November 19, 2020: On November 19, 2019, the Bronx Supreme Court, in a long-standing foreclosure case captioned CitiMortgage, Inc. v. Rafael Pantoja, et al., Index No.  13637/2006 noticed that an attorney named Lee E. Riger filed a motion with the Court on behalf of two dead clients, as if they were both among the living at the time. Upon the unveiling of Mr. Riger’s bizarre act of necrophilic litigation, his employment as an associate attorney with Balfe & Holland for the past ten years was immediately terminated upon further discovery of false billing activity with First American Title Company for legal work he supposedly performed for his two cadavers.

Apparently, Mr. Riger learned that the first of his two dead clients he represented in the foreclosure proceeding died on August 14, 2018. Mr. Riger was then supposedly shaken from the news that his second and the last of his clients he represented in the foreclosure proceeding, died on May 5, 2019. Afterwards, in a strange act of lawyering a la mode Norman Bates, Mr. Riger concealed facts of the death from the Court, and on September 3, 2019, Mr. Riger swore under oath that his clients “authorized” him to renew settlement negotiations with Citibank in the foreclosure action.

Taking Riger’s false pretenses from bad to worse, his professional misconduct was heightened when a search of the public records revealed that Riger’s dead clients, when alive, had used another dead man’s social security number to obtain more than $300,000.00 in defaulted mortgage loans currently at issue in the foreclosure action.  It has been one year since Riger has justifiably disappeared from the legal grid, leaving the Court with his empty promise that he would one day soon “find” a personal representative for his dead clients…“even if he had to dig up a couple of gravesites.”