43
Attorney pleads guilty in tax case
YOUNGSTOWN
A prominent Cleveland lawyer and former president of the Ohio State Bar Association has pleaded guilty to filing false personal federal income-tax returns for 2004 through 2007.
Leslie W. Jacobs, 66, of Gates Mills and formerly of Shaker Heights, the senior partner in the competition, anti-trust and white-collar crime practice group at Thompson Hine LLP, entered his plea to a one-count information Wednesday before U.S. Magistrate George J. Limbert.
Jacobs, who said he prepared the tax returns himself without help from a professional tax preparer, will be sentenced on the felony by U.S. District Judge Benita Y. Pearson at 10:30 a.m. Jan. 17.
He could be fined up to $250,000 and given a sentence ranging from probation to three years in prison. His plea agreement calls for him to make full payment of taxes owed to the IRS with penalties and interest.
Jacobs, a Harvard Law School graduate, was charged with falsely inflating his business expense deductions and, as a result, falsely understating his law-firm partnership income by $252,257 over the four years.
In some cases where he claimed business-expense deductions, the law firm had reimbursed him for those expenses, but Jacobs denied to an IRS agent that he had been reimbursed, said John M. Siegel, an assistant U.S. Attorney.
During those years, his actual law-firm partnership income ranged from $633,303 to $759,973 annually, the U.S. attorney said.
Thompson Hine, where Jacobs has worked since 1968, is a century-old, 400-lawyer business law firm with offices in seven U.S. cities.
The case against Jacobs was investigated by the IRS and is being prosecuted by Siegel and Rebecca C. Lutzko, another assistant U.S. attorney.
Limbert allowed Jacobs to remain free on a $50,000 unsecured bond pending sentencing, barred him from possessing a gun, and restricted his travels to Ohio and Pennsylvania, unless otherwise authorized by the court.
Jacobs’ lawyer, Niki Z. Schwartz of Cleveland, declined to comment on the case after court.
Jacobs was president of OSBA in 1986 and 1987 and was instrumental in the construction of a new three-story association headquarters building in Columbus, said Kenneth A. Brown, the 25,000-member association’s public relations director.
“As president of this association, he did a good job for the members,” said Brown, who declined to comment on the criminal case against Jacobs.
Jacobs remains an active partner at Thompson Hine, which did not give him tax advice or help prepare his personal tax forms that generated the criminal charge against him, said Sheila Turner, the law firm’s media relations manager.
Turner called Jacobs’ situation “regrettable,” but she said the charge has “nothing to do with Mr. Jacobs’ work at the firm.”