- Michael Avenatti, already serving 5 years, wants to plead guilty to his last open criminal case.
- In court papers filed in Southern California on Sunday, he said he wants to 'be accountable.'
- Avenatti is charged in that federal case with embezzling nearly $10 million from clients.
Incarcerated celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti is saying "Basta!" to yet another criminal trial — and wants to finish out his federal prison time in a low-security "camp" in Oregon that once housed Suge Knight.
In papers he filed on Sunday in Southern California, Avenatti said he wants to plead guilty to the third and last of his open criminal cases, this one alleging he cheated clients out of nearly $10 million.
Since he can't reach an agreement with federal prosecutors, he'd be pleading "open," he wrote, meaning without a set agreement on prison time in place — essentially throwing himself blind on the mercy of the court.
The client-embezzlement case had been set for a July retrial after a mistrial last year; a date for Avenatti to plead guilty in the case has not been set.
"Mr. Avenatti wishes to plea in order to be accountable, accept responsibility; avoid his former clients being further burdened; save the Court and the government significant resources; and save his family further embarrassment," he wrote in Sunday's filing.
Avenatti is currently at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution at the mouth of Los Angeles Harbor, where he is serving a 5-year term on two previous convictions, one for cheating client Stormy Daniels out of nearly $300,000 in book deal proceeds and the other for trying to extort $25 million from Nike.
In a separate court filing in federal court in Manhattan, Avenatti, who once had law offices in Los Angeles, asks to be moved from the low-security Terminal Island to the federal prison camp in Sheridan, Oregon.
The filing clarifies that Avenatti — a one-time presidential hopeful who used the hashtag #basta, Italian for "enough," when tweeting about Donald Trump — wants to go to Sheridan's low-security satellite camp.
In 2001, Marion "Suge" Knight, founder of Death Row Records, finished out a 5-year sentence at Sheridan for violating probation by getting into a fight in 1996 at a Las Vegas hotel. Hours after the fight, Tupac Shakur was killed in a still-unsolved drive-by shooting as he rode in Knight's car.