Every lawyer takes an oath. The specifics vary by state, but the substance is always the same: to uphold the law, to serve the administration of justice, to act with integrity before the courts. In California, the oath is administered the day you are admitted to the State Bar. You raise your right hand. You swear. And then you are trusted with something most people never think about until they need it — the ability to walk into a courtroom and be believed. Judges believe you. Banks believe you. Opposing parties and their counsel extend you the professional courtesy of assuming that when you file a document, it is truthful. When you represent a client, you have authority to do so. When you submit a declaration under penalty of perjury, it reflects actual facts.

A federal RICO complaint filed in January 2026 tells the story of what allegedly happens when that trust is converted into a weapon.

In January 2026, a 185-page federal RICO complaint landed in the Southern District of California — fifteen defendants, more than 750 predicate acts of racketeering catalogued across eight years, approximately $75 million in fraudulent transactions traced through a web of shell companies and corrupted court filings. Among the defendants: Scott R. Carpenter, California State Bar No. 144259, who practiced at Cummins & White, LLP — Suite 300, 2424 S.E. Bristol Street, Newport Beach.

The complaint does not describe Carpenter as a bystander. It does not describe him as a lawyer who made mistakes. It describes him as an active participant in a corrupt organizations scheme who allegedly turned every tool available to a licensed attorney — court filings, banking communications, corporate documents, the threat of immigration enforcement — into instruments of fraud.

The Seizure

The most direct allegation against Carpenter involves something that should never be possible in a functioning legal system: an attorney allegedly walking up to a bank and taking control of a company’s account through false representations.

According to the complaint, Carpenter fraudulently seized control of TopDevz’s Wells Fargo bank account by transmitting false representations via interstate wire facilities. TopDevz, LLC was a manager-managed limited liability company based in La Jolla, California. It had a sole manager with exclusive authority over the company’s affairs. Carpenter’s client, Tyler Brandon Davis, held a 49% minority membership stake. He had no management authority. He could not bind the company. He could not hire attorneys on its behalf.

But an attorney’s word carries weight at a bank. When a licensed lawyer contacts a financial institution and makes representations about a company’s governance, the bank has every reason to believe him. The complaint alleges Carpenter exploited exactly this dynamic. He allegedly contacted Wells Fargo and made statements about TopDevz that were not true, and the bank — relying on the presumed credibility of a California attorney — transferred control.

Think about what flowed through that account. TopDevz was generating millions of dollars in revenue from clients that included HBO, DriveTime Automotive Group, Procore Technologies, and Becton Dickinson. By 2021, the company had logged nearly $30 million in cumulative revenue. The complaint characterizes the seizure of its bank account as wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. section 1343, with each false representation transmitted through interstate communications constituting a separate predicate act of racketeering.

An attorney who takes control of a company’s bank account without lawful authority does not just steal money. He severs the company’s ability to operate. Payroll stops. Vendor payments stop. Client receivables flow to someone who has no right to touch them. It is, in practical terms, the financial equivalent of cutting a building’s power lines.

Stock Certificates for a Company Without Stock

Some allegations in the complaint illustrate the scale of the scheme. This one illustrates its audacity.

Carpenter, the complaint charges, published and transmitted forged TopDevz stock certificates via email. The problem with these documents is not merely that they were forged. The problem is that they could not legitimately exist at all.

TopDevz was organized as a California limited liability company. An LLC does not have stock. It has membership interests. The distinction is not semantic. Stock certificates are instruments of corporate governance. They represent shares in a corporation. They carry specific legal weight, specific regulatory requirements, specific implications for ownership and control. An LLC membership interest is governed by an operating agreement, not by stock certificates. Creating stock certificates for TopDevz was like printing currency for a country that does not exist.

Yet according to the complaint, someone created them. And Carpenter transmitted them via email — interstate wire communications that the complaint characterizes as additional predicate acts of wire fraud under RICO. The apparent purpose, the filing suggests, was to fabricate a paper trail supporting Davis’s claims to ownership and control that the actual operating agreement never granted.

This allegation is worth pausing on because it reflects a specific kind of legal misconduct. An attorney who transmits a forged corporate instrument does not make a careless mistake. Carpenter, as a practicing lawyer, would have understood the difference between an LLC and a corporation. The complaint’s implication is that the stock certificates were not an accident. They were manufactured evidence, created and disseminated through the professional credibility of an attorney who knew they were fictional.

