Joe Ruigomez’s Story
Joe’s family hired Tom after he was seriously injured in the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion in 2010. Joe’s sister, Jamie Ruigomez, noted that the family “thought he could win [the case] for us,” but “we didn’t know how much of a snake he would be along the way,” while his mother, Kathy, said Tom was “comforting” when they first met with him.
After settling the lawsuit against PG&E for the Ruigomez family in 2013, Tom allegedly told the family it would take three months to process the funds and asked if they wanted to put the money, which was millions of dollars, in one of his investments. “The primary reason I am trying to manage the young man’s funds is so that nothing goes wrong,” Tom wrote in a letter to the family. In a voicemail to the Ruigomezes, Tom told them he was “in their corner” and “never like a family more” than them.
Joe, who claimed Tom “treated him like a child” and told him he worried about a young person getting too much money at once, subsequently noted he wasn’t getting payments on time and said Tom was hard to get ahold of.
“He would be like, ‘Oh, sorry about that. These things happen. I’ll get it to you next week,’” Joe alleged. “And half the time the check would come when he’d say so — the second time — and half the time it wouldn’t.”
By 2017, he claimed the checks “disappeared completely.” After the Ruigomez family filed a lawsuit for their remaining settlement funds, Tom agreed to pay them $12 million, signing a document saying he would make a $1 million payment and a $2.5 million payment a couple of months later. “He never got to the second payment,” Kathy claimed. After going back to court, Tom was deposed, and the family is “among the first in line to collect their settlement money from the bankruptcy” case.
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