Murdaugh Murders Podcast - Taking On "The Firm" - Part One (S01E25)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I don't know exactly what role Ellick Murdoch's law firm played in his alleged crimes, but we're hearing some disturbing accounts about how PMPED is allegedly handling the victims. And it's important that we peel back the layers of accountability as this case keeps expanding. My name is Mandy Matney. I'm a local journalist who has been investigating the Murdoch family for almost three years now. This is the Murdoch Murders podcast with David Moses and Liz Farrell.

Starting point is 00:00:44 As you know, we are a mission-driven podcast. We expose the truth wherever it leads. While accomplishing this mission, we always take care to respect victims and we are sensitive to the traumatic nature of the story. We are also sensitive to our fans, many of whom have requested MMP merchandise, and we believe that we found a great way to accomplish both of these goals. We are so excited to announce today that pre-sales for Murdoch Murders podcast merch is now live at MurdochMurdersPodcast.com All net proceeds from merchandise sales are donated to victim-focused charities like Hopeful Horizons and others on a regular rotation. Hopeful Horizons is a children's advocacy,

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Starting point is 00:02:26 search for Murdoch Murders podcast on your favorite platform. Previously on the Murdoch Murders podcast, we told you about how Elik Murdoch is accused of sealing more than 6.2 million related to his fake forge accounts at Bank of America dating back to 2016. He's accused of sealing millions of dollars from clients while he was a partner at the law firm started by his great grandfather, PMPED. But so far, PMPED has escaped accountability for the most part. While PMPED partners have been claiming to make Alex's victims whole, it appears like something else was happening behind the scenes. And today, I'm going to introduce you all to a new voice for victims in this case, attorney Justin Bamberg. He was one of the first

Starting point is 00:03:20 lawmakers I met when I started my job at Fitznews. Earlier this year, I wrote a profile about Justin and his dad when his father was sworn in as the first African-American sheriff in Bamberg County, South Carolina. Bamberg County, where Justin is from, is just north of Hampton County. It's small, rural and poor, just like Hampton County. Justin is also a state representative for the district that includes Moselle, and he brings a different perspective to this case as a whole because of his roots in rural South Carolina. If you grew up over in this neck of the woods or this part of the state, you've been familiar with the Murdoch family. You've been familiar with that particular law firm, and it's something that's kind of been around for a very, very long time. And in general,

Starting point is 00:04:10 when you live in rural South Carolina, almost everything is institutionalized. The concept of new is not something you see here very often. Usually, if it's a doctor, that doctor was the doctor for your parent. If it's a law firm, that law firm was the law firm for one of your elders before you. Kind of how this part of the state has been. If you were in Hampton, it was the farm, and that's what people referred to them as, the farm. The reputation was one where, I mean, they would win. They would win folks' compensation. Hampton County has always been a bad venue to get sued in if you were a defendant or a company, much like most of these counties. We don't have much over here. One thing that we have consistently had is people here are hardworking.

Starting point is 00:05:08 They're good, honest folks, and they've had to effectively fight for everything that they've had in life. And people do not like companies that take advantage of folks or injure folks. What we're kind of seeing here is a firm and a family in the Murdoch, or Alec Murdoch, who have for years been on that side, you know, fighting against these companies. And now, it turns out that people are at this point having to fight back against them. And they're in the position that some of the other defendants have been in that they've gone after for 100 years or so. Things are coming full circle for PMPED. Long ago, the firm staked out its own corner of the earth in Hampton County. Its brick building stands in stark contrast to every other structure within

Starting point is 00:05:57 miles of it. It is large and formidable. It is the, quote, house that CSX built, which is a reference to the millions the firm made in suing the railroad company. PMPED has been at the helm for generations, cultivating a reputation of absolute unassailability, like kings in their castle. Even now, the firm seems to be regarded as a legitimate second government of Hampton County. They have been punishers and heroes, saviors and fixers. If you want help, you go to them. They get results. They have spent decades projecting the image that they are right there, standing by the side of regular folks, protecting them from the bad guys, from the people who seek to take advantage of them. So many people feel they owe the firm and its individual attorneys

Starting point is 00:06:41 their loyalty. But there are two sides to the firm's generosity. Hampton County has been called a judicial hellhole and is known for fixed juries, judges friendly to plaintiffs, outside settlements and jury awards, chasing businesses and job opportunities away. This has helped people individually, but has also been seen as playing a major role in holding back the county as a whole. Hampton County is impoverished. There's virtually no industry there, which means a good portion of the population must travel an hour and a half in some cases on stuffy, crowded buses to work on the coast. The same coast that serves as the weekend playground for many of the firm's attorneys. Now, for the first time, the firm is finding itself on the other side of the courtroom

