By Robert Haugh
Disgraced former Santa Clara City Councilmember Dominic Caserta is back.
Caserta has sued The Mlnarik Law Group and his former attorney, John Mlnarik.
He alleges that the law firm withheld part of the settlement money from his case against the Santa Clara Unified School District.
As SCNO previously reported, in 2024, the school board approved a 4-1 deal to give Caserta about $1.6 million plus health coverage until age 65. The vote was not initially disclosed.
After a cure-and-correct demand forced the issue into public view, the district identified Trustees Albert Gonzalez (now a City Councilmember), Vickie Fairchild, Bonnie Lieberman, and Jodi Muirhead as yes votes.
Michele Ryan voted no. Jim Canova and Andy Ratermann were absent.
Caserta was a Santa Clara High School teacher. He sued the District because he alleges that his personnel file was leaked when stories came out about numerous female students accusing him of sexual misconduct and harassment.
At the time, Caserta was running for County Supervisor in 2018 but had to resign from the City Council and dropped out of the Supervisorial race.
Caserta’s lawsuit against Mlnarik claims the firm received the settlement funds, controlled the disbursements, failed to promptly turn over his share, and took fees it was not entitled to take.
He is seeking damages, punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, and costs.
This is not Mlnarik’s first time being accused of mishandling clients’ money.
In 2018, Mlnarik was suspended from practicing law for one year and placed on three years of probation after admitting misconduct in two client matters.
According to the California State Bar, Mlnarik took money for legal work he did not perform and twice tried to charge clients’ credit cards without their knowledge or consent. In one of those cases, it was after one client had fired him.
Mlnarik’s conduct was found to involve dishonesty and moral turpitude. But in 2019, Caserta hired him anyway.
Adam
Besides this story, the real freak show is the decline of Santa Clara brought to you by Suds Jain and Kevin Park the Quaking Duo of Daffiness.
SF STANDARD did a piece of the crumbling condos of El Camino.
Massive development going on in Normandy area and Jain has told the residents to live with it. From his mansion, the Tesla and Chinese auto investor has turned away.
Becker is back LYING and Jain says nothing
Karma hits two DISGRACED former “leaders”.
They each created much chaos everywhere
they went. Now they are eating their
own.
Get out the popcorn.
Always appreciate the reporting on this slimebag (my former Civics teacher at SCHS in 2001-2002). Recently I’ve come to realize my only objection is that, to refer to him as disgraced, it implies he ever had grace to begin with. No such quality has ever been applied to his putrid corpus. The true disgrace is that our dear city continues to line his greasy pockets with taxpayer money.