15 Are Charged With Defrauding Banks and Other Lenders of $20 Million

F.B.I. Press release

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and George Venizelos, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and Carl E. DuBois, the Sheriff of Orange County, today announced the unsealing of an Indictment (the “Indictment”) charging 15 defendants, including 14 defendants with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud in connection with mortgages and other loans secured by properties in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Monroe in Orange County, New York. The defendants include several related members of a family, the Rubins, as well as a real estate attorney and a real estate appraiser.

NY Times     Many of the defendants were on Medicaid and were receiving food stamps. One couple even claimed they were homeless.

Yet, according to the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, they secured 25 mortgage loans totaling $20 million for residential properties in Brooklyn, Harlem and Monroe, N.Y., by vastly overstating their income, net worth and the amounts in their bank accounts. A majority of the loans, the authorities said, went into default and were never repaid.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, on Thursday charged 15 men and women, 12 of them members of an extended family, with defrauding banks and other lending institutions out of the $20 million over a period of 10 years by lying about their assets and debts. Among banks said to have been defrauded were Bank of America and Credit Suisse First Boston.

“They played the part of prince or pauper, depending on what scam was being perpetrated,” Mr. Bharara said at a news conference at the federal courthouse here. “People claimed to be millionaires when it suited them and claimed to be homeless when it suited them better.”[...]

A central figure in the scheme, the indictment said, was Irving Rubin, 58, of Brooklyn, who, it said, considered himself a real estate developer. Also indicted were his wife, Desiree, 57; his sons Yehuda, 29, of Monroe, and Joel, 33, of Brooklyn; and his brothers Abraham, 51, Jacob, 41, and Samuel, 59, all of Brooklyn. [...]

One of the $1 million bails was for Abraham Rubin, who the judge noted had served a four-month sentence for trying to bribe a “victim witness” with $500,000 in an unrelated investigation — the case against Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed therapist in Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidic community. Mr. Weberman was found guilty of sexually abusing a young client starting when she was 12. [...]

Fraud in government programs in New York is not excusable but it is not unusual see the following

DNA Information

 An internationally known pianist hid records of his $1 million Hamptons home to swindle the federal government out of thousands of dollars in housing subsidies to pay for a TriBeCa apartment, DNAinfo has learned.

Antonio Fermin, who has performed at Carnegie Hall and worked as a piano teacher, was arrested and pleaded guilty last Thurs., April 5, to illegally receiving $17,815 in Section 8 housing funds from July 2004 to September 2009, after failing to disclose he owned a three-bedroom, 2,700-square-foot hideaway on wooded Ranch Court in Sagaponack, court records showed.

 New York Times 2012

An influential Brooklyn rabbi and onetime chaplain in New York City’s jails who drew notoriety several years ago for arranging a lavish jailhouse bar mitzvah for an inmate’s son pleaded guilty on Tuesday to making false statements in connection with a federal housing fraud scheme.

NY Post

A longtime welfare fraud investigator for city government was fired after pleading guilty to committing housing fraud against the federal government, The Post has learned.

Anti-fraud prober Sylvia Battle-Black, a 17-year veteran of the Human Resources Administration, admitted lying about her income to obtain $62,376 in government-subsidized housing benefits from 2006 to 2011, prosecutors said.

Incredibly, Black for six years didn’t disclose on her applications for Section 8 housing that she was employed as a HRA fraud investigator since 1996. 

NY Sun

A New York City teacher was arrested yesterday and faces charges that she stole almost $40,000 in illegal housing subsidies.

Monique Ellis, 39, is a special education teacher at P.S. 180 in Brooklyn. According to the city's Department of Investigation, she lied about her annual income between 2003 and 2007, allowing her to steal $39,968 from the New York City Housing Development Corp.