A former real estate lawyer who practiced in Florham Park received a sentence of seven years in state prison Thursday, Sept. 13 at a hearing in state Superior Court, Morristown, for his role as legal counsel in a fraudulent loan scam that used a dead man’s identity as the supposed “buyer” of a Newark house…
Complex Scheme
Chiesa said Nunes, the mastermind of the scheme, acted as a principal of Leska Management, a bogus real estate management company. With Veras’ assistance, she arranged for the purchase of a home in Newark from a woman who had fallen behind in her mortgage payments. The seller owed $477,196 on her loan, but the holder of the mortgage, Kondaur Capital Corporation, based in California, agreed to a “short sale” for $260,000 to a purported buyer identified by the defendants. A “short sale” is a preforeclosure sale in which the mortgage holder agrees to permit the home to be sold for less than the amount due on the loan.
That sale was never completed. Chiesa said DiGiacomo, who represented himself as the attorney for both the buyer and Leska Management, told Kondaur the sale had fallen through. He then negotiated with Kondaur to assign the mortgage to Leska Management at a discounted price of $219,877. He never disclosed that, prior to the assignment of the mortgage, the home was sold at an inflated price of $539,000 to a fictitious buyer created by the defendants.
Nunes, with assistance from Sousa, a mortgage broker, fraudulently applied to Provident Funding Associates for a $431,200 mortgage loan and purchased the home using the identity of a deceased man, whose last name was “Benazi.” Nunes created counterfeit bank records, employment records and false identification documents for Benazi for the loan application, and she had another man pose as Benazi at the closing. No payments were ever made to the lender on the loan. The seller was never notified of the closing and her signature was forged on the closing documents.
Stillwell handled the closing for Ideal Title and assisted in the creation of false closing documents used to deceive the lender. She never collected monies due at closing from the buyer, and falsified U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) settlement statements to indicate the funds had been collected and the prior mortgage had been paid off.
In her role as escrow agent, Zullo, the owner of Ideal Title, misappropriated loan proceeds by wiring $376,032 to DiGiacomo’s attorney trust account at Nunes’ direction. DiGiacomo used $219,877 of the misappropriated funds to pay for the assignment of the mortgage and wired the balance of $156,155, representing the net illegal profits, into a bank account controlled by Nunes and Veras. Stillwell, Zullo and DiGiacomo were all compensated for their participation in the scheme.
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Press release from State attorney office: click here