SUGAR BEAR, ESQ.

Another crime saga from deep in the piney woods of East Texas. John Lomax hit a grand slam homer when he wrote, “And now it looks like this Sugar Bear is going to be hibernating for a while.”

RAVEN “SUGAR BEAR” GIACONE: LUFKIN WOMAN BUSTED FOR POSING AS LAWYER; MET “CLIENT” AT MCDONALD’S
By John Nova Lomax

Houston Press Hair Balls
August 26, 2011

It all started earlier this summer when a Lufkin woman met 30-year-old Kimberly Raven Giacone at a local McDonald's. The woman had a problem. Her son was in prison and she wanted to get him transferred to Rusk State Hospital, a correctional mental health facility.

According to police, Giacone told her she could help. She said she was a lawyer. For the Value Menu price of $36, she would get going on the transfer to Rusk.

A little later Giacone told the woman that she had typed up some paperwork and asked the woman if they could review a letter she would send. Giacone went to the woman's house and showed her the letter, which read that the jailed son would be transferred to Rusk. It sported a letterhead reading "Giacone Law" above the address of a finance company in downtown Lufkin. According to the affidavit, the letter was signed "Raven Giacone, Attorney at Law." How her heart must have swelled in writing those auspicious if bogus words...

After showing the woman the letter, Giacone asked for another $300 to complete the process, the affidavit states. The woman gave her the money.

Later, after talking with a real lawyer in Nacogdoches, the woman found out that Raven Giacone was not a lawyer. In fact, she is a twice-convicted thief known on the streets and in jail as "Sugar Bear."

Well, give her credit for one thing: At least she didn't sign that fake letter to TDC as "Sugar Bear, Esq."

The duped woman called Giacone and told her the jig was up, police say, and Giacone dropped her act immediately. She reportedly hustled over to the woman's house and returned the $336 and begged her not to call police. (She had good reason to worry -- she was on probation.) Obviously, the woman did call the cops, and now Sugar Bear is facing a third-degree felony charge of falsely holding oneself as an attorney.

She allegedly admitted to a Lufkin detective that she typed the fake letter and said that she had been looking for office space for a paralegal business she wanted to start. Of course, she's not a paralegal either, but told the cop that she really wanted to be one.

Oddly, that story failed to dissuade the cop from arresting her.

And now it looks like this Sugar Bear is going to be hibernating for a while.