Four Detroit-area residents, including a sitting judge and a local attorney, were charged for their roles in a years-long scheme to embezzle money from incapacitated individuals.
Nancy Williams, 59; Avery Bradley, 72; Andrea Bradley-Baskin, 46; and Dwight Rashad, 69, all Detroit residents, were charged by indictment with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The indictment also charges Bradley with one count of wire fraud, Bradley, Bradley-Baskin, and Rashad with several counts of money laundering, and Bradley-Baskin with a single count of making a false statement to fa ederal law enforcement agent.
Probate courts regularly appoint guardians and conservators to manage the personal and financial affairs of adults, known as wards, who have been found by the court to lack the capacity to manage their own affairs.
Guardians and conservators are fiduciaries who are obligated to act in the best interests of their wards. The indictment alleges that Nancy Williams owned Guardian and Associates, an agency that was appointed as a fiduciary by the Wayne County Probate Court for incapacitated wards in over 1,000 cases. Avery Bradley is an attorney who, along with his daughter (and fellow attorney) Andrea Bradley-Baskin, operated a law firm that often represented Guardian and Associates in Wayne County Probate Court and regularly practiced there.
The indictment alleges that the four defendants conspired to systematically embezzle funds from wards and to obtain and retain money that rightly belonged to the wards and their estates.