

Tobolsky said he foremost experienced gaming as a six-year-old when he visited a racetrack with his family. At IX or ten, his male parent introduced him to football pools. He lost each week, which resulted inward “an dreadful feeling” that he later recognised as depression.

In his luxuriously school day years, he traveled with his begetter to racetracks all along the East Coast and even out gambled underage in casinos inwards Puerto Rico. He funded his play with money earned on his newspaper publisher route.

In 1984, at 23, Tobolsky began attending Gambling Anonymous meetings and later quit gambling for 22 years.

But the breakup of his wedlock inward 2006, joined with fears that he would not live capable to make up for his children’s college fees, caused his old demons to resurface.

Now he faces upwardly to 20 years inward prison.