Swindler Exploits the ‘Hope of Inmates,’ Prosecutor Says

NEW YORK — The Facebook page for Waymore Post-Conviction LLC — a legal firm that purported to assist the wrongfully convicted — is topped with the slogan: “Take the correct road home … Your family is waiting.”

The page shows a photograph of two young children kissing a man who seems to be their father.

“Waymore P.C. will review the entire case file and transcripts for a criminal case,” it says. “At the conclusion, a detailed report outlining the issues are provided to the defendant.”

But according to prosecutors in Brooklyn, Waymore Post-Conviction was run by a man who had no training as a lawyer and stole as much as $15,000 from hopeful convicts and their families from 2012 to 2016. On Tuesday, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office unsealed an indictment against the man, Kenneth Moore, charging him with crimes that included larceny, fraud, forgery and the unauthorized practice of a profession.

Working from an office in Bushwick, prosecutors said, Moore, 53, of Queens, targeted inmates serving long sentences, sending them certified letters in which he offered to file post-conviction motions on their behalf. His victims included prisoners in New York, North Carolina, Kansas and Virginia and his pitch was simple, according to the indictment: Moore would ask the inmates’ relatives to sign contracts with him and pay him 80 percent of his standard fee of $5,000 to $10,000 in advance of any work. But in 16 instances, prosecutors said, he never filed a motion. In two others, they added, Moore submitted fraudulent briefs, using the forged signature of a real attorney who had no idea the papers had been filed.

In a “particularly egregious case,” prosecutors said, Moore persuaded a defendant to hire him instead of using the Innocence Project, the well-regarded New York organization that was founded in 1992 to reverse wrongful convictions. Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said he took the conduct personally because his office has a special team devoted to wrongful convictions, the Conviction Review Unit, that has become a national model.

“This case is especially reprehensible to me because in Brooklyn we have a robust Conviction Review Unit that takes wrongful conviction claims seriously,” Gonzalez said in a statement. “This defendant allegedly took advantage of that exemplary work by targeting vulnerable victims and exploiting the hope of inmates and their families that they might be released from custody.”

At his arraignment in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Tuesday, Moore pleaded not guilty and was ordered held on bond of $300,000 or $150,000 in cash.

His case was brought at a moment when wrongful convictions have achieved a heightened cultural significance. After years of courtroom labor, documentaries like “Making a Murderer” and television shows like “The Night Of” have made the issue a cause célèbre in the criminal-justice world, attracting the attention of a broad national audience.

But as word of the problem has spread, so, too, have opportunities for people to use it for their own unscrupulous ends, said Paul Cates, a spokesman for the Innocence Project. Cates said that Moore’s case was not the first time officials at the Innocence Project had heard of something similar, including instances when firms or individuals had used variations of their organization’s name to boost their own credibility.

“We don’t think it’s a widespread problem,” Cates added, “but it’s definitely concerning.”

In Moore’s case, there seem to have been early hints that something wasn’t right. On three occasions in 2016, people who said they hired him to help them or their loved ones posted messages on Yelp, claiming he had cheated them.

In June that year, a woman from Highland, New York, who gave her name as Shanelle R., wrote on the site that she had “made about 6 payments” to Moore, but never met him in person. “When I confronted him about showing up to his office and they said he not there anymore, I lost contact with him,” she wrote.

Two months later, someone named Katrina M. from Garland, Texas, posted a similar message, warning others not to work with Moore.

“Kenneth Moore pretends to be a lawyer that specializes in post conviction,” she wrote, “but he is not even licensed to practice law. He took over $6k from my family and in hopes of getting a loved one released.”