A bomb threat, a lawsuit and ‘Call Rafi’: Inside a nasty Phoenix lawyer feud

“I want to get some things off my chest right now.”

On the 13th episode of his “Call Gil Show” podcast, Gil Negrete was about to go nuclear.

To this point, everything about the podcast had been a warmup for the former personal injury lawyer. He’d spent the first episode explaining the suspension of his law license and how he went from slapping his face on billboards and buses to being unable to practice. With each subsequent episode, Negrete had loosened up, spilling secrets and gossip about the Valley’s community of personal injury attorneys.

And he’d picked the 13th episode to take down one of the biggest of them all. Negrete was going after billboard staple Brandon Rafi.

“Now the gloves come off,” Negrete said. “You got me, Brandon? The gloves are coming off now, my guy.”

At issue was a lawsuit filed by Rafi that accused Negrete of defamation and much more. It claimed Negrete was behind an anonymous gossip Instagram account that had damaged Rafi’s reputation. It asserted that Negrete had organized a home invasion at Rafi’s residence. And, most egregiously to Negrete, it accused him of calling in a fake bomb threat to Rafi’s office.

All of it, Negrete told listeners, is “bullshit.” He would fight the suit in court, of course, but that would take time. Until then, Negrete would use his podcast to make Rafi pay.

Over the next two episodes — titled “Negrete vs. Rafi” and “Negrete vs. Rafi II” — Negrete shared all the dirt he had on Rafi, one of the Valley’s most prominent personal injury attorneys. Negrete lambasted Rafi’s suit as frivolous, dissecting its shortcomings and unearthing what he said was exonerating evidence the suit ignored. He brought up a federal employment suit filed against Rafi’s firm, Rafi Law Group, by a former employee.

Negrete didn’t stop there. Rafi, he said, is a “punk ass bitch” with no trial experience whose firm has poor reviews on online review sites. He also accused Rafi of being sensitive about his well-to-do upbringing and "rubbing elbows" with GOP extremists Kari Lake and Abe Hamadeh.

Once, they had been friends, Negrete said, but no longer. Rafi may be “on top of the world” now — billboards on every corner; a catchy “Call Rafi Rafi” jingle on the radio — but he’d “decided to fuck with the wrong one.” That “one” is Negrete, a non-practicing lawyer with a string of ethical and legal sanctions on his record who recently wrapped up a 15-month suspension.

In a statement to Phoenix New Times, Raees Mohamed — the attorney representing Rafi Law Group in the case — said the firm "is determined on addressing Mr. Negrete’s non-stop harassment, defamation, and deliberate dissemination of false information." The statement did not address most of the 16 questions New Times sent to the firm.

Negrete, however, was eager to unpack their feud in an interview. Over 80 minutes, Negrete answered questions about his career indiscretions and recapped his falling out with Rafi, the highly visible attorney Negrete said he’d once thought of as a brother.

"Whatever you want to know,” Negrete said, “I’m going to tell you.”

Until recently, their feud simmered under the surface. Now it’s out in the open, and Negrete is doubling down.

From ‘brothers’ to enemies

Years before Rafi accused Negrete of making a bomb threat, their relationship had begun to sour.

Negrete said the two first met in 2014, just before Rafi opened Rafi Law Group. They bonded over a love of hip-hop and Phoenix, sitting together at Suns games and vacationing together in California. When Rafi Law Group’s business exploded, Rafi routinely referred cases to Negrete’s practice.

Then in 2022, Negrete said, Rafi cut him off. At issue was one client, representing what Negrete said was only $5,000 in business, who signed with Rafi’s firm before switching to Negrete’s later the same day. Through a subordinate, Rafi demanded Negrete send the client back to RLG. Negrete said he tried to persuade her, but she did not want Rafi’s firm to handle her case. After that, Negrete said, RLG stopped sending cases his way.

Negrete said he objected to how the younger lawyers at Rafi Law Group talked down to him. “I’m being scolded like I was a little kid,” said Negrete, who is 47. “And I’m not a little kid.” The statement from RLG's attorney did not address New Times' question about Rafi's relationship with Negrete before the lawsuit between them.

