Fla. lawyer claims Panama court stealing millions from orphans

A half-decade ago, Richard Lehman was just a tax lawyer in South Florida who happened to have a very wealthy friend and client. Lehman's fishing buddy, Wilson Lucom, was a curmudgeonly millionaire, a onetime member of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration who went on to found the conservative group Accuracy in Media. In his old age, Lucom relocated to Panama and began buying up prime oceanfront land-more than 7,000 acres by the time he died in 2006.

Lehman spent a lot of time in Panama with Lucom in his friend's waning months. He signed the will in which Lucom left his entire estate, then valued at more than $50 million, to a foundation dedicated to feeding Panama's impoverished children. In 2006, Panama's version of probate court named Lehman the sole executor of Lucom's estate, which included property in Florida and Texas as well as the land in Panama, on which Lucom had envisioned a shining model city.

That didn't sit well with Lucom's widow, a Panamanian aristocrat named Hilda Arias Lucom, nor with Hilda's children by her marriage to onetime Panama finance minister Gilberto Arias. Lucom's will specified a yearly allowance for Hilda, but cut out the Arias children.

Thus began a fantastical probate battle that has led the tax lawyer down paths he never imagined. According to an 84-page civil racketeering complaint he filed Friday in Miami federal district court, Lehman has witnessed rampant corruption at the highest levels of the Panamanian judiciary, has been accused of murdering Lucom and attempting to extort his onetime family, has been falsely arrested in Panama and placed on an Interpol alert list, and has been on the wrong end of a $2 million Florida state court judgment for misusing Lucom estate assets. The Arias family has argued that Lucom never spoke of wanting to help children. He never even liked children, according to Hilda's 2008 interview with The New York Times. The foundation, according to the Ariases, was Lehman's concoction. READ THIS FULL ARTICLE ONLINE