Starting point is 00:07:22 and the question is being asked, were they the real bad guys all along? Justin Bambur got involved in this case earlier this month when a man by the name of Johnny Bush called him. Bush was one of six victims named in the December indictments against Ellick Murdoch. Bush suffered catastrophic injuries in a vehicle accident in 2016 and hired Murdoch to represent him. In June 2016, Ellick Murdoch allegedly told his client, Johnny Bush, that he had spent $100,000 of his settlement money on accident reconstruction for Bush's case. Instead, Murdoch had a check written for $95,000 to his own fake forge account for his personal use. I've been keeping up with everything that's been going on.

Starting point is 00:08:13 A, it's been absolutely crazy. I have been following the work that you've done and Fitznews has been doing since the beginning in terms of putting information out to people. So I was well aware of what was transpiring. I did not know how deep this particular aspect went. And I ended up getting a call about some missing money and kind of asked certain questions and found out exactly what's going on, trying to get your feet up onto you. And it really was mind boggling. And it started with one and then it led to another call and another call of people who had certain experiences with the office, not just in Ellick Murdoch misappropriating and stealing money. And that's where the misconception is, I think for a lot of people who

Starting point is 00:09:09 may be be looking at what's going on, Ellick stealing people's money is one thing. These are things that have transpired afterwards that in reality had very little to do with what Ellick did. When Justin started digging and asking questions, he noticed something was really wrong here, with the way he was hearing that victims were being treated by PMPED attorneys. And what we saw is, for example, with Mr. Bush, his money gets taken five years ago. And when it comes to light by law enforcement, hey, Mr. Bush, you're owed another $95,000. He goes and he's able to get that back. But that doesn't make anybody whole. And I've said this time and time again, if I went to a bank and I said, I want to borrow

Starting point is 00:10:04 money to purchase a home and Mr. Bankerman, you're going to give me $95,000 and I'm going to pay you back when I want at 0% interest, they're going to call security and have me escorted out because they're going to think that I've lost my mind. And that is what has been going on. I think most of us can agree that Ellick's former clients deserve to receive interest on the money he allegedly stole from them. Honestly, this should go without saying this shouldn't even be a conversation at this point, especially not when Ellick's defense attorneys attempted to make their client free by capitalizing on the good optics of making victims whole at his bond hearing earlier this month. But along with the matter of making victims whole by accounting for factors

Starting point is 00:10:52 like inflation and interest, there's another important consideration here. And that is the basic business of life. Every day, Ellick's former clients have made critical decisions in their lives based on not having their settlement money, whether it was $95,000 or a million dollars. People make very different decisions when they don't have the security of knowing there's money in the bank. If Ellick did what he's accused of doing, he not only robbed these people of their money, he also stole an uncountable number of life choices from them. Decisions about medical care, employment, vehicle repairs, childcare, education, relationships, all of these things are affected by our financial status, all of them. So if he did this, and if PMPED is making it worse by trying

Starting point is 00:11:39 to limit damage to the firm, then we wouldn't call that quote making victims whole. I want to go back to the bond hearing again for a second because it's important to note that Ellick's attorneys Dick Harputlian and Jim Griffin indicated to the judge that 10 of the 12 victims who have been named in the indictment so far had been made whole. And yet here we are now talking about some of these same victims who have since sought representation because they do not believe they were made whole. That is quite a discrepancy. One thing that is encouraging though is that law enforcement appears to be on its game when it comes to letting former clients of Ellick know they might be one of his victims. We'll be right back.

Starting point is 00:12:21 On December 16th, Justin dropped a press release where he pretty much went for the jugular. In his news release, Justin attacked the good old boy system that enabled Ellick Murdoch's bad behavior. He said Murdoch literally PMPED people's pockets. And he asked victims to email him at PMPEDmypocketsatbamberglegal.com. The funny thing here is that lawyers across the state who are familiar with PMPED are incredibly careful in what they say about the firm publicly. PMPED holds a lot of authority and frankly there's a crazy amount of reverence paid to them to the point that attorneys outside the firm will even go to the firm to get the partner's blessings before pursuing cases that could be across interests. Since the murders of Maggie and Paul

Starting point is 00:13:15 and throughout this past fall, the whispers among attorneys and those in the legal field were loud but not too loud. What Justin did here, it might be hard for people outside the state to understand just how bold of a move it was. He not only told the victims in the state that he was willing to go up against the great and almighty firm, he sort of did the unspeakable on his press release by openly using the let's call it alternative pronunciation of PMPED which is PMPED, PMPED People's Pockets and then he created a dang email address for it. People's access to justice for being made whole, people's access to having someone fight for them should not be contingent on who's on the other side. And there are individuals in that office