Representation Without Authority

The complaint lists four clients Carpenter allegedly represented: Davis individually, TopDevz LLC, Porter Consulting LLC, and Mason Building & Design LLC. Porter and Mason were entities within Davis’s alleged network of companies. But it is the second name on that list that tells the deeper story.

TopDevz. Without lawful authority.

The operating agreement designated a sole manager with exclusive authority over the company’s operations, including the right to engage legal counsel. Davis, as a 49% minority member, did not have that right. He could not hire a lawyer for TopDevz any more than a minority shareholder can fire a company’s CEO.

Yet Carpenter filed pleadings on behalf of TopDevz. He appeared in court proceedings as counsel for the company. Every filing carried the implicit representation that he had been lawfully retained to act on TopDevz’s behalf. The complaint says that representation was false from the start.

The scope of the unauthorized filings is staggering. The complaint characterizes the volume as “hundreds of fraudulent pleadings and declarations” submitted through courts’ electronic filing systems. Each filing pushed through a court’s ECF system constitutes a separate wire communication. Each one that was filed without lawful authority, and that contained material misrepresentations, is characterized as a separate predicate act under the RICO framework.

Hundreds.

Over years.

Through multiple courts and arbitration proceedings.

Manufacturing Perjury

Filing unauthorized court documents is one category of alleged misconduct. Manufacturing false testimony under oath is another.

The complaint alleges that Carpenter assembled three perjured declarations by Davis. These were sworn court filings — documents submitted under penalty of perjury, carrying the weight that courts assign to testimony given under oath. According to the complaint, Carpenter did not simply fail to notice that his client’s declarations contained false statements. He assembled them. He constructed them using the identity of TopDevz’s founder and the company itself to commit perjury.

The California Penal Code sections cited in the complaint lay out the criminal framework: perjury under section 118a, conspiracy to cheat and defraud under section 182(4), conspiracy to obstruct justice under section 182(5), and subornation of perjury under section 127.

Subornation of perjury is not a crime of negligence. It is the deliberate act of inducing another person to lie under oath. It requires knowledge that the testimony is false and the intentional procurement of that false testimony for use in a judicial proceeding. The complaint’s allegation that Carpenter assembled perjured declarations is, in legal terms, an accusation that he ran a production line for false evidence — building sworn statements he knew were untrue and putting them before courts that were relying on them to adjudicate a multimillion-dollar dispute.

The Deportation Threat

Every criminal scheme eventually reveals what it is willing to do when confronted. For this one, according to the complaint, that moment arrived when Carpenter allegedly turned to the company’s founder and told him, in substance, that fighting back could cost him his ability to remain in the United States.

The founder of TopDevz operated in this country under an L-1A intracompany transferee visa — an immigration classification that allowed him to expand his Canadian technology business into the American market. That visa was tied to his majority ownership and managerial control of the company. Lose the company, lose the visa. Lose the visa, lose the right to live and work in America.

The complaint alleges that Carpenter understood this vulnerability and weaponized it. The filing charges that he threatened the plaintiff with criminal prosecution and immigration consequences to extort a settlement — to coerce him into signing away his rights to a company valued between $18 million and $30 million by making clear that resistance would trigger consequences far beyond the civil courtroom.

There is a word for using threats of harm to compel someone to act against their own interests: extortion. When the threat involves deportation — the destruction of someone’s entire life in this country, their career, their home, their family’s stability — it is a particularly vicious form of coercion. The complaint characterizes this conduct as part of the broader pattern of racketeering activity, and it is perhaps the allegation that most vividly illustrates what the complaint means when it says the legal system was weaponized.

An attorney is supposed to advocate. Not to threaten deportation. Not to exploit a person’s immigration status as leverage in a civil dispute over corporate ownership.

The Church Recruit

Criminal enterprises grow through trust. The complaint describes one specific channel through which the alleged operation expanded: a church in Corona del Mar.

According to the filing, Carpenter recruited a fellow attorney named J. Douglas Kirk into the scheme. Kirk practiced with Kirk and Toberty in Irvine. The two men were close friends from Grace Fellowship Church in Corona del Mar — a community of shared faith, personal relationships, and mutual trust.

The complaint alleges Carpenter converted that relationship into an operational asset. Kirk’s alleged role paralleled elements of Carpenter’s: filing fraudulent pleadings, lending his law license to the enterprise’s operations. For his participation, the complaint says Kirk received more than $30,000 in fees paid from criminally derived funds.

