Crooklyn Machine resorts to forgery to maintain control over Dem party

 

THE CITY

The Brooklyn Democratic Party submitted paperwork with at least two forged signatures to the city Board of Elections as part of a bid to knock fellow Democrats off June primary ballots, a grassroots political organization alleges.

On Thursday, Rep Your Block, a volunteer organization, lodged a complaint with the board, citing sworn affidavits from two registered Democrats in Brownsville and East New York who said the signatures on ballot challenges to candidates filed in their names weren’t theirs.

The “filing of these objections with your agency amounts to the criminal act of filing a false instrument,” the complaint to the BOE states. “These objections and any resulting specifications should be dismissed by your agency.”

Rep Your Block, which aims to get more residents to participate in the borough’s Democratic party, also communicated to THE CITY concerns about the validity of at least a half dozen other signatures submitted on formal objections to candidates’ ballot petitions filed with the board.

They point to a similarity in the handwriting among the signatures, obvious discrepancies between the submitted signatures and voter signatures already on file at the Board of Election, and even misspellings of some of the names.

“We just want to be a part of our own political party. It shouldn’t be that hard. And to have to go to a criminal end to block us is just shocking,” said Maggie Moore, campaign director for Rep Your Block. “It’s really, really unfortunate and disappointing.”

The flagged challenges were among dozens linked to the Brooklyn Democratic Party targeting the ballot petitions of nearly 200 candidates who are seeking party positions. 

 THE CITY

Reon Sealey, 21, writes his name in a hasty, hard-to-read scribble. So on Friday, when reporters from THE CITY visited his Brownsville, Brooklyn, apartment, he was surprised to see a document with a clear cursive signature purporting to be his — and misspelling his last name, without the second “e.”

The document is an official filing submitted to the city Board of Elections, aimed at knocking a Democratic candidate running for a low-level party position off the June primary ballot.

“This is not my signature, 100% it’s not,” said the young man, wearing a hoodie on a windy day outside his apartment building.

His upstairs neighbor, Osasogie Airhiavbere, told THE CITY she too didn’t sign that form, which showed a tidy version of her signature right beside Sealey’s.

“It’s definitely fraud, and it’s not good,” said Airhiavbere, a 38-year-old administrative staffer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The neighbors join two other registered voters in Brownsville and East New York who swore in affidavits last week that their signatures were forged on similar election-related documents, THE CITY previously reported.

All four of the residents’ contested signatures appear on ballot objection forms that list a top attorney for the Brooklyn Democratic Party as the point of contact.

The two affidavits alleging fraud formed the basis of an official complaint filed with the New York City Board of Elections last week by Rep Your Block, a volunteer organization that helps Brooklyn residents run for county committee seats.

Predatory slumlord swindled city housing agencies for 8 years

QNS 

A Far Rockaway man was charged for defrauding government rental assistance programs by renting out dilapidated apartments he did not own to families in need, prosecutors announced Tuesday.

Paul Fishbein, 47, faces wire and mail fraud charges for allegedly falsely claiming to be the owner and landlord of 20 rental properties, mostly in the Bronx, while collecting government subsidies and evicting tenants over the course of eight years, according to the Southern District of New York.

“As alleged, Paul Fishbein not only took advantage of New Yorkers in need, he also defrauded city and federal government programs designed to help these very people,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said. “Fishbein allegedly lied about ownership of residential properties, fraudulently took rent subsidies and other benefits from those government housing programs, and often evicted tenants without cause from housing that was substandard in any event. Now Paul Fishbein is in custody and facing serious federal charges for his alleged fraud and exploitation.”

According to a complaint unsealed in Manhattan federal court Tuesday, Fishbein allegedly lied about owning the properties beginning in 2013 based on forged deeds. He then allegedly rented the properties to homeless and low- to moderate-income families through rental assistance programs operated by three city agencies — NYCHA, the Human Resources Administration and Housing Preservation & Development — and collected money, including federal funds, as the purported owner and landlord of the properties.

The complaint estimates Fishbein defrauded the three city agencies out of about $1.5 million, including more than $270,000 in federal funds. In addition to taking payments, Fishbein allegedly faked using a broker to rent out the properties and kept certain broker’s fees for himself that the HRA issued as payment.

