A Cambridge tenant convicted of stealing more than $70,000 from her landlady by using the landlady’s credit cards lost an appeal of her larceny conviction but had her money-laundering conviction tossed out. The Appeals Court decision Monday involved an unusually close relationship between the tenant and her landlady, and a theft that started when the tenant offered to care for the landlady’s cats while the owner was out of the country.
A Middlesex Superior Court jury convicted Erin Kipeum Lee, 42, of larceny by credit card of a person over 60 and of money laundering on July 1, 2022. The jury acquitted her of larceny by cashing checks and deadlocked on counts of forgery and passing a forged check. Lee was sentenced to three to four years in prison on the larceny conviction – a more severe punishment than sentencing guidelines called for – and three years of probation for money laundering to be served after her prison term ends.
The Appeals Court overturned the money laundering conviction because there wasn’t sufficient evidence that Lee tried to hide the credit card purchases, the court said. As a result of the decision, the sentence of three years probation is vacated.
The victim, Maria Santos, lived in one side of a building she owned on Harvey Street, North Cambridge, and rented out five furnished apartments on the other side to women attending Boston-area colleges, the prosecution said. Lee, one of her tenants, was a student at Harvard University, according to the decision.
Lee developed a closer relationship with Santos after the young woman visited Santos and “fell in love” with the landlady’s cats, a brief by the prosecution said. When Santos, then 77, prepared for her annual three-and-a-half-month visit to her farm in Brazil in 2017, Lee offered to care for the cats. Ordinarily two employees and a law firm managed the property, the brief said.
Lee, with a key to Santos’ apartment, found credit cards and blank checks the landlady had hidden in a drawer, the prosecution said. Passwords, email addresses and similar information was visible on a bulletin board hung in the apartment, the prosecution said. When Santos returned home, she brought gifts for Lee in return for the cat care and the two women hugged, the prosecution said. Then, Santos discovered her $100,000 bank account had been emptied, blank checks were lying on the ground in the laundry room, and she had “issues” with her credit cards, the prosecution said.
Santos contacted Cambridge police. Their investigation uncovered deposits of Santos’ checks into Lee’s account and credit card purchases with Santos’ cards, the prosecution said. When police came to Lee’s apartment with a search warrant, “they could hardly enter the defendant’s bedroom-size apartment because there was merchandise everywhere,” the prosecution said in a legal filing. Another filing said it took “several truckloads” to remove the items to the police department.
Defense arguments
Lee said she had done work for Santos for years without being paid, and the landlady had promised to compensate her in gifts and cash when she returned from Brazil. She intended to repay anything extra she had taken when the two women figured out what Lee was owed, Lee said. Lee also said the checks she had cashed were actually sent to her by Santos, from Brazil.
Lee’s attorney also argued that Santos did not lose any money from the credit card purchases because the credit card provider didn’t charge her for unauthorized purchases, as required by law. And Lee also intended to repay the landlady for anything Lee wasn’t owed, the defense argued.
Lee said she came to Vancouver, Canada, from Seoul, South Korea, at the age of 18. She moved to Cambridge in 2010, she said. She joined First Church in Cambridge and volunteered in its Friday Cafe and Outdoor Church programs for homeless people, her attorney said in advocating for a sentence of probation.
Court looked at second issue
The case also touched on an unusual bias issue: a prospective juror who said she might side with Asians such as her – and the defendant – because of attacks against people of Asian descent. The Appeals Court noted in its decision that the trial occurred during the pandemic, when Asians were targeted for hatred and violence.
The prosecutor dismissed the prospective juror after the juror said she might feel sympathetic toward another Asian person. The juror said that “recently there are a lot of crimes against Asian- Americans. So that might affect my judgment, maybe … It’s just that I might have the tendency to be more lenient towards Asian people.” Under questioning from the judge, the juror said she could be impartial.
The Appeals Court ruled that the prosecutor had produced an adequate nonracial reason for excluding the juror, turning down one of the defense lawyer’s challenges to the conviction. The prosecutor had said she wasn’t excluding the juror “on the basis that this individual is of Asian descent,” but because “I’m not sure she’ll be able to set aside her affinity toward other individuals, not necessarily because she is of Asian descent, but rather because she is bringing a bias into the courtroom.”
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