A veteran and often flamboyant Chicago attorney is facing charges that he violated lawyer ethics by threatening to use an illegal tape recording to force a favorable settlement in a divorce dispute.
Misconduct charges were filed last week against Julius Lucius Echeles by the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, the state agency that investigates allegations of lawyer wrongdoing.
The charges result from Echeles` attempts last year to negotiate a favorable settlement on behalf of a woman he was representing in a divorce battle that already had been fractious.
He is accused of threatening Chicago lawyer Joseph T. FitzSimmons with disclosure of a secretly taped telephone conversation between FitzSimmons and his client, Mieczyslaw Dworzanski, unless they agreed to Echeles` demands. Instead, FitzSimmons reported his talks with Echeles to the disciplinary commission.
At the time, Echeles was representing Dworzanski`s estranged wife, Elzbieta, who was seeking custody of the couple`s two sons and two-thirds of the family`s home. Dworzanski and his now former wife are Polish immigrants who live in Chicago.
The conversation between FitzSimmons and Dworzanski was recorded in September 1987 without their knowledge, according to the disciplinary commission`s complaint. FitzSimmons said it was one of several that were secretly taped by Mrs. Dworzanski in the fall of 1987, while she and her husband were living in separate apartments of a building on Chicago`s Northwest Side.
Tape-recording conversations without the knowledge of the parties violates both state and federal law, according to the commission`s complaint. Echeles apparently thought that FitzSimmons was suggesting to Dworzanski during the conversation that he commit perjury, according to the complaint.
The complaint says that Echeles called FitzSimmons into his office in February 1990 and ”threatened to transmit the tape to the court or to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.”
FitzSimmons said Echeles ”mischaracterized” his conversation with Dworzanski.
He also said Mrs. Dworzanski overheard some of the conversations by hiding a baby monitor in her husband`s apartment.
She was convicted in 1989 on child abduction charges after she and a former state caseworker attempted to kidnap her children while the divorce was pending.
Echeles, 76, has been one of the city`s more flamboyant and unconventional criminal defense lawyers throughout much of his half-century of practicing law.
He lost his license for a time in the 1950s after he was convicted on federal bribery charges. But he also has represented the son-in-law of slain mobster Sam Giancana, accused killers facing the death penalty and one of the men charged in the multimillion dollar Purolator vault heist.
Attempts to reach Echeles for comment were unsuccessful.
Among the rules Echeles is accused of violating is one that requires lawyers to report any suspected ethics violations by another lawyer, which essentially means he faces misconduct charges for not reporting his suspicions about FitzSimmons to authorities.
