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	Prison Sentences Keep Piling up for Smolka U.S. Judge in Va. Adds Five Years to Time; Disbarred Lawyer Faces 14 Years Total By Tom Campbell Times-Dispatch [Virginia] June 24, 2006 http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2 FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1149188711015&path=!news&s=1045855934842 The disbarred lawyer who cheated the families of convicts and masqueraded as a victim of abuse by a priest had his federal prison stay lengthened by five years yesterday. U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne sentenced Thomas Edward Smolka to the statutory 60-month maximum for failure to appear in court on Aug. 28, 2003, for sentencing. Smolka apparently went on the run weeks earlier after realizing the court was likely to impose some serious time for the three counts of fraud to which he had pleaded guilty. While a fugitive, Smolka stole the identity of the dead husband of a friend in New Mexico, where he was living at the time. Hiding out under that name in Portland, Ore., Smolka attempted to defraud the Catholic Diocese with a false claim that he was a childhood victim of sexual abuse by a Portland priest who had been in the news. He contacted a lawyer, who was representing several of the priest's alleged victims, about filing a lawsuit against the diocese. U.S. marshals looking for Smolka talked to people who knew him in New Mexico and learned about the woman who had befriended him - with a gift of $30,000 - and from whom he had stolen her late husband's name and Social Security number. They found someone had taken out a driver's license in that name on June 3, 2003. After that, U.S. Deputy Marshal Bill Stanton of Richmond found records of a credit card with the dead man's name being used repeatedly at a store in Portland. Stanton asked marshals in Portland to check it out and store employees identified Smolka from a photograph. On March 24, 2004, the phone in Smolka's apartment in Portland rang at 6:30 a.m. It was the U.S. Marshals Service, which had come to arrest him. He opened the door, acknowledged who he was and surrendered. Back in Richmond, at Smolka's delayed sentencing for defrauding clients, Payne on Sept. 10, 2004, imposed a prison term of 6½ years and called him an embarrassment to the profession of law. Last November, a federal judge in Portland sentenced Smolka to just over three more years in prison and specified that term starts when Payne's 6½ years ends. Yesterday, Payne also made the additional five years consecutive, meaning Smolka is looking at 14 years and 7 months in federal prison from all three sentencings. "He targeted prisoners by taking their money and delivering no services," Payne said yesterday. Then, while on the run, he duped a widow and tried to dupe the Catholic Diocese in Portland, the judge said. "He has repeatedly, time after time, shown a willingness to violate the law," Payne said. "He violated it while on release [awaiting sentencing the first time]. . . . He violated it in many different ways." Smolka pleaded guilty to the fraud charges in Payne's court in January 2003. That was just two weeks after he was acquitted in Henrico County Circuit Court on grand larceny charges of allegedly cheating a convict and his wife out of a $20,000 legal fee for which he did no work. Judge L.A. Harris Jr., who tried Smolka without a jury, said he had to find him not guilty because, while what Smolka did may have been unethical, he was not convinced that it amounted to criminal embezzlement. Smolka, once a Virginia Beach lawyer and developer, was found guilty of killing his wife in Florida in 1993, but the conviction was reversed on appeal after he spent 33 months in prison. In 1996, Smolka and his three children settled the wrongful-death lawsuit they had filed against him in the death of their mother. The children received the bulk of the money from an insurance policy and the sale of Smolka's house. Contact staff writer Tom Campbell at tcampbell@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6416.
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