The unwinding of Brandon Labiner, Part 1
Long before his jailhouse death this month, the Boca Raton lawyer’s life was coming apart under the weight of money, theft and lies
The first of two parts.
There was so much money in the little law office Brandon Labiner shared with his father Paul; all of it going so wrong, so fast.
In the span of 14 months, a long-time bookkeeper was charged with siphoning $3 million from the firm. A client persuaded Brandon to send a wire transfer; the check covering it bounced.
And Brandon drained $451,000 from his stepmother’s trust fund, The Florida Bar found, then forged documents to incriminate his father.
He was arrested for driving drunk. He was accused of lying to one judge. When he failed to show up for a court hearing, another judge ordered him arrested. His law license was suspended.
His father was to blame, Brandon told anyone who was listening. His father took the money. His father was lying. His father was mentally ill. His father was destroying his practice, his license, his life.
It was all his father’s fault.
On July 1, Paul’s body was found in the stairwell of his office’s underground parking garage, still clutching his keys. The 68-year-old was shot four times; once in the head.
Police notified his daughter and son-in-law, who called Brandon.
He was unusually calm, they told police. After they got off the phone, he texted: When would they like to see his new cat?
Brandon was arrested hours later at his own law office on an outstanding misdemeanor DUI warrant. The next day, he was charged with the premeditated murder of his father.
He pled not guilty.
Five months later, Brandon was found dead in his Palm Beach County jail cell.
The family and the practice
Snapshots of the last year of Brandon Labiner’s life are captured in more than 500 pages of Florida Bar complaints and counter-complaints, banking documents, civil suits, federal and state court records, arrest reports and crucially, the Bar’s analysis of where the money went.
Amid the myriad versions of reality running through those papers, this is clear: Brandon’s father did not start out with the intent of becoming the man who would one day try to get his son’s law license revoked.
Just the opposite. Paul, who had a 30-year legal career specializing in trusts and wealth management, purchased a law practice so that Brandon could be lead attorney of his own firm as soon as he passed the Florida Bar.
Brandon moved into Paul’s Boca Raton office. He became a Certified Elder Mediator and licensed real estate agent. He took on personal injury clients. Paul poured the equivalent of $200,000 in loans and financial support into his son’s new firm, he said in court papers.
They were pet people. Paul’s YouTube discussion on wealth management was not even paused when Shayna, the large, shaggy white dog in the office, climbed into his lap. Brandon’s wedding announcement featured a smaller shaggy dog nestled between the couple.
In wedding pictures, Paul proudly straightens the tie on Brandon’s tuxedo.
That was 2021. Barely a year later, Paul would say, Brandon started spiraling.
A slow-moving DUI
The blue Volvo had been in a turn lane for more than half an hour, its blinker on, before a Coral Springs police officer approached. A passing ambulance crew had called the police.
It was 3 am on Feb. 22.
Brandon opened the door, leaned out and looked at the approaching cop.
“Sorry,” he said, before closing the door and slowly making the turn.
He was driving on the rims of two flat tires, drifting across the road. It took several police units to safely bring him to a stop.
The cop smelled alcohol on Brandon’s breath. But Brandon was also diabetic. Blood-sugar fluctuations can trigger alterations in behavior.
Paramedics checked him out. His blood-sugar levels would not cause mental impairment, they said.
He was medically checked again and then booked into the Broward County jail.
It was a first Driving Under the Influence offense, a misdemeanor. Adjudication was withheld. The charge would be dropped if Brandon could abide by the court’s terms for a set period of time.
But just three months later, the law office was rocked by a financial disaster that snowballed into a series of lies, bizarre behaviors and ultimately, an arrest warrant for Brandon on the DUI charge.
The $3 million bookkeeper
Janet Blissitt was a bookkeeper eking out a living on $250 a month in wages and $1,800 a month in disability payments when she filed for bankruptcy in 2015.
She drove a Lexus with 178,000 miles on it. The clothes in her closet were worth no more than $50, she said.
