Holland & Knight hires DOJ Crypto-Fraud Expert
Camelia Lopez Shoemaker, who led numerous white-collar investigations for the federal government, joins the Dallas office of Holland & Knight.
Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Bruce Tomaso spent more than 30 years as a writer and editor at The Dallas Morning News. When asked what positions he held there, he usually says it’s easier to list those he didn’t.
As enterprise editor on The News’s breaking news desk in the summer of 2016, he played a key role in covering the downtown shooting spree that left five police officers dead. For its coverage, The News was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting.
He spent most of 1997 in Denver covering the federal criminal trials of Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Four years later, he covered McVeigh’s execution.
His first major reporting assignment for The Texas Lawbook was a retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the $119.6 million verdict for 10 young men who’d been molested as children by Rudy Kos, a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. The stories earned Bruce and his Lawbook editor, Allen Pusey, the Dallas Bar Association’s 2018 Stephen Philbin Award for Feature Writing.
In 2019, he covered the seven-week medical fraud trial of nine physicians, healthcare executives and others associated with Forest Park Medical Center, a now-defunct Dallas surgical hospital.
He’s a member of the Alumni Hall of Fame at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He and his wife, Dallas attorney Patricia A. Nolan, have one grown son, who is smarter than either of them.
He will drop everything, including preposterous sums of money, to see Lady Gaga, Notre Dame football, or the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.
You can reach Bruce at bruce.tomaso@texaslawbook.net.
Camelia Lopez Shoemaker, who led numerous white-collar investigations for the federal government, joins the Dallas office of Holland & Knight.
Healthcare fraud prosecutions, many stemming from the pandemic, stood out among the biggest white-collar cases in Texas last year.

Jury duty is no piece of cake. But at least it comes with one in the court of U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of the Eastern District of Texas.
An avid baker, Judge Mazzant likes to treat juries in his Sherman court to a homemade coffee cake. He shares with The Texas Lawbook his recipe, and his thoughts behind the kindly gesture.
Stephen Gilstrap, a six-year veteran of the U.S. attorney’s office, joins roughly 2 dozen lawyers who have left since the start of the year.
The nomination of Nicholas Ganjei to the bench of the Southern District of Texas goes next to the full Senate, where swift approval is expected. Ganjei, currently the Southern District’s top federal prosecutor, is a former chief counsel to Sen. Ted Cruz.
Kaylee Ree Lunn pleaded guilty in July to wire fraud, admitting that she used bank customers’ financial data to apply for bogus loans under the government’s Paycheck Protection Program.
Jurors in the court of U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt found Alexandro Rovirosa guilty of conspiracy and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. A codefendant, Mario Avila, is a fugitive.
Stephanie Hockridge, a former local news anchor in Phoenix, was sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Fort Worth for her role in what prosecutors called a vast fraud based on phony applications for loans under the Covid-era Payroll Protection Program. Her husband, Nathan Reis, pleaded guilty in August for his role in the scam.
Barbara M.G. Lynn, the recently retired judge for the Northern District of Texas, has been appointed as mediator in an insurance dispute involving the Boy Scouts of America that the presiding judge in the matter called “the mother of all coverage cases.”
Rachael Jones, most recently deputy chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Texas, joins McKool Smith’s white-collar and complex commercial litigation team.
© Copyright 2026 The Texas Lawbook
The content on this website is protected under federal Copyright laws. Any use without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.