Fishbein is also accused of faking financial eligibility for Medicaid since at least 2014, the complaint says. He allegedly told the HRA he worked at a company where his total income was about $150 a week — or $600 a month — when he in actuality made hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Prosecutors allege Fishbein received nearly $50,000 in Medicaid benefits to which he was not entitled to as part of his scheme.

Vallone petition forensic report is getting really interesting

Forgery - Garden Variety and the Real Deal - Part 3 by Paul Graziano on Scribd

Details released about Vallone petitions

Forgery - Garden Variety and the Real Deal - Part 1 by Paul Graziano on Scribd

WOW, and this is only part 1!

Good times.

Dirtbag gets jail for house theft

From the Daily News:

A Queens ex-con pleaded guilty on Friday to stealing an elderly woman's house out from under her.

Darrell Beatty, 51, pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a forged instrument for using a phony deed to swipe Jennifer Merin's Laurelton house out from under her.

As a result of the plea deal, he'll get even more free housing — it calls for him to get a year in jail.

Merin, 72, said that's not enough time.

"I'm glad he's going to jail. He deserves to go to jail but I think that the sentence was too brief," she told the Daily News after Beatty's plea. "He lived in my house for longer than he will be in jail and he'll be out on the streets again."

NYPD cop charged with stealing house

From NBC:

A 45-year-old NYPD officer has been indicted on multiple felony counts, including grand larceny, for allegedly forging a deed to a home in Brooklyn and stealing the property from the rightful owner.

Blanche O'Neal, 45, assigned to the 83rd precinct, allegedly submitted a deed in July 2012 indicating she had bought a property on Vernon Avenue for $10,000. The deed said she purchased the property from Colie Gallman, Jr., the sole heir of Lillian Hudson, who had owned the property before she died.

About three years later, O'Neal called authorities to report someone had transferred her property to a corporate entity without her permission and alleged she was the victim of deed fraud. O'Neal told detectives she had won a $5,000,000 lawsuits against the estate and was awarded the home as part of a settlement from the person she claimed was the sole heir, Colie Gallman.

As part of their investigation into O'Neal's allegation, detectives began looking into the deed transfers on the property going back to the ownership of Lillian Hudson. They determined the deed filed by O'Neal was fraudulent, according to prosecutors.

Liu campaign falsified resident's signature on mailer

From the Queens Chronicle:

A Douglaston resident claims his name, address and a false signature that is not his were wrongly included in a letter supporting John Liu sent out by the candidate's campaign team last week.

Liu is running a primary race to unseat state Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside) in the 11th District in northern and northeastern Queens. Avella is a maverick member of the Independent Democratic Conference and Liu a former city councilman and comptroller supported by the party establishment.

Last week some residents in the district received "An Open Letter to Our Neighbors in Little Neck and Douglaston" promoting Liu's candidacy and touting his support for middle-class families. The letter says it was paid for by the John Liu Senate Election Committee and is signed by former Rep. Gary Ackerman, Rep. Grace Meng (D-Flushing), Borough President Melinda Katz and City Councilman Paul Vallone (D-Bayside) — as well as nine area residents.

But one of the residents listed on the letter, Joshua Block, says the signature is not his and that he knew nothing of the missive until he opened it last Thursday.

"I wasn't involved in drafting it. I knew nothing about it. I didn't sign it," Block said in an email. "Nobody asked me to be a part of it, and I'm no way committed to voting for Liu. I was absolutely shocked to see my name at the bottom."

Variations of the letter were sent all over the district. There may be other victims.

Deed fraud becoming more common

From the NY Times:

They wandered into New York City government offices this week, indignant at how the cogs of bureaucracy had slowed their grand plans of thievery.

Lasharan Amos, 42, arrived on Tuesday at the New York City sheriff’s office in Queens, wondering why the city was taking so long to give her ownership of a home that the authorities said in fact belonged to her mother.

Two days later, Jethro Chappelle Jr., a former convict who uses a wheelchair because of a gunshot wound, did the same. He took an elevator to the 13th-floor City Register’s office in Manhattan, demanding to know why the city had not yet recorded two deeds he had filed for abandoned properties in Harlem.

Ms. Amos and Mr. Chappelle were promptly arrested and charged with various counts of grand larceny, perjury and offering false statements to public officials. Their arrests were the first since June, when the Department of Finance, in coordination with the city sheriff’s office, began flagging irregularities in a deed transfer system that has long gone unguarded.