Over the next two years, Negrete said he and Rafi maintained a cordial relationship punctuated by periodic “tiffs.” Negrete hired lawyers away from RLG. Someone close to Negrete — one of many people he identifies as “Public Enemy No. 1,” a title for which there apparently is a multiway tie — gossipped to Rafi about him.

But the bomb threat allegation kicked the feud into a high gear.

The threat did happen. On Feb. 9 of this year, a bomb threat was made at the offices of Rafi Law Group at 24th Street and Highland Avenue. As a horde of police responded and poured into the building, someone was outside taking photos.

Those photos were shared on the Instagram account @LawyerFiles, an attorney gossip account with more than 62,000 followers that has since been set to private. The account claimed, erroneously, that police were raiding the firm and that RLG’s attorneys had been drinking. RLG wasn’t a new target. In September 2023, @LawyerFiles had authored a long post criticizing Rafi as inexperienced and bankrolled by his father.

Five days after the bomb threat, attorney Raeesabbas Mohamed filed a defamation suit on behalf of Rafi and RLG claiming the posts were defamatory “and specifically designed to inflict maximum reputational harm.” The complaint also claimed that whoever was behind the account was responsible for the bomb threat and “arranging (a) home invasion” at Rafi’s residence two weeks earlier, on Jan. 27. But without an identifiable defendant to serve, the complaint sat in the court system until late May.

That’s when Mohamed amended the suit to name Negrete as a defendant. It was Negrete behind the Instagram account, the suit now claimed, and Negrete who’d called in the bomb threat and organized a home invasion. Negrete was served with the suit June 18. A week later, he responded on his podcast.

“This is a public lawsuit that you filed against me, and you're saying that I called in a bomb threat to your office?” Negrete said on the podcast. “You punk ass bitch.”

On the podcast, Negrete said the suit has several deficiencies. The @LawyerFiles posts might have sounded like him — “It matches my opinion, for sure,” Negrete said — but it provides no documentation connecting Negrete to the account. The court has cleared Mohamed to subpoena Instagram to uncover its owner, but it’s unclear if any subpoena has been issued. The suit’s amended complaint makes no mention of it, and Mohamed did not answer a question from New Times about it.

Negrete said whatever that subpoena uncovers won’t be him. Negrete told New Times he does not own the account, though he knows who does. “Today, it’s not me,” he said. “Maybe it’ll be me tomorrow, though.” Asked to clarify, Negrete said — tongue-in-cheek, he noted — that he might buy the account to further antagonize Rafi.

Also absent from the complaint was any evidence connecting Negrete to the home invasion or bomb threat. The complaint cited no police incident report numbers for either, though there is evidence both happened.

Negrete claimed on his podcast that there were no calls for service to Rafi’s Arcadia home on or around the date of the supposed home invasion. Police records show otherwise. There were no calls for service from Rafi’s residence on the date the lawsuit gave for the home invasion, but there were three on Jan. 28. One was labeled as “burglary alarm,” and two subsequent calls were categorized as requests for an estimated time of arrival for police. It’s not clear if emergency personnel responded to Rafi’s residence, and no incident reports were filed regarding the event. Mohamed's statement did not address a New Times question about the event.

Speaking to New Times, Negrete said he requested the same police records New Times found but was told there weren’t any. “I didn’t mean to mislead,” Negrete said. “If there was a report, don’t take it as I didn’t tell anybody. I just was not told.” Still, as Negrete noted, nothing about those calls connects him to the incident.

As for the bomb threat, which was submitted through the chat function on RLG’s website, police records explicitly identify someone other than Negrete as the culprit. Rafi’s lawsuit claims that Negrete, “either acting alone or in concert with others, made a false report to the police by threatening to bomb RLG’s Phoenix office.” However, according to the police incident report, the firm — particularly Letisha Ulibarri, an RLG employee listed as the complainant on the report — knew that to be false not long after the threat was made.