What she did have was an abundance of credit card bills; more than $16,000 owed to Macy’s alone.
At the time of the bankruptcy filing, she was working as a bookkeeper and office manager for Paul’s law office, according to Brandon’s statement to The Florida Bar, entrusted with multiple office accounts and trust funds.
Blissitt began embezzling in late 2021, federal prosecutors said. Money from the Labiners and their clients was spirited away in wire transfers to dummy corporations in New Jersey and an account in Ohio.
It totaled more than $3 million.
Blissitt confessed to Paul and Brandon in their office, Paul said in his written statements to The Florida Bar.
She pleaded not guilty in New Jersey federal court to a single charge of wire fraud. The case is pending.
Brandon would indirectly blame Blissitt’s actions for his own decision to try to empty and close office bank accounts, he told a Florida Bar investigator. The bank overseeing the accounts had failed, he said.
So had his father. Brandon accused Paul of trusting Blissitt too much.
Paul, though, believed a different theft prompted Brandon’s deceit.
A shadow client, a bad check
Paul thought he could explain, though not understand, why Brandon entered their office over a long Memorial Day weekend in 2022 to break into his bank accounts: Brandon was trying to move money out of Paul’s account to cover the damage from a client fraud.
Brandon had been victimized by a scammer, Paul told The Florida Bar. A client gave Brandon a check to cover wire transfers. Brandon sent the wire transfers. The check bounced, leaving the young lawyer holding the bag for “a significant sum,” wrote Paul. “Brandon was devastated.”
Paul believed it was this financial fraud, not the bookkeeper’s embezzlement, that prompted Brandon to attempt to take money to cover losses.
Being a victim of a major financial fraud might have elicited some sympathy for Brandon’s situation. And in his own statements to the Bar, Brandon did not directly dispute sending such wire transfers.
But in an unexpected turn, Brandon claimed there had never been a fraudster client. There had never been a bounced check. He said his father would not be able to prove he had ever been scammed by “a so-called client.”
His father was making it all up.
Bar: A ‘deceitful’ financial offender
It’s not clear how Paul concluded that Brandon had tried to access his bank accounts on Memorial Day weekend, or what, if any, evidence of the attempted hack was on his computer. But the fallout was immediate and explosive.
First, Paul changed passwords for multiple bank accounts. Then he confronted Brandon.
His son reacted with “a verbal and expletive-laced tirade,” Paul would repeatedly say over the course of several months.
“He attempted to physically remove my desktop computer for the purpose of erasing evidence” and when Paul moved to stop him, Brandon pushed his father hard enough to injure him.
Brandon met each of Paul’s accusations with a near-identical accusation.
It wasn’t Brandon trying to illegally access Paul’s accounts, as Paul charged; it was Paul trying to take money from Brandon’s accounts. It was not his father who was injured and forced into physical therapy after Brandon shoved him; it was Brandon who was injured when his father shoved him out the door. It wasn’t Brandon who went on a cursing tirade, it was his father.
Paul demanded Brandon leave the office they shared. Brandon refused. After the Boca Raton police were called, Brandon left. Paul changed the locks.
That was May 31.
The next day, Paul said, his business checkbook was gone, computer equipment was missing and email passwords had been changed.
The day after that, Brandon told the Bar, one of his bank accounts dwindled from $76,848 to $48, the result of Paul locking him out of office accounts. Checks started to bounce.
And shortly after that, when Brandon was put on notice that Paul would remove him as trustee of his stepmother’s trust fund, hundreds of thousands of dollars disappeared from that account.
The Florida Bar’s investigation concluded Brandon had looted more than $451,000 of his stepmother’s money and lied about it, forging documents to incriminate his father.
Brandon Labiner was a “deceitful, high-level financial offender” the Bar investigator wrote.
But it wasn’t only the $451,000 that was Brandon’s unraveling, or the sole trigger leading to his arrest for Paul’s murder.
It was everything that came after.
Part 2: Lawsuits and a murder
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