A disbarred New island of Jersey lawyer pleaded shamefaced this week to defrauding an investor in a bastard business sector that purported to offer up loans to City of Brotherly Love Eagles fans.

Instead, Frank Tobolsky spent most of a $2.4 gazillion investment funds on personal expenses and a “crippling” gaming habit.

Prosecutors said Tobolsky, 59, told the sole investor the business sector would habituate Eagles fans’ sit down licenses as corroboratory to unafraid the loans. The dupe sent the money to Tobolsky in tranches between 2013 and 2016.

A personal place license, or PSL, entitles a sports devotee the right wing to purchase time of year tickets for a specific seat in a stadium. The bearer can sell the licence to someone else if they no yearner want to buy a ticket.

But no loans were ever so issued. Some of the money was returned to the victim as purported profits, but Tobolsky spent almost $2 billion of the fund, a great deal of it at Atlantic Ocean City’s gaming tables.

Theft past Deception

Tobolsky was separately supercharged inward 2018 for theft past dissimulation for the fraudulent sales agreement of an Eagles place license. The former prop lawyer advertised a non-existent licence for sales agreement online, afterwards depositing the victim’s $9,400 defrayal into his account at the Golden Nugget.

As a first-time offender, he was permitted to go in a pretrial diversion program, according to Atlantic County courtroom records. This is typically a rehabilitative computer programme that allows a defendant to execute community of interests service of process instead of sledding to prison.

Tobolsky was barred from practicing law of nature inward November 2017 by the New island of Jersey Supreme Margaret Court for misappropriating $32,500 of a clients’ pecuniary resource held inward escrow. The money had been placed in his attention inward throw out of a prop deal.

But in March 2013, he siphoned it into his possess personal account, which at the time contained simply $5.

In his defense on that occasion, Tobolsky told the homage he suffered from a determined gambling problem. He also claimed anxiety and economic crisis that sometimes caused him to follow “literally… out of [his] mind.”

He described this as a “crippling” mental illness, adding the allegations against him were “inextricably linked to [his] vitiated capacity, stress, and duress.”

‘Awful Feeling’

Tobolsky said he 1st experient play as a six-year-old when he visited a racecourse with his family. At ix or ten, his male parent introduced him to football game pools. He missed from each one week, which resulted in “an dreadful feeling” that he later recognized as depression.

In his high school day years, he traveled with his begetter to racetracks all on the eastward coast, and regular gambled underage inward casinos inwards Puerto Rico. He funded his gambling with money earned on his newspaper route.

In 1984, at 23, Tobolsky began attending Gambling Anonymous meetings and subsequently quit play for 22 years.

But the breakup of his man and wife inward 2006, linked with fears that he would non live able-bodied to compensate for his children’s college fees, caused his old demons to resurface.

Now he faces upwardly to 20 years in prison.