The day of the threat, police traced its origin to a computer at Maryvale Preparatory Academy. Police informed Ulibarri of that information the same day, and she told police “she believed it was a student and that the threat was not likely credible,” according to the incident report. But Feb. 20, 11 days after the threat, Ulibarri contacted police to share the photos posted by @LawyerFiles, which she suggested might indicate the account owner’s involvement. That owner, she told police, could be Negrete. On Feb. 29, though, police determined the threat was a prank by a sixth-grader at Maryvale Prep. The student was suspended.

“Rafi Law Group was notified of the findings and did not wish to further pursue prosecution,” the incident report concluded.

Yet Rafi’s amended complaint — filed May 30, more than three months after police closed the bomb threat case — repeated the claim that Negrete was responsible, despite police the fact that police determined otherwise. The statement provided to New Times by Mohamed did not address questions about the bomb threat and the police report.

“This isn’t even immature,” Negrete ranted on his podcast. “This is criminal. This is a frivolous police report.” It also, he said, constituted a violation of Rule 11 of the Arizona Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires that “factual contentions have evidentiary support.”

“I'm going to the (state) bar,” Negrete said on the podcast. “I'm putting it on record, and I'm not going to rest until this man has some sort of punishment coming to him for the shit that he pulled on me and my family.”

In the meantime, Negrete went on the attack.

The feud deepens

If Rafi has a bad reputation, Negrete said, it’s earned.

The complaint in Rafi’s defamation suit took issue with claims made by @LawyerFiles that Rafi relied on his father for funding and that he is inexperienced. “RLG did not require any capital from this father, did not receive a ‘blank check’ or ‘free rent’ from his father,” the complaint read. “The gist of this allegation is to discredit Plaintiffs by making Rafi look incompetent and incapable of starting his own law firm.” The allegation that Rafi lacks experience “is also false,” the complaint added, “and portrays Rafi as an incompetent lawyer.”

However, Negrete says both claims in the @LawyerFiles post hold water.

Negrete said Rafi did get a leg up from his dad. While many of Negrete’s and @LawyerFiles’ claims about Rafi’s family backing are difficult to verify, one claim isn’t. Maricopa County Assessor’s Office records show that Rafi’s first law office located at 2235 N. 35th Ave. was owned by the lawyer’s father, Michael Rafi, prior to 2006. That year, Michael Rafi transferred ownership to 2235 Property LLC, which has owned it ever since. The LLC lists the elder Rafi as its statutory agent – on the affidavit of property value from the transaction, Michael Rafi signed as both buyer and seller.

Mohamed did not respond to a question about whether Rafi's father financially backed the firm.

The complaint does not directly refute the suggestion by @LawyerFiles — and parroted by Negrete on his podcast — that Rafi has never tried a case in court. “Rafi has personally handled thousands of cases himself,” the complaint said, though it did not say he handled them at trial. In his statement, Mohamed said Rafi "has been a practicing attorney since 2014 and has previously represented thousands of personal injury clients." He did not address whether Rafi has trial experience.

If Rafi is hunting for reputational harm, Negrete said, he should look no further than his firm’s own reviews. Roughly 240 of the more than 2,300 reviews of Rafi Law Group on Google rated the firm one star out of five. There are roughly three times as many five-star reviews as one-star reviews, though one five-star review insisted the firm “is really ZERO stars.” Additionally, there are three Rafi Law Group entries on Yelp, all of which have been “claimed” by the company, each with a rating of 2.3 or lower. On Glassdoor, where employees can rate their employers, the firm has a rating of 2.7 stars. In fact, one former employee is suing Rafi Law Group in federal court for retaliation.

In a suit filed in December 2023, former Rafi Law Group receptionist Ditzha Flores claimed the firm fired her for reporting that an RLG attorney grabbed her inner thigh at a Christmas party in 2022. In court documents, the company claimed Flores did not report the alleged assault to anyone when it occurred and also that she had a history of “lying, excessive drinking, poor performance, and lack of accountability.”

