A Superior Court judge has suspended a Wethersfield attorney from practicing law for four years in the wake of his conviction and sentencing by a New York court on bank fraud. It is the second time Mark A. Pagani has been suspended from practicing law during his career.
In June, Pagani, of the firm Bascetta, Pagani, Kearns & Small, was sentenced in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for his part in a scheme to defraud financial institutions. For two-and-a-half years, government officials said, Pagani conspired with others to obtain in excess of $100 million in commercial loans from two banks by submitting false and fraudulent loan applications to those banks. The conspirators had, officials said, overstated property values of real estate they were purchasing such that the cost basis of those properties was raised and the gain on the ensuing sale was lowered. The result, authorities said, was an underpayment of taxes.
