Tom Girardi’s son-in-law sentenced in fraud case

He gets four months for scheme that kept payments to crash victims’ survivors.

- By CLara HARTER

David Lira, the son-in-law of disgraced attorney Tom Girardi, was sentenced to four months in prison Monday for covering up the fact that Girardi withheld settlement funds from clients whose relatives had died in a 2018 Indonesian plane crash.

Lira was a longtime attorney at Girardi’s now-defunct law firm and helped obtain a historic $7.5-million payout for a group of Indonesian widows and orphans in 2020.

After Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board, Girardi and Lira’s lawsuit held Boeing accountable for the 737 Max’s faulty design and the company’s failure to properly disclose problems with the aircraft’s automated flight-control system.

But then Girardi misappropriated some $3 million of the settlement funds, in part to fund his lavish lifestyle with his wife, “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Erika Jayne.

Girardi was sentenced over the summer to seven years in prison by a Los Angeles judge for stealing from his clients.

In June, Lira pleaded guilty in federal court in Illinois to one count of contempt of court for defying a Chicago judge’s order concerning the distribution of settlement funds. After Judge Thomas M. Durkin ordered that withheld payments be sent to clients immediately, Lira continued to cover for Girardi, who failed to distribute the funds. He will begin serving his sentence in February.