In an announcement on Wednesday, the Justice Department reported that former California lawyer, Philip Eric Myers, who pled guilty to one count of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud in September, 2013, was sentenced in an Anchorage court.

61-year-old Myers was sentenced by Chief United States District Court Judge Ralph R. Beistline to 64 months in prison for stealing a fortune from an elderly woman’s estate. Myers was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $1,081,000.

At the time of sentencing in this federal case, Myers had been convicted in three separate cases of Theft from Elder or Dependent Adults in the State of California. In each of those cases he had embezzled money from Trusts he had established for his elderly clients. Myers was disbarred from the practice of law by the State of California on February 11, 2013. Myers was an estate and trust attorney in that state.

Myers, along with his 54-year-old co-defendant Brian Ben Israel, an Anchorage resident nurse working at the Meridian Psychiatric Consulting Group, met and built a relationship with the elderly Mrs. Juanita Gielarowski and her daughter, Linda Stowers. Ben Israel found out about Gielarowski’s money through the financial records at Meridian in 2005. Both Gielarowski and Stowers were patients there.

In the years of 2005 through 2008, Ben Israel became a health provider as well as a financial advisor to Gielarowski and her daughter. With the help of Myers, Ben Israel gained control over the assets in Gielarowski’s Revocable Trust by creating another trust where Ben Israel was appointed co-trustee.

By the time the two men were finished with Gielarowski, they had syphoned off over $2.8 million from the trust that was set up for her long-term care and placed it in the trust that Ben Israel was co-trustee.

It was in December of 2007, that Myers and Ben Israel withdrew $1 million from the trust account, convincing Gielarowski’s daughter, a Walmart employee, to invest in Typhoon Security Technology, a company that had been suspended by the state of California three months prior and was no longer in business. Authorities say that instead of investing those funds, Myers used most of that money to pay part of a 2005 civil judgement and settlement for stealing from the Rose T. Heil Trust.

The two men had convinced Stowers that the loan would be paid back within 90 days in the amount of $2.5 million. When the loan wasn’t repaid, Stowers voiced her concern over the depletion of the funds in the trust. In turn, Myers and Ben Israel convinced Stowers to take out a $400,000 loan on Gielarowski’s home and several other properties owned by Gielarowski. When Stowers was unable to re-pay on the loan in 2009, the properties went into foreclosure and Gielarowski was removed from her home and put into a state-run elderly care facility. She died there in June of 2010.

Ben Israel was sentenced to 66 months in prison by Judge Beistline in December on his conviction on one count each of mail and wire fraud as well as filing a false tax return. Ben Israel spent much of his share of the money to purchase plastic surgery, a $750,000 home in Hawaii as well as to pay off his mother’s home in Ohio.