A Texas attorney will be spending the next 25 years of his life in a federal prison for taking part in an international money laundering conspiracy that defrauded lawyers and law firms across the nation out of more than $8.8 million, under a sentence handed down in a federal court in Tampa, Florida.

U.S. District Chief Judge Steven Merryday of the Middle District of Florida recently sentenced 52-year-old Perry Don Cortese of Little River, Texas, to prison for conspiracy to commit international money laundering and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.

Cortese and his business partner, Priscilla Ann Ellis, were arrested by federal agents in Texas in August 2016 and later were transferred to Florida for prosecution. According their indictments, Cortese and Ellis would incorporate shell companies and then open bank accounts for the fake companies.

“Conspirators would and did contact victim lawyers and law firms, via email and telephone, for the purported purpose of seeking legal representation in transactional dealings and legal disputes,” according to their indictments. “The purpose of the contacts with the victim lawyers and law firms was merely to gain access to their legal trust accounts.”

Cortese and his co-conspirators would get cashier's checks of $20 or less and use them to forge new cashier's checks payable to the lawyers and firms in amounts of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They then told the victims that their matters had settled, and they sent the cashier's checks saying they were “the supposed proceeds of the legal settlements and transactional conclusions.”

As part of the scheme, victim lawyers and firms were instructed to wire money into funnel accounts held by the conspirators known as “money mules.” The funds were then quickly moved to other accounts in the United States and around the world before the victims could discover the fraud. Between 2012 and 2015, millions of dollars' worth of wire transfers were received into the accounts to be laundered while conspirators in Canada, Nigeria, South Korea, and Senegal helped coordinate the fraud from abroad.

Cortese also worked for the conspirators by laundering victims' money through his interest on lawyers trust, or IOLTA, accounts while Ellis laundered several million dollars' worth of fraud proceeds through several bank accounts under her control.

A Florida federal jury found both Cortese and Ellis guilty of money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud charges Oct. 21, 2016. Ellis was sentenced to 40 years in prison for her role in the scheme.