A federal jury convicted a high-flying paralegal yesterday of forging titillating JFK documents linking the late president to Marilyn Monroe and a Chicago mob boss to finance a lavish lifestyle.
After deliberating for two days, the panel found Lawrence X. Cusack III guilty on 13 counts of mail and wire fraud in connection with the sale of hundreds of documents containing forged signatures of Kennedy, Monroe and others.
Cusack, 48, of Connecticut, shook his head in disbelief after the verdict was read and left Manhattan Federal Court without comment. He remains under house arrest until he is sentenced July 30.
Prosecutors accused him of living a life of “ferocious, unrelenting consumption,” buying a Connecticut mansion, a home in Southampton and 11 luxury cars, including an antique Rolls-Royce and several Mercedes Benzes and Range Rovers.
But the money for his acquisitions came from defrauding unwitting collectors out of up to $8million between 1993 and 1997, prosecutors charged.
Cusack’s lawyer, Robert Katzberg, declined to comment. He had argued his client had the 700 documents checked out by handwriting experts and believed they were authentic.
Cusack’s scheme centered on exploiting his late father, a lawyer who handled Marilyn Monroe’s estate for her mother, Gladys Baker, and did legal work for the Archdiocese of New York, which had some connection to Kennedy.
Jurors saw several examples of the forgeries during the two-week trial. One was a contract between JFK and Monroe in which the late actress’ silence about meetings between Kennedy and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana was bought in exchange for a trust fund set up for her mother. But it turned out the contract, dated 1960, was written on a typewriter not available until the ’70s.
Cusack faces up to five years in prison and could be ordered to pay restitution to his victims.