Working with corrupt notaries public, or sometimes simply by searching public records online, those inclined to have long been able to forge property deeds, claiming, for instance, to have taken ownership of a family member’s home or a building that had long been neglected. As long as the documents were properly formatted, officials had little choice but to record the deed transfer.

When there were gaps in required information or other problems with the forms, the documents were just returned to the filing parties with instructions about how to fix the flaws. Tricking the system was so easy that people like Mr. Chappelle, 51, who had been arrested on an attempted murder charge in 2003, and convicted of assault a year later, and Ms. Amos apparently were confident enough to announce themselves to city agencies.

Queens' own artistical genius

From the NY Times:

Pei-Shen Qian’s neighbors on 95th Street in Woodhaven, Queens, knew he scratched out a living as an artist: he often dried his paintings in the sun, propping them up on the weathered white siding of his modest house.

They were less clear on why he kept his windows covered, or why every so often a man in an expensive car would come to the house carrying paintings to, not from, a painter.

“He would bring a painting in and show it to him, for him to work on or fix up something,” Edwin Gardiner, 68, who lives across the street, said before pausing and adding, “I don’t know what he did with it.”

Parts of the mystery became clearer on Friday as neighbors learned that Mr. Qian, a quiet 73-year-old immigrant from China in a paint-flecked smock, is suspected of having fooled the art world by creating dozens of works that were modeled after America’s Modernist masters and were later sold as their handiwork for more than $80 million.

Mr. Qian, who came here more than four decades ago and struggled to sell his own works in this country, earned just a few thousand dollars for each of his imitations. New York was a center of the art world, but Mr. Qian told friends that he had been disheartened by the difficulties he encountered finding a foothold as an artist.

“He was kind of frustrated because of the language problem, the connection problem,” said Zhang Hongtu, a friend and acclaimed Chinese artist who lives in New York. “He was not that happy.”

Mr. Qian’s low profile as a painter has evaporated; federal authorities have decided that he was the artist whose fakes are at the heart of one of the bolder art frauds in recent memory.

A revised federal indictment handed up this week charged Glafira Rosales, one of the dealers accused of having peddled his works, with money laundering and tax evasion in connection with the sales.

The indictment does not name Mr. Qian, who could not be reached for comment on Friday, but people with knowledge of the case confirmed that he was the man referred to only elliptically in the charges as the “Painter.” Neighbors say agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched his home this week.

Lopez' tweeding pal pleads guilty

From the Daily News:

The right-hand woman of disgraced Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez pleaded guilty Thursday to a criminal charge of lying to federal investigators.

But Lopez wasn't in Manhattan federal court to see Christiana Fisher take a fall. 
Instead, Lopez's gal pal, Angela Battaglia, was in the courtroom when a black-clad Fisher admitted fibbing to the feds about the bloated $607,024 salary she was being paid to run the Lopez-founded non-profit, Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Center Council.

"I was aware of forged documents and tax filings that inaccurately stated that the board of directors of the Ridgewood-Bushwick Senior Citizens Council had approved increases to my salary," she said. "I knew it was improper."

Fisher, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of filing false information in response to a subpoena from the Manhattan U.S. attorney, also agreed to forfeit $170,659 in salary she got by cooking the books.

It was the only charge against Fisher, who also was Lopez's campaign manager. She faced a maximum sentence of six months in jail.

Cops won't take his report

From the NY Post:

A Queens man who claims his signature was forged on an auto-financing agreement that grossly inflated his agreed-upon monthly payments says the NYPD has repeatedly refused to take a complaint about the alleged crimes.

"Each time I brought it to them, they said, ‘No,’" said Andrew Burrowes, 33, about the four times he has tried to file criminal complaints in connection with his SUV purchase from Auto Palace in Woodside.

“They said that didn’t constitute a police report,” said Burrowes, a school-bus driver. Adding to Burrowes’ frustration is that the auto lender, Ally Financial, has asked him to provide a police report to help resolve the situation -- in which he said a forged document jacked up his loan amount for a 2004 Volvo.

The allegedly false loan papers said he agreed to buy the vehicle for $26,645 -- not the $13,900 to which he said he’d agreed.

