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Firm gets a taste of dish it serves

By Scott Barancik
Published February 17, 2007

Few law firms have sued America's nursing homes more successfully than Wilkes & McHugh, a Tampa firm that claims lifetime winnings of more than $200-million in abuse and neglect cases.

But two former clients from Tennessee say the firm is taking too big a cut.

A proposed class-action lawsuit filed in Memphis claims W&M duped the clients into approving a 40 percent contingency fee, despite a state medical-malpractice law limiting lawyers to a 33.3 percent share of settlement proceeds. The suit also accuses W&M of charging unreasonable expenses; one plaintiff says the firm billed her $26,900 for five round-trip flights from Tampa to Memphis.

Lawyers for W&M and named Tim McHugh deny the allegations. In a court filing, they say the complaint is riddled with so many "scurrilous" falsehoods that it "borders on the commission of a fraud. Tampa resident Jim Wilkes hasn't responded to the suit yet. It took process servers more than a month to find him.

Some defendants are even harder to track down.

By the time federal authorities sued Aleksey Kamardin last month over an alleged pump-and-dump scheme, the 21-year-old student had long fled Tampa for his native Eastern Europe. But searching door-to-door for Kamardin in the Republic of Georgia won't be necessary, Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer Carl Tibbetts said in a January interview. Under Florida law, the SEC can satisfy its service requirement by mailing copies of the complaint to Kamardin's former Tampa address, his former eTrade brokerage account, and the secretary of state's office in Tallahassee.

The U.S. doesn't have an extradition treaty with the Republic of Georgia.

Scott Gostyla isn't lost, but the onetime dot-com star says he is a little forgetful.

In late 2005, the former Hydrogen Media CEO filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. His primary goal was to eliminate an $8-million debt to a group of the defunct St. Petersburg company's investors, including Chris Sullivan and several other OSI Restaurant Partners executives.

Gostyla pleaded poverty at the time, saying he had no income and total assets worth $1,529. But one investor, OSI general counsel Joe Kadow, filed suit to block the bankruptcy, arguing that Gostyla had failed to fully disclose his financial situation.

Among the 2005 transactions Gostyla now recalls: netting $27,000 from the sale of his marital home - less than three months before filing Chapter 7; selling his Rolex watch for $8,000; pocketing $15,000 from his checking account; and confirming an account balance of about $1,500 on the day he filed, not $34 as reported in court papers.

"A bankruptcy trustee should not be required to engage in a laborious tug of war to drag the simple truth into the glare of daylight," Tampa lawyer Amy D. Harris argued at a November hearing.

"Sophisticated doesn't mean smart," argued Gostyla's attorney, Lutz lawyer Andrew Forman. "I think that's borne out by the (previous) bankruptcy and the multiple business failures."

Scott Barancik can be reached at barancik@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8751.

[Last modified February 16, 2007, 22:12:28]