Disbarred Portsmouth Attorney Found Guilty Of Stealing From Impaired Client

By Damien Fisher, NH Journal

Disbarred Portsmouth attorney and one-time Democratic congressional candidate Justin P. Nadeau learned the hard way that criminal law also applies to lawyers.

Nadeau was convicted on Wednesday on charges of theft by deception, financial exploitation of an impaired adult, forgery, and falsifying physical evidence. His sentencing is scheduled for June.

Nadeau’s legal saga began when he reportedly stole money from a mentally incapacitated client, then attempted a poorly executed cover-up when the New Hampshire Attorney Discipline Office’s Professional Conduct Committee launched an ethics investigation.

“It’s difficult for me to imagine something worse for a lawyer to do,” one investigating member of the Professional Conduct Committee said, according to court records.

The charges stem from Exeter woman Shawn Fahey, who hired Nadeau after she suffered a traumatic brain injury. During their business relationship, Nadeau convinced Fahey to give him close to $300,000 in loans secured by a condo he did not own, as well as the anticipated proceeds from a pending defamation lawsuit he had against the Portsmouth Police Department. Nadeau allegedly told Fahey he was “strapped for cash” until the defamation lawsuit was resolved.

The lawsuit against the Portsmouth police arose from the arrest of a Portsmouth man, Christian Jennings. Jennings was allegedly found with quantities of marijuana, Ecstasy, amphetamines, a loaded gun, and $42,000 in cash. According to police, Nadeau was handling an $85,000 marina investment for Jennings before the arrest, though the marina deal never closed. Nadeau brought the lawsuit when police opened an investigation into whether he was laundering drug money. The defamation case was settled in 2019.

Nadeau also allegedly hid the $165,000 he collected after he sent Fahey to a Massachusetts attorney to handle her injury case, according to the PCC investigation. Nadeau reportedly collected referral fees from the Massachusetts attorney, as well as other money related to Fahey’s case.

Nadeau slow-walked the production of documents related to the case for the PCC, according to court records. After months of stalling, Nadeau destroyed his computer before the hearing, according to court records. Nadeau claims he made all the appropriate conflict-of-interest disclosures and eventually produced printed copies of the letter he claimed he sent Fahey.

However, James Berriman, the computer expert hired by the PCC, reviewed Nadeau’s office server and found the dates on the documents Nadeau gave to the committee were fake and that the documents were created well after he took the money from Fahey.

“As a member of the PCC observed at oral argument before the PCC, ‘the Berriman Report and the spoliation of evidence, in my mind . . . is one of the most significant violations I have seen in decades of practice before the ADO before joining this committee,’” a New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling states.

Nadeau appealed his disbarment, but the Supreme Court ruled in April that he crossed too many lines to be allowed to continue as a lawyer. The court found that Nadeau engaged in a “deliberate, multi-year effort to deceive the disciplinary authority.”

Nadeau tried to make a go of it in politics in the early 2000s, running an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for Congress as a Democrat.

Nadeau’s father, J.P. Nadeau, agreed to resign from the New Hampshire Bar Association in 2009 after he was investigated for a conflict of interest for representing a construction company involved in a dispute with Justin Nadeau.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.