Substance Abuse and Recovery - A Lawyer's Story

Gary Reing was winning trials he had no business winning while spending his clients' escrow money on cocaine. He believed he was borrowing it. The law called it grand larceny and forgery, the Appellate Division called it disbarment, and the front page of the Law Journal told the profession he was unfit to practice. Fourteen years later, a two-word order — "motion granted" — gave him his license back. This is the story of how.

In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with Reing, a tax attorney, a convicted felon, and a recovering addict who went on to chair the lawyer assistance committees of both the New York City Bar and the New York State Bar, for an unusually candid account of addiction, discipline, and the long road to reinstatement.

"Everything Went Up My Nose"

Reing does not soften the facts. A sole practitioner in the South Bronx in the early 1980s, when cocaine was king, he converted client funds and forged a client's signature, each time certain he would pay it back. He describes denial as it operates in a high achiever: academic mediocrity offset by campus leadership, a teaching assistantship, the bar passed on the first try — how could someone functioning that well have a problem? The Bronx defense bar noticed missed court dates and blamed his father's death; his wife could see the drinking and smell the marijuana but could not catch the cocaine. Disciplinary committee notices went unopened. He had lost, he says, the power to choose.

Driving to Minnesota

The turning point was the belief that he would die if he did not act that day. After one more court appearance, paid in cash and spent on cocaine, he drove three days to a rehabilitation center in Minnesota, where they took his keys, his money, and his suit. Reing describes the reversal at the heart of treatment — he had believed he used because of his life, and learned that his life was as it was because he used — and the family week in which his wife, discovering for the first time that all the money was gone, broke through what he calls the brick wall of his denial. A call from his counselor brought the news that the Bronx District Attorney had "confused my borrowing with grand larceny." The DA let him finish the program before surrendering; a colleague from the Bronx bar represented him for free.

Two Felonies, Five Years' Probation, Seven Years Gone

Reing walks through the criminal and disciplinary consequences in parallel: guilty pleas to the top counts of two indictments, five years' probation instead of prison, restitution to the Lawyers' Fund for Client Protection, which had reimbursed his clients, and automatic disbarment upon the felony conviction — his request to resign first was refused, and rightly so, he says. He explains how a disbarred lawyer must stay off the line: preparing tax returns as a ministerial act, representing clients at IRS audits on the numbers alone, declining the appeals work his enrolled-agent credential would have allowed. Meanwhile he built a recovery on a six-dollar-an-hour job, a halfway house that stretched from ninety days to five months, and a meeting he could walk to.

Motion Granted

A decade after disbarment, having finished probation and begun paying restitution, Reing asked the men in his support group the question they asked back: would he be all right if the answer was no? He recounts the reinstatement process in detail — the disciplinary defense lawyer's advice to keep paying and gather affidavits, the motion denied because a professional responsibility exam had since been added, the referee's hearing, the three-member panel with a public member who asked about interest on the stolen money, and the discovery that one victim had never filed a claim, prompting a search that found the man's widow so that Reing could make amends in person. Eight or nine months of silence ended with two words. He did not practice for years afterward; he did not feel he belonged.

Redemption, and a Diagnosis

The final segment is the arc from disbarment to leadership. Seventeen years sober, Reing volunteered for the City Bar's Lawyer Assistance Program, then joined its committee, then chaired it — the same institution that had read his name on the front page of the Law Journal. On his twenty-fifth sober anniversary he spoke at the Minnesota center where he had begun; he returned home to a liver cancer diagnosis, surgery, and recovery. He describes what lawyer assistance programs have become since the alcoholism-only committees of the 1970s: mental health, gambling, debt, professional social workers, peer counselors who have been where the caller is, all confidential under Judiciary Law § 499. His message to the audience is not to wait for the lawyer in trouble to come forward, because denial will not let him; bring him in, and the program will do the rest.

What to Know Now

The system Reing passed through has been restructured, mostly in the direction he would have wished. New York's uniform disciplinary rules, in effect since October 2016, codified the path he traveled: automatic disbarment on a felony conviction under Judiciary Law § 90(4), and reinstatement under 22 NYCRR § 1240.16 no sooner than seven years later, on proof of compliance with the order, payment of restitution to the Lawyers' Fund for Client Protection, passage of the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination, and present character and fitness — the very showing his 1998 motion stumbled on and then made. The same rules added what did not exist for him in 1985: a diversion program under § 1240.11 allowing a lawyer whose misconduct stems from substance abuse or mental illness to be referred to a lawyer assistance program with the disciplinary proceeding stayed and potentially dismissed on completion. The Lawyers' Fund now reimburses up to $400,000 per client and continues to report that addiction and gambling underlie a large share of the thefts it covers. The profession has caught up to the data: the 2016 ABA and Hazelden Betty Ford study found problematic drinking among one in five lawyers, New York removed the mental-health question from its bar application in 2020, and lawyer well-being has become a standing concern of firms and law schools. The Thursday lawyers' meeting at the City Bar still convenes, and in 2026 the City Bar named as director of its Lawyer Assistance Program Meredith Heller, a lawyer in long-term recovery who chaired the committee after Reing — evidence that the model of lawyers helping lawyers he describes has become the profession's own. Reing continues to practice tax law in New York with his son.