Skip to main contentTwo weeks ago, the U.S. Attorney for Oregon had to take time out of her day to ship off a response to the state bar, which had received a complaint about her.
Was the complainant a vengeful drug lord, upset by Karin Immergut's zealous prosecution? A white-collar criminal who felt he'd been framed by the state's top federal prosecutor?
No, a Jaguar-driving produce vendor suspects that Immergut's hubby snooped through their mail--and tried to use what he found in a bitter dispute over a stately West Hills home.
This tale begins in July 2003, when Immergut and her husband, James McDermott, bought a 5,000-square-foot house in Southwest Portland for $1.3 million from Cindy Rinella and her husband, David.
After the closing, McDermott claimed the Rinellas had misrepresented the state of the house's electrical system and asked for repayment of $227,000.
The Rinellas refused, so McDermott took them to mediation.
In a pre-mediation discussion in July of this year, McDermott raised questions about the Rinellas' ability to pay a settlement, should they be found liable. Specifically, he referred to written correspondence from the Jaguar automobile company to the Rinellas.
That reference led Cindy Rinella, whose family owns Rinella Produce in Southeast Portland, to believe that her mail, some of which was still going to their old house, had been opened.
In August, Cindy Rinella accused Immergut and McDermott, a partner in the Ball Janik firm, of opening Rinella's mail, which is a federal offense and would violate Oregon State Bar misconduct rules.
In his written response to the bar complaint, filed Sept. 17, McDermott acknowledges that he saw a "notice from Jaguar or Jaguar Motor Credit addressed to the Rinellas that suggested to me that Jaguar was either going to repossess one of the Rinellas' cars or in fact had repossessed the car."
McDermott stated that he used the information, gleaned solely from the envelope's exterior, in conversation with an attorney representing Re/Max, the real-estate firm that handled the Rinellas' sale.
"I questioned whether the Rinellas had sufficient liquid funds to fully fund a settlement and I used the unopened Jaguar envelope to illustrate the point that I am probably not the Rinellas' only creditor," McDermott wrote in his response to the bar.
Cindy Rinella, when contacted by WW, said that for a time she and her husband were behind on payments for their Jag--which they still own, along with a 2003 Mercedes and a Cadillac Escalade--but says they were never close to repossession.
A Jaguar representative, Rinella says, told her that account information is confidential and that nobody could have gotten it without opening her mail. "It's highly unlikely that he could have gotten information any other way," she says.
In her written response to the bar on Sept. 22, Immergut, too, denies that she or her husband opened any mail, "nor have we sought to use any confidential information about the Rinellas to gain some advantage against them in ongoing property litigation."
Immergut says she's offended by the complaint. "I have spent my career doing the right thing," she says. "My integrity is being impugned by a spurious allegation that's not based on any evidence." McDermott was unavailable for comment.
Although the bar had not formally responded to the complaint at press time, Scott Morrill, a lawyer for the bar, told WW he will dismiss the complaint unless Rinella can provide proof the mail was opened. Meanwhile, the two sides still face arbitration on the underlying property dispute.
WWeek 2015