The recruitment pattern matters because it illustrates something about how the alleged enterprise operated. It did not grow through cold professional outreach. It grew through trust networks — existing relationships where people had reason to extend the benefit of the doubt. The complaint describes this dynamic repeatedly. Josh Lintz, hired as TopDevz’s COO, allegedly transformed from trusted insider to active conspiracy participant. D. Edward Hays, another attorney named in the complaint, is accused of his own role as the architect of the bankruptcy fraud phase of the scheme. At every step, according to the filing, the enterprise recruited by exploiting precisely the kind of trust that professional and personal relationships are supposed to be built on.

The Money

In RICO cases, the financial trail is not just evidence. It is structure.

The complaint alleges that Carpenter received $196,768 in legal fees from TopDevz’s fraudulent JPMorgan Chase bank account — an account the filing describes as containing criminally derived funds controlled by Davis without lawful authority. Nearly $200,000 in payments to an attorney for services rendered in furtherance of a scheme that the complaint characterizes as the systematic dismantling of a legitimate business.

Under RICO, receiving payments derived from racketeering activity does more than establish involvement. It establishes financial motive and ongoing benefit. Carpenter was not, according to the complaint’s theory, a lawyer who accidentally wandered into a fraud. He was allegedly filing the documents, assembling the declarations, making the threats, transmitting the forged instruments — and depositing checks drawn on an account that existed only because of the fraud he was allegedly helping to perpetrate.

The broader enterprise, according to the complaint, moved approximately $75 million through fraudulent transactions. Carpenter’s $196,768 is a fraction of that total. But it represents the price at which, the complaint alleges, one attorney traded his professional obligations and his oath to the California State Bar for a role in an eight-year criminal operation.

What the Courts Never Saw

A scheme of this complexity cannot survive judicial scrutiny. According to the complaint, it survived because Carpenter and others actively concealed evidence of criminal activity from courts and arbitrators.

This allegation strikes at the foundation of the adversarial legal system. Judges and arbitrators depend on the parties before them — and especially on the attorneys, who are officers of the court — to present their cases honestly. An attorney who withholds evidence of fraud does not just harm the opposing party. He corrupts the process itself. He converts a courtroom from a venue for truth-seeking into a stage where outcomes are shaped by what one side has agreed to hide.

The complaint alleges that Carpenter helped sustain the enterprise by ensuring that courts and arbitrators never received the complete picture. The forged documents. The fraudulent bank account seizure. The criminal origins of Davis’s control over the company. All of it, according to the filing, was systematically concealed from the judicial officers whose job was to resolve the dispute fairly.

A Profession Betrayed

Six attorneys are named across the fifteen defendants in this complaint. That number is not incidental. It speaks to the filing’s central contention: that stealing a multimillion-dollar company requires legal infrastructure. You need people who can navigate the court system, file documents that carry professional authority, and present a facade of legitimacy to banks, judges, and arbitrators who have every reason to trust an attorney’s word.

The allegations against Carpenter, taken together, describe what happens when that trust is systematically exploited. Fraudulent seizure of a corporate bank account. Forging stock certificates for a company that could not have stock. Filing hundreds of unauthorized pleadings. Manufacturing perjured declarations. Threatening a foreign-born entrepreneur with deportation. Concealing criminal activity from courts. Recruiting a fellow attorney from his own church. Accepting nearly $200,000 from a fraudulent account.

Each allegation, standing alone, would constitute a serious accusation against any practicing attorney. Together, they describe a pattern that the complaint characterizes as the corruption of the legal process itself — a licensed officer of the court allegedly turning every mechanism designed to protect people into a weapon aimed at one person.

The complaint cites RICO violations alongside California Penal Code sections for perjury, conspiracy to defraud, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and subornation of perjury. The federal civil RICO claims seek treble damages, injunctive relief, and costs under 18 U.S.C. sections 1964(a), (b), and (c).

The full complaint is publicly available and details the broader enterprise across all fifteen defendants. What it describes is not simply the story of a company that was allegedly stolen. It is the story of a legal system that was allegedly hijacked from the inside by one of the people sworn to protect it.

The case remains pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. Scott R. Carpenter has not been convicted of any crime in connection with the conduct described above. All allegations referenced in this article are civil claims contained in a filed complaint. No findings of fact have been made by the court, and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

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The full court filing referenced in this article is available for download: View complaint (PDF). Additional source documentation: www.slideshare.net. All allegations are civil claims in a filed complaint; no findings have been made by any court.