In February, RLG filed a counterclaim for abuse of process, denying that Flores was grabbed and “that any ‘unwelcome touching’ occurred.” In a letter to Flores’ attorney — which the attorney then attached as an exhibit to buttress her retaliation complaint — a lawyer representing RLG threatened to file a $250,000 suit against her “for libel, slander, harassment, loss of business, damage of image, and damage of goodwill.”

While Mohamed's statement did not address the litigation with Flores, it did say "Arizonans choose Rafi Law Group more than any other law firm because of their results and excellent customer service. Over 40% of clients CALL RAFI because of positive word-of-mouth recommendations from former clients and their friends and family."

Negrete addressed Flores' lawsuit on his podcast, though he didn't name her. He also didn’t disclose on the podcast that Flores has worked for him since leaving RLG, first at his now-defunct AZ Hometown Law Firm and currently as a legal assistant for Valley Injury Lawyers, a worker’s compensation firm Negrete partly owns.

Speaking to New Times, Negrete said he omitted Flores’ name from his podcast “out of respect for her,” and that no connection should be drawn between her current employer and her lawsuit against her former one. “The fact that she has a lawsuit against Brandon, it’s not one and the same that she’s an employee of Valley Injury Lawyers,” Negrete said.

But if Rafi wants to impugn Negrete’s credibility, the connection creates an opening. With Negrete, there are many others.

More bulletproof?

Near the end of his second Rafi-centric podcast episode, Negrete issued a bold challenge.

“You could drum up all my skeletons, my guy,” Negrete said, addressing Rafi. “I’m more bulletproof than you.”

At least one person is determined to test that theory. In April, an anonymous individual purchased the domain name WhoIsGilNegrete.com. The site went live sometime between then and July, seemingly dedicated to Negrete’s destruction.

With cartoons and crude Photoshopped images of Negrete behind bars — as well as his actual mugshot from a 2011 arrest — the site said it aimed to inform the public about Negrete’s “criminal activities and unethical conduct.” It gave brief overviews of several state bar complaints and one criminal conviction against Negrete. All of it appears accurate, if less than thoroughly detailed. (Notably, while the state bar has come down on Negrete several times, it has no records of discipline against Rafi.)

Negrete’s criminal conviction stemmed from that 2011 arrest. That year, Negrete was charged with money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering, two class 3 felonies that related to several cashier’s checks issued to pay a client’s $75,000 bail. Negrete pleaded down to facilitation to commit money laundering, a class 1 misdemeanor, and was sentenced to probation. In 2021, a complaint was filed to alert the state bar of Negrete’s conviction. For not following his duty to self-report the offense, the bar issued Negrete an “admonition” and fined him $600.

Speaking to New Times, Negrete maintained he did nothing wrong and said he accepted a plea deal to avoid a trial that could have resulted in a felony conviction and disbarment. He said he didn’t report the conviction to the bar because an ethics attorney said he didn’t have to, and while he thinks he knows who filed the bar complaint, he doesn’t believe Rafi had anything to do with it.

Negrete’s more recent state bar run-ins have brought stiffer punishments. On Feb. 9, 2023, the bar suspended Negrete’s license for a year and fined him $1,200 after he falsified emails submitted to the bar to cover up his firm’s failure to send a required document to pay a medical lien. The bar credited Negrete for taking responsibility for forging the emails, though he said on his podcast that he did so to cover an employee’s oversight.

While suspended, Negrete sold his practice AZ Hometown Law Firm to the Los Angeles-based firm Sweet James, but he again landed in hot water with the bar. On April 15 of this year, Negrete was again fined $1,200 and his suspension was extended for three months in part because he failed to properly inform his clients about the sale of his firm, transferring their files to Sweet James without obtaining their consent.

The same bar investigation found that Negrete’s firm submitted a falsified and backdated Notice of Claim — again, Negrete said, to cover up an earlier oversight — to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office in a 2021 personal injury case. Earlier this year, Negrete’s former client in the case filed a civil suit over the same issue, including a sworn declaration from a process server who claimed Negrete personally asked him to deliver the falsified document.