Gangs selling fake IDs to illegals

From the Times Ledger:

Police arrested 18 people, many who have suspected ties to the international street gang M18, on charges of running a fake identification mill for immigrants in Jackson Heights, the Queens district attorney’s office said.

Those who were taken into custody, 13 of whom are Queens residents, included seven men believed to be M18 members who allegedly gave forged documents to the police when officers asked for their identification papers, three men who were allegedly caught exchanging a fake Social Security card and permanent resident card for cash, two suspected M18 members and document forgers, another man and a woman who allegedly had forged documents and four other alleged M18 members, the DA said.

The arrests were made as part of an investigation beginning in June 2010 by the NYPD’s Manhattan Gang Squad of an alleged M18-run forged document organization centered in Jackson Heights, the DA said.

State Assemblyman Francisco Moya (D-Jackson Heights) said Elmhurst, Corona and Jackson Heights have become an epicenter of gang recruitment of children and he applauded Brown’s work.

Queens does fraud well

From the Daily News:

Two Queens men were charged with defrauding banks of more than $10 million, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Manhattan federal prosecutors charged Christopher Cavounis, 30, and Jagdesh Cooma, 27, both of Fresh Meadows, with using shell companies and fake names to get loans and lines of credit.

During the scam, which lasted from 2009 to November 2010, the pair gave a bank employee a $135,000 bribe and threatened other bank employees with violence if they didn't get their money quickly, court papers charge.

From the NY Post:

Authorities say a man tried to illegally sell three Manhattan buildings that belong to somebody else — and got a $1.6 million down payment from a potential buyer.

Queens District Attorney Richard Brown says a criminal complaint names Kook Hee Nam, also known as David Nam. The charges include grand larceny, forgery and identity theft.

The buildings in question are on Seventh Avenue between 30th and 31st streets. Their owner says the defendant never had permission or authority to sell them.

The defendant allegedly produced a signed document while offering to sell all three buildings for a total of $6.5 million. The prosecutor says Nam accepted the down payment at his home in Queens.

Nam’s attorney did not immediately return a call for comment.

Shit tit worker in deep crap

From the Brooklyn Eagle:

A Brooklyn sewage treatment worker with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was arrested this week on a charge of submitting a forged letter purportedly from his DEP supervisor to the city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a Site Safety Manager’s license.

The letter falsely claimed the defendant had supervisory construction experience at DEP, according to the criminal complaint. The city’s Department of Investigation (DOI) opened an investigation after the Buildings Special Investigations Unit, a specialized unit that is supervised by DOI and includes staff from DOB, questioned the claims in the defendant’s letter. The office of New York County District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. is prosecuting the case.

Alvaro Mora, 44, of Woodside, Queens, has been charged with criminal possession of a forged instrument in the second degree, a class D felony, and offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree, a class E felony. Upon conviction, a class D felony is punishable by up to seven years in prison and a class E felony by up to four years in prison.

DOI Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn said, “Fabricating experience is a foolish way to seek a city-issued license, especially where the fraud, if successful, would have compromised the safety of New Yorkers. This arrest is a stern reminder that individuals who flout the rules and willfully disregard construction safety will be held accountable.”

In March 2009, DOB denied Mora’s application for a Site Safety Manager’s license because he did not submit the required letters from his supervisors describing his construction experience. In May 2009, Mora resubmitted his application and asked for reconsideration for the license.

Fake contractor in deep doo-doo

House of cards falls on builder
By DAVID SEIFMAN, NY Post

A Queens contractor filed 195 documents over eight years with the city Buildings Department using the name of an unwitting Las Vegas engineer to certify that his work had been done properly, The Post has learned.

Nor was this the first such deception by Tibor Csizmadia, 76. He was imprisoned for four months in 2000 for similarly misusing an architect's name.

The scope of the fraud is so great that 18 months into its audit, the department's only been able to examine 88 of the 195 job sites to ensure their safety.

Csizmadia vanished after confessing on July 22, 2008, according to a criminal complaint. An arrest warrant was issued last August. He could face 183 counts of forgery and falsifying business records.

A department staffer sensed something wrong in March 2008 after getting a routine application from engineer Hsu Lee, whose license had been inactive since January 2007.

Lee told authorities that he left New York in 2000 and had never heard of Csizmadia.