Follow up on that Fairfield land scam
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FOR SALE Uncompleted Storey Building With Four Flats
Pakuro Road, Mowe, Ogun, Nigeria
₦30,000,000
/ One-time (Negotiable)
RefCode CJ4460
(That’s $39,000 U.S. — contact Prince Christopher for details and wiring information)
As a partially finished house looms idle on Sky Top Terrace in Fairfield, the partners who bought the lot from an apparently fake seller and developed the property over the last eight months have issued a statement saying they are victims of the fraud with hundreds of thousands of dollars and their hard-earned reputations at stake.
A partnership owned by Gina Leto and Greg Bugaj is a defendant in a lawsuit in U.S. District Court by the rightful landowner, Daniel Kenigsberg, whose family has owned the half-acre lot for 70 years. Kenigsberg, a Long Island physician, returned to the street where he grew up on May 31 and found the property cleared with a $1.5 million house built upon it.
That same day, they said in a written statement, "we learned to our shock and dismay that Kenigsberg, had not, in fact, sold the property to us. Rather, a third-party had impersonated Kenigsberg and – through the carelessness and neglect of the various real estate professionals involved in the transaction – managed to list, market, and sell the property without anyone ever catching on."
Leto and Bugaj said they have cooperated with local police and the FBI in a criminal investigation; that they offered Kenigsberg $500,000 for the land they thought they had bought last October for $350,000, which they said he rejected; and that they have initiated their own lawsuit against "the real estate professionals who facilitated the sale of the property in an attempt to hold them to account."
Kenigsberg filed a federal lawsuit on July 14 naming 51 Sky Top Partners, owned by Leto and Bugaj, and a lawyer who apparently executed the sale of the property for a scammer posing as Kenigsberg, as defendants. He's seeking as much as $2 million in damages and wants the property restored to its original state.
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Scams involving fraudsters posing as sellers have become more common. One in which a house was actually built -- in this case, 4,000 square feet with four bedrooms and five bathrooms, on the market for $1.475 million at least until recently -- may be unique.
"We, as buyer, had no contact with the party impersonating Kenigsberg. We had no reason to believe he was an imposter. We would not have paid $350,000 for the property – nor would we have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars more in construction – if we had," Leto and Bugaj said in their statement.
Work on the house stopped in early July after Kenigsberg and the partnership realized the land sale was a fraud. Leto and Bugaj said they agreed to vacate the property as Kenigsberg demanded except to make sure the site was secure and even then, with his permission.
Peter M. Nolin, the lawyer for Kenigsberg who filed the federal lawsuit, declined to comment on the $500,000 offer the partners said they made and on further developments in the case.
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Kenigsberg said he hopes to pass the land to his children or grandchildren as a vacant lot, one that connects his family to the place where his parents bought a house next door in 1953, along with the parcel at issue -- the house where he and his siblings grew up. Leto and Bugaj, in their statement, criticize Kenigsberg for holding out even as they agree he is a victim of the scam.
"But he is not a victim the same as we are. He will be made whole in the very near term through restoration of the property at our expense. We, on the other hand, will not recoup the hundreds of thousands of dollars we have, in good faith, invested in the property for years (if ever), and may never fully ameliorate the harm done to our reputations."
