Murdaugh partner in financial crime ex-banker Laffitte to be sentenced in late July

A date has been set for the sentencing of Russell Laffitte, the former South Carolina banker who pleaded guilty to helping ex-lawyer, convicted killer and fraudster Alex Murdaugh steal millions.

Laffitte will be sentenced July 24, a Thursday, in federal court in Charleston, according to the federal court records database.

U.S. Judge Richard Gergel will preside.

Laffitte was found guilty of six counts of financial crimes by a federal jury in November 2022 after a multiweek trial and sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution and to forfeit $85,854 in illegal proceeds.

But he appealed his sentence and conviction and won a new trial last year after serving 13 months in a federal prison in Florida.

Federal prosecutors promptly said they would put Laffitte on trial again. That trial was supposed to begin in May.

But in April Laffitte agreed to plead guilty to federal bank fraud charges a jury had found him guilty of in 2022.

Under the plea deal made public between Laffitte’s lawyers and federal prosecutors, Laffitte is slated to get five years, or 60 months, instead of the seven years that Gergel originally sentenced Laffitte to in August 2023.

Laffitte would get credit for the 13 months he has already served.

Laffitte has also agreed to pay $3.5 million “in criminal restitution” under his April 14 plea agreement.

In sentencing Laffitte in August 2023, Gergel emphasized how Laffitte had been a willing participant in “an elaborate criminal scheme in which there wasn’t just bad judgment, there was complicity, for which he was richly compensated.”

And the people Laffitte and Murdaugh stole from, Gergel noted, had been “extremely vulnerable people. Their family members were victims of horrible, tragic events in their lives; death, people widowed, lost their parents. It was horrible to vulnerable people. And he treated them like they were players on a chessboard, moving that money around. He was making money, Murdaugh was making money.”

State charges for similar financial crimes are pending against Laffitte, but no court dates have been scheduled.

This story was originally published July 8, 2025 at 12:47 PM.