By A.C. Thompson

Every now and then a reporter stumbles onto a scenario that just looks a tad peculiar – an equation where the numbers don't seem to add up, a set of circumstances so odd they defy logic. This is one of those stories.

Two years ago an Oakland lawyer named Githaiga D. Ramsey was accused in federal court of stealing nearly $1 million from a pro hoops player, former NBA forward Jason Caffey, who played for the Golden State Warriors and the Milwaukee Bucks.

The allegations appear at least somewhat credible. Ramsey, at the time a prosecutor under then-district attorney Terence Hallinan, moonlighted for three years as Caffey's manager, a position that gave him access to the athlete's checking account at Union Bank of California. And in court papers, Caffey pointed to reams of very suspicious bank transactions suggesting Ramsey may have walked off with a gargantuan sum of dough.

But despite the magnitude of the reported rip, Ramsey remains a free man. No local, state, or federal law-enforcement agency has brought criminal charges against him. Perhaps that's because Ramsey is totally clean, and there's really nothing to investigate. Or perhaps something else – something a wee bit peculiar – is going on.

We'd love to tell you how Ramsey perceives the situation, but he didn't return Bay Guardian calls seeking comment for this story.

Ramsey, meet RICO

Ramsey, 41, is, to put it bluntly, blessed with some fairly potent family connections. His father is retired Alameda County Superior Court judge Henry Ramsey; his brother is Ismail Ramsey, a highly respected former deputy U.S. attorney currently lawyering at Keker and Van Nest, a powerhouse firm with clients like Enron's Andrew Fastow; his mother is Eleanor Mason Ramsey, president of Mason Tillman Associates, a government consultancy.

Ramsey himself took a position at the D.A.'s Office after graduating from UC Hastings College of Law in the mid-1990s. And by 1999, when he started representing Caffey, he was both prosecuting crimes and committing them, if the athlete's tale is to be believed.

In 2003 Caffey filed a federal civil suit charging Ramsey with "defrauding" him of "over Nine Hundred Thousand Dollars" and accused the lawyer of transgressing the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act – the anti-mob law used to take down the Italian Mafia.

The suit was settled quietly on terms that remain confidential. Contacted by phone last week, Caffey's lawyer, Eric Farber, declined to comment on the matter citing the confidentiality pact; we were unable to locate Caffey.

In the past couple weeks, the Ramsey-Caffey dispute has entered a new phase, with the State Bar of California filing disciplinary charges against Ramsey Jan. 20. The 30-page document makes for interesting reading: by the bar's tally, Ramsey actually took Caffey for far more money than previously alleged: a whopping $2,275,000.

"We view the misconduct very seriously," Esther Rogers, the state bar attorney handling the case, told us. "Rarely has there been a case where an attorney used his trust to steal over $2 million from a client."

The bar has no power to prosecute criminally and can, at most, revoke Ramsey's license to practice law.

Rogers also alleges Ramsey "committed fraud in a real estate transaction." That transaction is the sale of Caffey's $1 million home in Oakland's Upper Rockridge neighborhood in 2000.

Property records show Caffey bought the house, which sits on a 4,800-square-foot lot, in 1999 for $1,069,000. He sold the house to Ramsey 17 months later for just $1,050,000.

The bar alleges that Ramsey rigged the deal, working with real estate agent Mamood Moktari. According to the bar, Moktari billed Caffey an extra $10,500 for the sale and secretly split a $40,000 commission with Ramsey.

Moktari, who works for Red Oak Realty in Berkeley, vehemently denied the accusation. "There was nothing inflated about [the commission]," he told us. "Everything was disclosed to Mr. Caffey.... I have documents to verify this." Moktari was not named in Caffey's suit, and no charges of any sort have been filed against him.

While Ramsey picked up the house on the cheap, he turned around and flipped the property for a tidy profit of nearly $400,000 in 2003, property records indicate.

Last week the trouble-prone lawyer found himself in hot water once again – and once again real estate was at issue. On Feb. 2, a federal judge found Ramsey in contempt of court for trying to sell a piece of property in the East Bay town of Hercules worth between $300,000 and $400,000. The property is tied to an alleged $6.4 million Ponzi scheme and has been frozen by the court.

Ramsey, who represents an employee of the company being sued in the case, purportedly attempted to unload the property twice to generate cash for his client.

The judge, Charles Breyer, pounded Ramsey in his contempt order, "noting the particularly reprehensible nature of his participation in the unlawful transfers and the cover up that followed," and demanded he shell out more than $60,000 for flouting the court.

'No criminal offenses'

Despite the clues amassed by the bar and Caffey's lawyers, no law enforcement agency has yet felt compelled to file criminal charges against Ramsey.

As far as Ramsey's attorney is concerned, there's nothing criminal about the case. The allegations "have been investigated by the FBI, and there has been a determination that there were no criminal offenses," said the lawyer, Doron Weinberg, in an interview with the Recorder, a legal newspaper.

Neither the Federal Bureau of Investigation nor the U.S. Attorney's Office would comment on whether Ramsey has indeed been cleared of criminal wrongdoing. Nor would the San Francisco District Attorney's Office.

One expert on legal ethics said prosecutors may view the whole imbroglio as more business quarrel than major league theft. "The criminal authorities might not be involved because in their minds, they say, 'This is a civil matter' and figure they can't prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt," said Carol Langford, an East Bay lawyer who teaches at local law schools and has written two textbooks on the subject. "My guess is Ramsey is saying he had a business reason to do what he did. In that case you're not going to be able to prove it was a crime."

Still, Ramsey's free pass looks kinda strange. Other local lawyers accused of shady behavior have ended up posing for mug shots. Take the case of Nikolai Tehin, the San Francisco lawyer convicted in criminal court late last year of scamming some $2 million from an array of poor clients. He's currently preparing for an extended stay in a prison cell.

"The story here is why the D.A. isn't prosecuting this," one former investigator for the state bar said. This source, a person well acquainted with the culture down at the Hall of Justice, thinks prosecutors are reluctant to slam other prosecutors, especially a guy like Ramsey, who's likely to stride into the courtroom with a top-dollar defense lawyer.

At the bar, Rogers told us she had no knowledge of any criminal probe but added, "It's possible the criminal process is still working its way through." Or perhaps it'll be left to Rogers's understaffed and underfunded organization to excavate the truth about the activities of Mr. Ramsey.

E-mail A.C. Thompson