The Beverly Hills Attorney Named in a Million Southern California RICO Lawsuit

A federal civil RICO complaint filed in January 2026 accuses Beverly Hills attorney D. Edward Hays of submitting two false sworn declarations in a bankruptcy case, documents the complaint says were designed to strip a company founder of control over his own legal claims.

Hays practices at Marshack Hays LLP, located at 9454 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. He signed the declarations on April 8 and April 29, 2024, filing them in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of California. Both declarations said the same thing: Tyler Brandon Davis was the managing member of TopDevz, LLC.

He wasn’t. That’s the core allegation.

TopDevz’s operating agreement named a sole manager with exclusive authority over the company. Davis held a 49% minority membership stake. According to the 185-page RICO complaint, he’d never held the managing member role at any point in the company’s history. The complaint calls both declarations fabrications submitted under penalty of perjury to alter the factual record of a federal proceeding.

The case, styled Case 3:26-cv-00080-GPC-BJW, names fifteen defendants and spans eight years of alleged criminal conduct targeting TopDevz, a La Jolla software staffing firm that placed contract developers with clients that included HBO and Procore Technologies.

Scott Carpenter, a Newport Beach attorney, is accused of filing fraudulent court pleadings and seizing TopDevz’s Wells Fargo bank account using forged documents. “This was a coordinated, multi-year effort to take everything the company had built,” the complaint said of the broader scheme, characterizing it as an enterprise that ran through state courts, arbitration panels, and federal litigation simultaneously.

Davis, the minority member, is named in the complaint as the enterprise’s principal organizer. Josh Lintz, who served as the company’s COO, allegedly ran an eight-day data extraction operation starting in January 2022 that transferred 2.5 million contractor records to a competing company. Lintz incorporated that competing company 33 days after the extraction ended.

By February 2024, the enterprise had been running for roughly six years. The founder of TopDevz still had legal claims and still had standing to pursue them. On February 26, 2024, that founder filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in San Diego.

Chapter 11 is reorganization bankruptcy. The debtor stays in control, can pursue claims that belong to the estate, and directs the proceeding. Chapter 7 is the opposite: a court-appointed trustee takes over, assets get liquidated, and the debtor’s decision-making authority disappears entirely.

The complaint says Hays had joined the enterprise sometime between August and December 2023, months before the bankruptcy petition landed. When it did, he was already positioned to act.

Hays filed motions to convert the Chapter 11 case to Chapter 7. The complaint says those motions rested on the false declarations he’d already entered into the record. Tyler Brandon Davis wasn’t the managing member. But the declarations said he was, and that characterization mattered for how the bankruptcy court understood the debtor’s capacity and the estate’s management history.

The conversion was granted. A trustee was appointed. Control over the estate’s claims passed out of the founder’s hands.

That’s the mechanism the complaint describes: don’t destroy the claims outright, just transfer authority over them to a neutral trustee who won’t pursue litigation that’s inconvenient for the defendants. It’s quieter. It’s harder to see.

The RICO complaint was filed in 2026. It covers conduct the plaintiffs allege dates back to 2022 and, in some respects, to conduct organized as early as 2023 inside what the filing characterizes as a coordinated criminal enterprise. Folsom, where Davis is based, is roughly 500 miles from La Jolla, where TopDevz operated. The alleged scheme connected both locations through federal court filings, digital data transfers, and, according to the complaint, a Beverly Hills law office.

Marshack Hays LLP has not filed a public response to the complaint as of the time of publication. The case remains active in the Southern District of California.