Police are hunting for the three individuals photographed above. All three are wanted in connection to a grand larceny.
The theft happened on Friday, November 30, in front of 2214 Avenue R.
Anyone with information regarding this crime is urged to contact Crime Stoppers. All callers to Crime Stoppers remain anonymous. Crime Stoppers can be reached at 1-800-577-TIPS, via the website, or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then entering TIP577.
Janna Doheny, after surrendering to authorities. (Source: Brooklyn DA)
Janna Doheny, the owner of multiple units inside Brighton Beach’s posh Oceana condominium development, is charged with bilking more than $29,000 from Medicaid over the course of eight years, according to a new indictment revealed by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
Doheny, 43, filed falsified documents for Medicaid, claiming her only source of income for her and her daughter was just $1,550 a month from her job at an adult entertainment establishment in Queens, and that her savings and investments totaled less than $5,000.
But investigators claim that Doheny wasn’t as cash strapped as her Medicaid application stated. They say Doheny lived the high life, making pricey purchases at Saks Fifth Avenue, Victoria’s Secret and Amazon, as well as getting professional glamour shots in skimpy swimwear while vacationing at a luxury resort in Arizona – a discovery they found by perusing her profile on a Russian-language social networking site.
“Lying to the system to receive Medicaid is a theft of taxpayer dollars and will not be tolerated,” said Human Resources Administration Commissioner Robert Doar, whose agency assisted in the investigation. “At HRA, we maintain the integrity of public assistance programs by providing benefits to those who are eligible and investigating those who ignore the rules.”
Investigators also found that Doheny not only purchased several condo units at Oceana between 2002 and 2010 – where price tags range from $500,000 to $2 million – but that she also owned property in Bay Ridge, Long Beach and South Florida.
The complaint goes on to state that Doheny deposited more than $100,000 annually into several bank accounts in her own name and the name of her business, Oceana Ventures, as well as a pile of cash totaling $170,000 in a safe deposit box on Long Island.
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, along with the Office of the Medicaid Inspector General and the Human Resources Administration, started to take a closer look at Doheny’s holdings after being tipped off to the Oceana purchases.
Vadim Vasilenko has been in jail since 2007 for allegedly running a money laundering credit card scam operation that involved $47 million dollars, however he has yet to have his day in court.
After years of appeals, arguments, and false starts, Vasilenko is still imprisoned without the possibility for parole and without a firm trial date in place. Getting desperate for any kind of help, Vasilenko has taken to the skies, flying banners over Brighton Beach this month asking both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama for help.
With no response from the presidential candidates, Vasilenko is now hoping that the Virgin Mary will come to his aid, as he plans to fly another plane pleading to Mother Mary herself, according to UPI.
As Vaslikenko awaits his call on divine intervention, you can watch him plead his case to Eyewitness News.
Honoring real survivors at a Holocaust Memorial Park ceremony. Photo by Erica Sherman
A disturbing scheme that has been running since 1994, which bilked a Holocaust survivors fund of $57 million, may finally be coming to a close. The scam was uncovered in 2009 after an FBI sting, and a year later the US Attorney’s Office announced indictments against 11 employees of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference. Thirty-one people have been charged so far.
Several individuals from Brighton Beach collaborated with employees of the Claims Conference, which manages the funds, and submitted applications for victims of the Holocaust. The problem was that the claims that were submitted and approved were for victims who did not exist, or people who were not qualified to receive the funds.
The employees received kickbacks for approving the fraudulent applications and the ringleaders who submitted the falsified documents received unlawful Holocaust reparations.
Valentina Romashova, who stole $150,000 from Holocaust survivors, has recently admitted her role in the scheme and plead guilty in court. She has been ordered to return the money and can serve up to five years in prison for her participation in the scheme, according to the New York Daily News.
Romashova approved almost 5,000 fake applications.
An ex-employee of the fund program, Yevgeniya Abramovich, was also sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay back $201,000, wrote the Jewish Press.
The individual pictured above is wanted in relation to a bank robbery on Avenue U. The robbery took place on September 18 at approximately 8:30 a.m. The suspect as described as a male in his 20s.
Anyone with information regarding this crime is urged to contact Crime Stoppers. All callers to Crime Stoppers remain anonymous. Crime Stoppers can be reached at 1-800-577-TIPS, via the website, or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then entering TIP577.
Police are looking for the two scam artists caught on camera in the video above.
The suspects are described as wearing dark colored wigs and sunglasses, last seen driving a darkly colored four-door Audi, according to DNAinfo.
The site goes on to describe their scam:
The con happened August 28, 2012 near Kings Highway and E. 16th Street, police said.
The suspects, two middle-aged women, approached the female victim with a bag they told her was filled with cash. In exchange for sharing the supposed cash, the victim gave the scammers an undetermined mound of money.
Cops call the ruse a so-called pigeon drop, a term that describes a scam in which the victim is easily conned.
Vitaly Borker, the owner of a Manhattan Beach-based online eye-wear retailer accused of harassing and threatening customers, was sentenced to four years in federal prison yesterday.
Borker, 35, was arrested in December 2010 after a New York Times article caught him boasting of his success in attracting traffic and sales to his site, DecorMyEyes.com, by terrorizing customers with threats of violence and even rape. Authorities busted Borker days later, and a raid on his Beaumont Street home-office found a trove of counterfeit goods, guns and child pornography.
