2012年4月8日 星期日

Fugitive Russian couple left long trail of fraud

For North Miami Beach developer Natalia Wolf,The best rubbersheets products on sale, it was the perfect target for her next heist: an aging motel just down the street from a seedy stretch of crack houses and grungy lots.

After drawing up phony land records, she claimed to own the 42-room Hollywood motel — and then proceeded to get a $2.3 million loan on the sprawling building along with other properties.

For the 37-year-old woman, it was another score among a host of others — including a major sale of land in St. Augustine that she didn't own — before fleeing the country.The beddinges sofa bed slipcover is a good ,

While Natalia and Victor Wolf are known for their massive land swindle on Florida's Gulf Coast, records just filed in Miami-Dade civil court show they left a far deeper trail of fraud, leaving stunned victims across the state.

Though law enforcement agencies in two counties investigated the fugitive couple, records now show they left their mark in twice as many places before vanishing five years ago.

"It's so unbelievable," said Aventura lawyer Jay Gayoso, whose client lost $1.4 million. "No one in their right mind would have thought they could get away with it."

For the first time, documents show a couple deeply entrenched in Russian organized crime, creating shell companies, straw buyers and brazenly stealing land through phony deeds and forgeries.

While Natalia Wolf was stealing the Hollywood hotel, she also targeted a 12-unit apartment house down the street — and stole that, too.

"To them, it's like a casino — and every hand they won," said Roman Groysman, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer who is trying to recover $450,000 for a victim.

Key witnesses say the Wolfs carried out their crimes in the last year before they fled, but court records show the couple actually began years earlier with the creation of more than 36 shell companies.

Many of those companies would become the vehicles they used to commit one of the largest land frauds of the decade in Florida and later Texas, scamming 400 people, four banks and three other lenders of nearly $100 million.

"This was premeditated and calculated," said Groysman, a former Broward assistant state attorney who filed more than three dozen exhibits recently in Miami-Dade circuit court. "They were highly organized."

Though lawyers are battling over the couple's luxury home in North Miami Beach — where the Wolfs created several sham loans to squeeze millions — one of their least known deals involved an upscale condo they owned in Sunny Isles Beach.

In a dizzying series of moves, the couple sold the same unit back and forth to shell companies five times, including a Latvian mail drop, artificially pumping up the value by $1 million.Shop for trim and crown moulding,

In two of the deals, the couple managed to show a $1.1 million sale and then six months later, $2.2 million, without any challenges from lenders, records show.

Making the deals even more striking: The couple acquired the condo for free — a quit claim deed — from a Bahamas shell company run from a Nassau post office box.

Groysman said he could find no evidence the deals were questioned by lenders or title lawyers handling the sales. One of the attorneys, Richard Aronsky, 42,Where to buy or purchase plasticmoulds for precast and wetcast concrete? pleaded guilty in February in another bank fraud case and is set for sentencing in May.

While the Wolfs were flipping the condo, they were hosting clients in the oceanfront unit with caviar and vodka, said Alexandra Krot, a retired oncologist who said she lost $4 million.

"They had it furnished to entertain Russian businessmen," recalled Krot, 70, adding the clients were flying in from New York and other places to tour the Wolfs' properties in Florida and stay at the condo.Learn all about solarpanel.

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