Negrete claimed in both the lawsuit and to the bar that one of the firm’s paralegals — Jason Keller, a former attorney who served prison time for smuggling heroin into jail — had actually committed the offense. The bar said Negrete was guilty only of insufficient supervision. Speaking to New Times, Negrete said computer metadata and phone and email records show he was not involved in the scheme.

Three days after extending Negrete’s suspension, the bar dismissed a complaint that Negrete had “collected an unreasonable fee from your client’s medical payments insurance coverage” after Negrete refunded the fee. Still, the bar’s letter to Negrete noted that the “dismissal decision does not mean we decided you did not violate the Rules of Professional Conduct.”

Much of Negrete’s 80-minute conversation with New Times concerned those judgments. He noted that all of them, including the information featured on WhoIsGilNegrete.com, are public record.

“I’m very transparent. I’ve never hid behind any of these things,” Negrete said. “I’ve only grown from them.”

As for WhoIsGilNegrete.com, Negrete said he wasn’t aware of the site until New Times brought it to his attention. He suspects Rafi is behind it, even if there’s little evidence to prove it. New Times also asked RLG about the website, but the statement Mohamed provided did not address that question.

New Times emailed questions to both Rafi and Negrete, including about the site, on July 3. By July 8, WhoIsGilNegrete.com had been placed in “maintenance mode.”

Far from over

In the days since he posted his two Rafi takedown podcast episodes, Negrete has hardly run from the feud.

He’s hyped the beef on the show’s Instagram page, including the Rafi v. Negrete civil case number — CV2024-003021 — in his bio. He released another podcast episode July 1, striking a calmer but no less tenacious tone.

“I’m going to aggressively defend,” Negrete said on the episode. “Full-court press, video depositions, everything. I told you, Brandon, if you were going to file a lawsuit against me, if you were going to bring Rafi Law Group into the lawsuit, then I’m going to bring out and flush out everything.”

In his statement, Mohamed said RLG is holding its ground. "The purpose of this lawsuit," the statement said, "is to once and for all put an end to Mr. Negrete’s baseless claims."

The statement added: "For years, Gil Negrete has used 'anonymous sources' to regularly and consistently defame Mr. Rafi, Mr. Rafi’s family members, Rafi Law Group employees, and Rafi Law Group, with no regard for how his unprofessional behavior will impact others. Multiple attempts were made directly to Mr. Negrete from Mr. Rafi and other members of Rafi Law Group asking him to cease this unprofessional behavior; these went unanswered leaving Mr. Rafi no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit."

On July 8, Negrete’s attorney, Geoff Sturr, filed an answer to Rafi’s complaint. It denied Rafi’s allegations that Negrete made the bomb threat, engineered the home invasion and is @LawyerFiles. It said Rafi’s complaint “fails to state a claim upon which relief may be granted” and asked that the suit be dismissed with prejudice.

As for submitting a bar complaint against Rafi or Mohamed, Negrete is less bellicose now than he was in late June. On his podcast, Negrete said he’s undecided about doing so, a position he reiterated to New Times. “I’m not about trying to bring down other lawyers,” Negrete said during his July 1 episode.

Rafi might be the exception. During an earlier podcast episode, Negrete compared the feud to the viral war of words between rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Rafi had “walked into the lion’s den,” Negrete said. “This is real lawyer beef. Shutting him down.” Speaking to New Times on July 3, Negrete was no less determined to nail Rafi to the wall.

“I feel like this is going to be his undoing,” Negrete said.

Negrete’s suspension ended July 10, meaning he can apply to have his law license reinstated. He plans to do so at some point, he said, but he’s not in a hurry. While suspended, he’s poured his time into his marketing firm, which does work for Valley Injury Lawyers as well as Lerner and Rowe, the Valley’s other omnipresent personal injury firm. Kevin Rowe of that firm is a part owner of Valley Injury Lawyers.

But whether he rejoins the profession or not, Negrete certainly is the talk of it. His feud with Rafi has created a buzz among Phoenix’s personal injury attorneys, whose faces and catchphrases many Valley residents know by heart.

But “those are just the billboard lawyers,” Negrete said, using a label he once would have self-applied.

“Most of the other lawyers don’t really give a shit.”