OC lawyer embezzled $500,000 from 89-year-old former LA boss and wife

Attorney Bonnie Roadarmel was well-connected and well-heeled, buying first-class airfaire to Paris and shopping at Hermes, Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld.

Married to a former supervising deputy in the state Attorney General’s Office, Roadarmel was a partner at a top Orange County legal firm who specialized in insurance law.

By contrast, her former boss, Stephen Kanne, an attorney who retired from a successful real estate law practice in Los Angeles’ westside, lived a much more spartan lifestyle, but not by choice.

In May 2021, Kanne, 89, discovered why, in the words of his 74-year-old wife, Claudia, “we were always broke.”

Roadarmel, who had volunteered decades earlier to manage the couple’s finances for free, had allegedly siphoned more than $500,000 from them in just the past 10 years, according to documents Kanne supplied to police and the State Bar of California.

Some of their money went to pay down multiple American Express cards in Roadarmel’s name, as well as one in the name of her husband, Paul Roadarmel, documents show.

The evidence was solid. Bonnie Roadarmel, 62, pleaded no contest in Los Angeles County Superior Court on May 23 to two counts of felony elder abuse with a fraud enhancement. She had been charged with nine counts.

Roadarmel was sentenced to four years in state prison, but that term was suspended in favor of a sentence of one year in county jail, which could be further reduced for good behavior.

She is in custody at the Century Regional Detention facility in Lynwood and due to be released on Nov. 27. Her law license as well as that of Paul Roadarmel are listed as “inactive.” A notice alerting consumers to Bonnie Roadarmel’s felony case is listed on her bar profile.

Text apology

In a text message to Stephen Kanne, Bonnie Roadarmel apologized and said her husband knew nothing of her misdeeds.

“I’m sorry for what I did to you and Claudia. There’s no excuse for my action,” Roadarmel texted on May 24, 2021, a week after he discovered the embezzlement, according to a photograph of the text provided by Kanne.

“I will repay you for all I took from you and Claudia. … I hope you won’t prosecute.”

But the Kannes went to the police.

Before her conviction, Bonnie Roadarmel paid $630,251 in restitution, according to a court minute order.

‘I will always despise her’

But the pain remains for Stephen and Claudia Kanne, who live in the Mandeville Canyon area of Los Angeles.

“If she hadn’t been caught, then she would have gone on to deprive me of perhaps the single most important thing in my life — ensuring that Claudia would live in comfort after I passed away,” Stephen Kanne said in his victim’s statement to the court. “And for that I will always despise her.”

At his age, Stephen Kanne told the court, he doesn’t leave home much because of health issues. So the restitution doesn’t do him much good now.

“It was just Bonnie’s way of trying to buy her way out of state prison,” he told Superior Court Judge Katherine Mader.

Bonnie Roadarmel’s attorney, Katherine Corrigan, declined comment. No photographs could be found of Bonnie Roadarmel and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department would not release her booking shot. Paul Roadarmel, who retired in July 2022 from the Attorney General’s Office, did not return an email seeking comment.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office also declined to comment.

Tale of betrayal

The Roadarmel case is one of heartbreak and betrayal.

In an interview, Stephen Kanne said he first met Bonnie Roadarmel when she applied for a clerking job in his office at the age of 23 in the early 1980s. As his staff dwindled with the sour economy, Roadarmel remained and eventually worked her way up to office manager in 1987, he said. By the time he retired in 1994, there was only him and Roadarmel.

“Anything I asked her to do, she was just the tops,” Stephen Kanne said. “Bonnie handled all of the bookkeeping, including my personal stuff, and I did the legal stuff.”

He said Bonnie asked if she could continue handling his personal finances after he took down his shingle, declining to accept any compensation. She had signing authority on his checks as part of the arrangement

“Whenever I wanted to go on vacation, I would check with Bonnie to see if I had enough money,” Claudia Kanne recalled in an interview.

On birthdays and special occasions, Roadarmel showered the Kannes with expensive gifts: decorative plates and a crystal bowl from Tiffany, extravagant floral arrangements and the like. But Roadarmel never visited the couple.

Claudia Kanne said she always wondered why she and her husband never had any money. They lived frugally, she said.

“I’ve never been in a beauty parlor since the junior prom,” Claudia Kanne said. “I cannot even pronounce (Hermes). I go to the grocery and come home and take care of my husband, because that’s the kind of lifestyle I thought I could afford.”

In her victim’s statement, she told the court, “As far as Tiffany’s, I saw the movie once, ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ but that’s as close as I’ve gotten, because … we were always broke.”

Meanwhile, Bonnie Roadarmel graduated from Loyola Law School in 1999 and eventually specialized in representing insurance policy holders. She worked her way up to a partnership at Newmeyer Dillon in Newport Beach.

Bonnie Roadarmel no longer works there, but her bio is still on the company website, touting that “she has successfully recovered millions of dollars for policy holders.”

Scheme unravels

Then the embezzlement scheme unraveled. In May 2021, Stephen Kanne called his bank to make sure one of his checks had cleared. He said he got a call back from a customer service representative asking who Bonnie Roadarmel was. The bank official explained that she had written several checks to herself, Kanne said.

He also learned there were payments to American Express on cards that he did not own. Kanne called an attorney, who then called Irvine police. An officer questioned Roadarmel and she immediately texted Kanne, according to a memo prepared by his attorney, Terry Kaplan, and submitted to the State Bar. A copy also was given to the Los Angeles Police Department, which took over the case.

While Roadarmel had worked as the Kannes’ personal bookkeeper since at least 1994, she turned over to them only 10 years of financial records, beginning in 2011. Among the files was an envelope containing American Express statements for cards paid down by the Kannes.

Scattered among the charges for such sundry items as gas stations, car washes, hair stylists and dry cleaners were a $9,056 round-trip ticket to Paris, France, nearly $70,000 over three years for luxury goods from Hermes, $15,677 for Chanel over a three-month period, and hundreds of dollars in charges for a private car service, according to an accounting submitted by the Kannes to police and the State Bar.

Payments also were made to insurance companies to presumably cover hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, according to Kannes’ submission to the police and bar.

“I really thought she was a special person,” reflected Stephen Kanne. “She played me like a Stradivarius.”

The Kannes said they believe Bonnie Roadarmel got a sweetheart deal in court because of her professional and personal connections.

Said Stephen Kanne: “She got a slap on the wrist with a feather.”

Source: Orange County Register