Disbarred Cincinnati Defense Attorney Who Defrauded Prisoner Clients Gets Three-Year Sentence
On March 10, 2025, the federal court for the Southern District of Ohio sentenced former Cincinnati defense attorney Richard Louis Crosby III to 37 months in federal prison for Social Security fraud. The 37-year-old pleaded guilty in July 2024 to using the identifying information of his girlfriend, his father and a dead man to fraudulently apply for employment with law firms around the country—after he had been disbarred for stealing funds from clients. He was also accused of defrauding prisoner clients.
Crosby was fired in 2019 from Cincinnati’s Strauss Troy firm for allegedly stealing funds from clients. The Cincinnati Bar Association filed a complaint against him in November 2020. He agreed to surrender his law license five months later, and Crosby was indicted for the thefts in Hamilton County in June and November 2021.
Meanwhile, Crosby didn’t stop holding himself out as an attorney. He assumed a stolen identity, applying to a law firm in Washington, D.C. that briefly hired him as “Richard Williams” in June 2021—the same month that he was first indicted in Ohio.
After his second indictment, the Hamilton County Court entered a disbarment order for Crosby. But he used the stolen identity again in June 2022 to land a job with a California firm, working as an attorney for three months at a $150,000 annual salary.
A month before that, Crosby had been arrested on the Hamilton County charges, eventually receiving a probated sentence in June 2023. He used his girlfriend’s Social Security number to apply to a Miami law firm in September 2022, beginning work the following month with a $5,000 signing bonus and a $185,000 annual salary—until investigators showed up from the Clermont County Child Support Enforcement Office in April 2023.
His cover blown, Crosby was fired by the Miami firm. But he continued to interview with other law firms, using the identity of a dead North Carolina man to land a $285,000-a-year job in September 2023 with a California practice. Crosby also falsely claimed to be a former U.S. Marine and a football player at the University of Michigan, but those lies did not earn him any charges when he was finally indicted by federal prosecutors in November 2023.
Before his plea in that case, and while free on bond in Cincinnati in early 2024, Crosby ran yet another scheme to defraud prisoners and their families of fees in exchange for promised work on appeals, parole and other post-conviction relief—none of which he was licensed to perform. Prosecutors didn’t learn about that until September 2024, at which point Crosby was in a cell awaiting trial
The Court revoked his bond in June 2024 after he missed a hearing and claimed that he was hospitalized on a “morphine drip.” As his GPS tracker revealed, Crosby actually spent the morning parked outside a hospital in an apparent attempt to fool the device.
In addition to his prison term, Crosby was ordered to serve three years of supervised release and perform 300 hours of community service, as well as pay $170,769.29 in restitution to two law firms he defrauded; an amount due to a third firm had yet to be determined. See: United States v. Crosby, USDC (S.D. Ohio), Case No. 1:23-cr-00111.
Additional source: Cincinnati Enquirer
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