Starting point is 00:14:07 that, you know, I know, I respect. This is about the entity and this is about the fact that people were done wrong. There's an underlying context associated with the practice of law, in my opinion that is hanging in the balance here. And South Carolina has been known as a good old boy state for a very long time. I mean, that doesn't matter whether you're talking law politics or what. And I've never really been in the good old boy system here. It is what it is. At the end of the day, Alec Murdoch was a member of the firm. He presumptively put money up to help fund the operations of the firm. And quite frankly, the firm profited from Alec's misbeeds. They're on the hook here. What Bamberg is saying here, the PMPED profited from Alec's misdeeds. That is a big deal.

Starting point is 00:15:12 Justin isn't messing around. He's going where other attorneys haven't really gone before, up against a law firm that has been feared by folks in his region for decades. When my clients entered into a contract for legal representation, that contract was entered into between client and law firm. Not client and Alec Murdoch or anybody else, client and law firm, the law firm dropped the ball here. And Alec Murdoch, yes, he went and took people's money, but those checks didn't come out of Alec Murdoch's personal account. My client's money that got taken, got taken from the firm's client trust account. That bank account is in the name of the firm. The firm is responsible. It is admirable for someone in the wake of something like this

Starting point is 00:16:09 going on to say, we're going to make it right. We're going to make people whole. That's admirable. And if that is what you are actually doing, then you deserve to be commended for that. But what is not okay in the way that I view it is these people are not being made whole. These people are being taken advantage of. Their trust is being taken advantage of. Their misinformation is being taken advantage of. And there are things that should have been explained to them that lawyers have an obligation to explain under the rules of professional conduct. For example, lawyers are not allowed to try and limit or mitigate their own or their firm's liability to a client or previous client by not informing them of certain things. You have a right to seek

Starting point is 00:17:01 counsel. We encourage you to seek counsel to discuss this and giving people a reasonable opportunity to do that. When you call somebody in and they come in and you know, you give them a check and don't explain any of their rights, you're operating as an attorney giving them legal counsel, but you're giving them half ass legal counsel. Justin told us that from what he's seeing, it appears like PMPED partners underestimated LX victims when they tried to make them whole and likely they never imagined that any of these people would seek legal advice from a lawyer like himself. I honestly believe that if people had the correct information, none of them would have just accepted these checks. Like here you go,

Starting point is 00:17:53 this is money that you're owed. They would have contacted an attorney first. That attorney would have been done exactly what we're doing here, which is saying, yes, the firm is going to give this individual this money back. But on top of that, you're going to pay interest. You're going to take into consideration punitive damages that the firm may face should this matter go to trial. And we're going to look at it like we would look at any case. It really looks like they're being victimized the second time. And there lies the problem that we keep saying over and over again in this case. The powerful refusing to actually admit to their misdeeds and take responsibility for their actions

Starting point is 00:18:45 and revictimizing victims in that process, which is horrible. And ever since Justin dropped that press release, asking victims to come forward, he keeps hearing these jaw dropping stories. I've been receiving calls from individuals, for example, there was someone who called in and was asking questions. And the underlying situation was really mind boggling to me, you know, hey, when Alec tried to commit suicide, a week later he was in rehab. And I understand that, but he called me from rehab and told me that he settled my case. How? How? That literally, it's so mind boggling. But at this point, you know, I think most people are of the position that nothing surprises them anymore. You know, that's just one example.

Starting point is 00:19:43 Good Lord. So we cannot stress this enough. When it comes to allegations of Murdoch involved crime, the jig is never up. Never. I think most people would cool their jets for a while after being airlifted to a trauma center with a boo boo on their head and an alleged murder for hire slash insurance fraud scheme that ends up on national television. I think most attorneys would probably be a little embarrassed that the whole world now knows that they don't even know about the suicide cause in their own insurance policy. But not our boy. Alec's alleged suicide attempt was on September 4. Four days later, the state Supreme Court suspended his license to practice law in South Carolina. From what Justin is saying here, Alec appears to have practiced law after that.