His actions even spurred Google to change its system for page ranking, so that cyber-bullies like Borker do not benefit from negative online reviews.
In May of 2011, Borker pleaded guilty to two counts of sending threatening communications, one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud. The mail fraud and wire fraud charges are because Borker was allegedly selling knock-offs of designer eyewear.
“Vitaly Borker was an Internet shopper’s worst nightmare,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. “Borker operated behind the veil of the Internet and aliases to first defraud his victims and then, if they complained, terrorize them with threats, intimidation, and harassment.”
The sentencing comes short of the five to six-and-a-half year sentence that prosecutors were shooting for, but much more than the 18 months his attorney expected.
Borker will also pay more than $96,000 in fines and restitution. His attorney said he will appeal the sentencing.
For several months after Borker’s arrest, he was released on a $1 million bond and was confined to his home. The judge banned him from using the internet, and even phone usage was monitored. To ensure compliance, the judge tasked a security guard to stay with him the entire time, at a cost to Borker of $1,000 a day.
According to CBS News, Borker was in tears during the sentencing and said, ‘I had a big mouth. I just couldn’t control it and it ruined my life.’
The New York Times reports that, though Borker pleaded guilty, a slew of hearings had delayed sentencing:
Though he pleaded guilty, Mr. Borker’s case went on for more than 18 contentious months, punctuated by a number of hearings. The latest, in July, centered on whether Mr. Borker had uttered the worst of the statements in the government’s indictment, something he denied.
A handful of Mr. Borker’s victims were summoned to testify about calls and e-mails they had received, which turned out to include a threat to slice off the legs of one customer. Federal District Judge Richard J. Sullivan said, at the end of one day of testimony, that he found the victims credible and so disturbing that he revoked Mr. Borker’s bail, which had allowed him to live at home under restrictions.
… His lawyer, Dominic F. Amorosa, argued that Mr. Borker deserved leniency because he is mentally ill — a doctor hired by the defense said he has “a bipolar mood disorder characterized by impulsive and manic mood symptoms” — and was frequently under the influence of marijuana and alcohol.
Mr. Amorosa also contended that only a tiny fraction of Mr. Borker’s customers were threatened and that his business was otherwise a thriving enterprise. DecorMyEyes had thousands of repeat customers, he said, and millions of dollars in revenue.
“He threatened, horribly, 25 people,” Mr. Amorosa said, suggesting that was a small number, given the scale of the company.
Once Borker is released from prison, he will face three years of probation, during which he will not be permitted to use a computer.
A swastika found in Gerritsen Beach last week (Source: GerritsenBeach.net)
A militant Jewish organization announced over the weekend that it will send “security teams” to Marine Park, calling for Jewish residents witnessing anti-Semitic acts of vandalism to “smash the neo-Nazis to pieces physically.”
The Jewish Defense Organization is deploying their patrols in Marine Park, Borough Park and other areas that were recently targeted by anti-Semitic vandals. The neighborhood has been plagued by hate-related graffiti, most recently in late June when a swastika was painted on a sidewalk near a Marine Park synagogue. Last week, swastikas were found on a bulkhead in nearby Gerritsen Beach.
Keep reading for the JDO’s full statement, and the NYPD’s response.
Source: GerritsenBeach.net
GerritsenBeach.net is reporting that swastikas and other hate-related graffiti were discovered along the bulkhead on Devon Avenue in Gerritsen Beach.
The site published photos of several versions of a swastika, including one with a circle around it and the word “Hail” scrolled above it.
It’s not the only graffiti on the bulkhead; the site describes it as a problematic area with vandals covering much of it in spray-paint, and, recently, a thief broke into several boats and stole supplies.
GerritsenBeach.net is calling for “neighbors and police [to] monitor and patrol this area.”
The following is a message from the offices of Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz:
In a push to punish those responsible for hate crimes, including the latest epidemic of anti-Semitic crimes plaguing our community, as a member of the Assembly’s Codes Committee, I called on the City’s District Attorneys to immediately seek the maximum penalty for defendants accused of hate crimes and asked Judges to impose the maximum sentence allowed upon conviction.
We are seeing an increase in the frequency of anti-Semitic incidents. Those who commit these abominable crimes must realize that there is a real penalty to pay for their actions. Most of these offenses are property-based, but the recent physical assault upon a Jewish man walking home from Sabbath services, by teens who hit him in the face and shouted derogatory epithets about his obviously religious appearance, highlights the critical need for harsher penalties.
Those who choose to act on the hatred in their hearts must know that they can expect to receive the maximum penalty that our Penal Code allows. We need to show the perpetrators of these offensive acts that there is no place for their hatred in our civilized society. We as legislators intended that the penalty for the commission of a hate crime be harsher than other crimes.The judiciary must now use its power to carry out our legislative intent.
I am working with law enforcement officials in an effort to swiftly bring those who commit these and other hate crimes to justice. As the son of Holocaust survivors and a representative of one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors, I am concerned over the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services’ annual “Hate Crimes in New York State” report, showing a 27 percent increase of hate crimes throughout New York City (350), while hate crimes in New York State dropped by 14 percent. The 2011 report also revealed that Jews were the most frequent targets of hate crimes and that, nearly 70 years after the end of the Holocaust, swastikas are still being placed on property throughout New York State. (Please see below a copy of a letter sent to our Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. Also note similar letters were sent to all our Borough’s District Attorneys).
