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.
Continue reading the main storyWorking 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.
“What it was doing was empowering people who wanted to commit deed fraud by giving them a road map to figure out how to get around the requirements,” Joseph Fucito, the New York City sheriff, said.
The Finance Department tried to change that in June, prompted by WABC-TV news reports about two cases of deed fraud in Laurelton, Queens. Disturbed by the reports, Jacques Jiha, the city finance commissioner, said he set out to determine “what kind of a roadblock we can put on the path of somebody who is fraudulently trying to record the deed.”
Now, when the register’s office notices discrepancies in the Social Security numbers associated with a deed being transferred, for example, it refers its suspicions to the sheriff’s office. Mr. Jiha said he planned to push for legislation in Albany to add safeguards to the process.
Sheriff Fucito said that since mid-June, his office had received 68 referrals involving more than 100 pieces of property valued at as little as $40 and as much as $50 million.
With deed schemes accelerating as property records become more easily searchable online, and with no other city agency charged with stopping them, the sheriff’s office, which was folded into Finance Department in the 1990s, is getting more active in rooting out the frauds.
The victims include vulnerable individuals whose homes are often their biggest assets, Sheriff Fucito said, as well as large banks that sometimes give mortgages to those who fraudulently acquire deeds and then never pay off the loans. “There is an element of preying on individuals who may not be able to take care of themselves or understand what’s going on with their property,” Sheriff Fucito said, adding that the schemes created “an elaborate financial mess.”
Once a fraudulent deed is processed, the only recourse for the rightful owner is to hire a lawyer and go through a lengthy legal process to try to reverse the deed transfer.
Neighbors of one of the vacant buildings that Mr. Chappelle tried to acquire, on Amsterdam Avenue and 158th Street, are hopeful that his arrest is a step toward reviving a property that for years has served as a crumbling sanctuary for vagrants. Crates packed with lottery tickets, aluminum foil, empty beer bottles and bags of clothes were wedged between metal scaffolding in front of the building and its padlocked door on Thursday.
“It should be something else,” said Ivette Rivera, 21, who was playing nearby with her 2-year-old son, “anything else, so they can take away the homeless people and crackheads.”
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