A Lake Jackson attorney has pleaded guilty to bank fraud for his role in a scheme in which he allegedly sold 10 beach houses along the Texas Gulf Coast to straw buyers at double or triple their appraised value, and then paid generous kickbacks to his co-conspirators.

Kirk Lawrence Brannan, 64, admitted to conspiring with three co-defendants from 2005 to 2009 to execute a scheme that prosecutors allege defrauded Wells Fargo Bank and other lenders out of $5.3 million. Brannan then paid $2.4 million of that money to co-conspirators who recruited straw buyers for the beach houses who never intended to live in the residences or pay the mortgages, prosecutors charged.

Brannan faces sentencing before Lee Rosenthal, U.S. chief judge of the Southern District of Texas, on Aug. 29 and could receive up to 30 years in federal prison and a possible maximum fine of $1 million.

According to a response Brannan filed in the case days before deciding to plead guilty, he noted that he obtained a law degree at the age of 49 and began a probate and estate planning practice in 2003, and later shifted his focus to tax law.

Brannan was accused of using his law degree to set up a family limited partnership for his family and placed most of the properties he owned in the Freeport/Surfside area into the FLP. But in 2006 after the IRS changed the tax rules for the FLP tax havens, Brannan transferred the properties out of the FLP back to individual family members, prosecutors charged. Brannan would later contend that he was approached by the co-conspirators about selling the beach homes and believed he was acting within the law when he sold the homes to them.

Brannon originally attended law school to fight for the rights of beach homeowners who faced the potential loss of their homes after hurricanes at a time when the state could declare the beaches public land through “rolling easements,” according to his attorney, Sam Adamo of Houston's Adamo & Adamo.

“He went to law school to fight that,” Adamo said of the beach land dispute, which was eventually resolved in the homeowners' favor in the Texas Supreme Court's 2012 decision in Severance v. Patterson. “And he and his family had built a lot of beach homes there and they would rent them. At the time this all started he was worth about $12 million dollars, and now he's completely broke. He's lost all of the houses, all his money and will lose his law degree. He just couldn't continue to fight it.''

“It's a case of a good man caught up in a bad situation. He's 64 years old, he's never been in trouble with the law before and served his country honorably in the Air Force and he just felt that he could not risk the trial,” Adamo said. “The federal system is geared for pleas of guilty and not trials.''

Co-conspirators Chucoboie Lanier, 41, David Lee Morris, 55, and Derwin Jerome Blackshear, 50, all of Houston, have previously pleaded guilty for their roles in the scheme and are set for sentencing Sept. 26.