Starting point is 00:20:34 Why? Because the jig is never up. We'll be right back. Okay, so that story that we just heard about Alec allegedly claiming to have solved a case after his suicide incident, that isn't the only shocking story that Justin Bamberg has heard from Alec's clients recently. Well, if you look at Mr. Anderson, another client of mine, not only did his money get misappropriated for approximately two years when law enforcement made it known that money was missing, he then went to the farm and they they took a 40% legal fee, which just blows my mind. You know, it blows my mind that under the eye of the firm, which owes a duty to this individual and others, that two years later, law enforcement tells them

Starting point is 00:21:38 that they're missing $750,000. And when they come in to get their money, because every penny of that along to them, the firm who says they had nothing to do with anything takes a $300,000 legal fee. And that is just not okay. And we take issue with that. You know, and these are just a couple of examples. You know, I know there are others where individuals have had money missing and either not received any of their money to date, or have only received a portion of what they're due. And there's no telling how deep it goes. I really don't know. I can only speak to, you know, that which I have been exposed firsthand to. But it just feels like the deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the more upsetting the whole ordeal is, because all of this was avoidable. And all of

Starting point is 00:22:43 this is, it's very damaging to the legal profession. I asked Justin about attorney fees, as it seemed shocking that PMPED appears to be collecting fees from clients who their partner stole from. Is there a clear rule or law about how much lawyers can take in fees and when they can take them? So attorney fees are always contractual in nature. At the onset of representation, law firm says, this is what the fee is going to be. And this is how we're going to get paid. And generally in the personal injury arena, that fee is on a contingency fee basis. I absolutely think there are some moral questions and some business practice questions with them taking a full 40% fee at that stage, right? If me and my mom go to a restaurant and her order comes out and it is

Starting point is 00:23:47 completely disgusting, and we send it back, and they bring out another plate of food, we better not get charged for both. That's not how this, that's not how life works. That's not how business works either. We asked Justin who owns his own law firm Bamberg Legal LLC if it's possible that PMPED partners, like their claiming, were truly unaware of Alex's alleged mass thievery until September 2nd, the day that they claimed in their own lawsuit that they found out about Alex's fake accounts. Well, it really just makes you wonder, you know, you're talking about five, six, seven years, however long, and every single year when equity partners or the accountant or the tax people may go over the numbers, they look at the profit, they look at how much money that they need to put

Starting point is 00:24:43 in, and nobody, nobody at all questioned, hey, when, that's $5 million going to forge, what's up with that? Or, hey, it looks like on a lot of Alex's cases, we're not seeing the reflection of legal fees in the operating account or none of those things. Nobody asked at all, you know, in, I mean, me personally, I've been poor before, so I watch my money, like I'm never going back, I watch my money, I look at my office books, that's just good business sense, and either they were asleep at the wheel, and the firm itself was not paying attention to what was going on, or maybe they just made and have so much money that nobody cares whether or not they're missing a few million bucks. Either way, I think that that's grossly negligent on the firm, or worse,

Starting point is 00:25:41 you know, so if nobody knew, that's absolutely grossly negligent. If somebody knew, then it's worse than gross negligence, but I do not understand how that would have been the case for all these years. Justin told me that he knew there would be some backlash in getting involved in the Murdoch mess and publicly calling out PMPED, but it came down to something very simple for him, right is right and wrong is wrong. There were multiple things that made me decide to get involved, I mean, I'd be lying if I said it was like something I just did on a whim, I mean, you know what you're stepping into, okay, I mean, it is what it is, like the same thing that allowed Alec Murdoch to do everything that he did, okay, types of boat crash, types of the case stuff, doesn't just go

Starting point is 00:26:36 away because now they're on a receiving end, right, so when you do what Eric did, or you do what I'm doing, you know that there's going to be some stuff attached to that, and you got to just be prepared to deal with it, you know, but I think the primary motivation for me was I had always committed myself to fighting the good fight, regardless of who's on the other side. And I've done that, going back to the time I put a claim in against the Sheriff's Office that my mother was the fourth highest ranking member of, it is what it is, there's right, and then there's wrong, and if you're wrong, you got to pay the piper for that. Justin told me that he immediately knew that he made the right decision to go after PMPED when something really weird happened soon after he

Starting point is 00:27:29 stepped into this arena. Any doubts that or reservations, rather doubt is a strong word, but any reservations that I may have had went out of the window when one of my clients received a phone call from the firm saying, yeah, we're getting your file together, we're gonna send it where you asked us to send it, and by the way, I'll see you in court. I want to pause here because this is absolutely horrifying. If the firm is making threats like, I'll see you in court, then that is a huge problem. PMPED appears to have been able to continue its operations without any sort of formal intervention from the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, the State Supreme Court, or law enforcement. Shouldn't the court be appointing a receiver to freeze PMPED's assets

