NEW YORK – Dana Giacchetto, the financial advisor who stole millions from clients such as Matt Damon, Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio, was sentenced to nearly 5 years in federal prison.
“I’m not the one-dimensional, mendacious con the press has made me out to be!” Dana Giacchetto said during his outburst in federal court in Manhattan.
Giacchetto, 38, had pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges accusing him of squandering nearly $10 million of his Hollywood clients’ funds on a lavish, drug-abusing lifestyle.
The boyish defendant mixed with the likes of actors Matt Damon and Cameron Diaz and singer Alanis Morrisette. All became clients with his business, The Cassandra Group, as did Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Stiller and Courtney Cox Arquette.
With some of his non-celebrity victims and his parents looking on, Giacchetto asked for their forgiveness as well as mercy from U.S. District Judge Robert P. Patterson.
“I never woke up in the morning and said ‘I’m going to rip off my clients today,”‘ he said. “I crashed and burned. … I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost my money. I’ve lost my spirit.”
Patterson gave Giacchetto the maximum sentence allowed under federal guidelines — the minimum was three years and 10 months — after blasting him for not cooperating with Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC, in seeking to reimburse victims, is investigating whether any funds were stashed in overseas back accounts.
The judge cited suspicions that “money from the little people was used to pay off the stars. That’s not fair.”
One of Giacchetto’s attorney, Roland Riopelle, insisted all the money “was simply spent. … There isn’t a pot of gold out there.”