Starting point is 00:28:23 and protect the best interests of these clients? If this is what's going down, then they clearly shouldn't be handling this themselves, and the court needs to step in now. Okay, literally Mandy, in the wake of my office sending letters of representation for certain individuals, one of them did receive a phone call from the firm or an individual at the firm, and the ending of that conversation was, I'll see you in court. And the client is like, well, what exactly do you mean by that? And it's, yeah, you're the lawyer you got said, he's suing my firm, so I'll see you in court. That's not appropriate. That is indicative of part of the problem here. And I'm sorry, but ain't nobody gonna punk us. That is not gonna fly. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:12 that comment was received a certain way by my client. It did come off as though it was semi-intimidation slash, do you really want to do this? And that comment was reported to the appropriate authorities because these people are victims. Okay, I don't care how people want to label their victims of a crime that occurred. And ain't nobody about to punk my clients, or punk me or my office, and that ain't going down. So any reservations that I did have about this whole ordeal went out the window the day I got that phone call. And I know that we're doing the right thing. And we ain't gonna let up because this train ain't got no brakes. Justin plans on turning up the heat on the firm in the new year. He said a class action lawsuit

Starting point is 00:30:10 is still on the table, as well as individual lawsuits against PMPED. At the end of the day, I think whether or not a lawsuit ends up having to get filed after the new year against the firm itself is going to be contingent on the firm, quite frankly. You know, if insurers get involved, if the firm wants to step up and truly make these people hold, and by making them hold, taking into consideration all of the things, including actual impunity damages, then there may not need to be a lawsuit. The whole point of filing lawsuits is accountability. And it's to hold people accountable when they don't want to voluntarily accept accountability. So where we end up? Who knows? But I do know that we're going to keep pressing forward.

Starting point is 00:31:15 And we're going to press forward against everybody who had anything to do with these folks' money getting taken. So I will be clear here. While Ellic's attorneys have claimed he stole money from clients to support an opioid addiction, we don't actually know how many victims are out there. Like we said before, sources have told us that Ellic Murdoch could ultimately be facing hundreds of charges related to financial crimes. But looking at the victims who have been identified in the first two rounds of indictments, we noticed something. 80% of them were minorities. When I look at the individuals who fell victim to this whole ordeal,

Starting point is 00:32:05 I really think they fall into three categories of people. People who just had long-term ties to Ellic Murdoch and or his family, the minority community, which is very upsetting to me, personally. And then equally as upsetting is folks who I would consider working class, just working class folks, it doesn't matter Black, white or whatever, working class people who fell victim. So the people who had close ties to the Murdoch family, minority, the minority community, and then your average everyday working class person trying to live the best life they can. And Mr. Bush is actually disabled, you know, and that's part of the the troubling aspect of his case and others is these are not independently wealthy,

Starting point is 00:33:12 don't have to worry about anything financial and life type individuals. These are people who are just trying to make it day by day. And they trusted Ellic Murdoch, but they trusted the firm and the firm brand. Justin grew up in a middle class family in Bamberg County as the son of two police officers. He told me that back then train tracks literally separated Black folks from white folks in Bamberg, South Carolina. Justin didn't forget about his upbringing, and he spent his whole career fighting for people who have been wronged by the system. Every single one of these people deserve 150% respect. It doesn't matter how much money they have. It doesn't matter what type of relationship anybody has with them. At the end of the day,

Starting point is 00:34:20 an important ball was dropped, okay, and for a lawyer in a firm that dropped the ball to tell one of these people who's doing nothing more than asserting their rights under the letter of the law, I'll see you in court is inappropriate, it's intimidation, it's disgusting, and it is indicative of the way that this entire process has been handled. And nobody got time for that kind of stuff. It's a new day in the idea here that there are people who ain't afraid of nobody. There's no other way to say it. Okay, I'm happy to see people standing up for themselves. I'm happy to see people standing up for themselves. And they ain't afraid anymore. And they ain't got a reason to be afraid. And I'm not saying afraid of an individual, I'm saying afraid of an institution,

Starting point is 00:35:19 right? Because those are two separate things. We know that it's a powerful institution that has existed. I mean, hey, it predates the this you talking about going back in time when my great granddaddy was sharecropping, picking cotton for people, right? It's an institution that has controlled and dominated. And people have always been afraid to book these type of institutions. And I'm happy to see people not not doing that anymore. We have a lot more to discuss about PMPED, aka the firm, and Alex alleged co conspirators. And we're excited to continue to expose the truth wherever it leads in 2022. As always, subscribe to fitsnews.com for the latest on the story and more,

Starting point is 00:36:14 and follow the Murdoch Murders podcast on Facebook and Instagram at Murdoch Murders Until then, have a safe and happy new year from all of us at the Murdoch Murders podcast. Stay tuned.

Murdaugh Murders Podcast - Taking On "The Firm" - Part One (S01E25)

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