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CIRCA 2008---MORTGAGE CONS GOT ATL. CITY COMPS (27-member massive mortgage swindle)
NY POST, BRUCE GOLDING
EXCERPT Garri Zhigun and his cohorts were treated like kings in Atlantic City casinos, including the Borgata. The ringleaders of a massive mortgage scam got comped as high rollers in Atlantic City by gambling with more than $400,000 in cash that they swindled from slipshod sub-prime lenders tied to the current financial crisis.
Garri Zhigun, 31, and Aleksander "Shorty" Lipkin, 30, used their ill-gotten gains to score free rooms, drinks, meals and show tickets at the Tropicana and Borgata casinos, a law-enforcement source said.
The Brooklyn men took 29 trips to the plush gambling dens in 2005 and 2006, playing with cash conned from lenders like Countrywide and Washington Mutual - whose now-worthless subprime mortgages were a key cause of the stock-market meltdown.
MONEY-LAUNDERING An investigation of casino records revealed that Zhigun bought a total of $434,850 in chips and cashed out only $135,000, the source said. Zhigun apparently shared the chips with Lipkin, according to the source.
At the time of their betting binge, Zhigun was on supervised release after serving two years' prison for faking injury records in a long-running insurance scam involving staged car accidents that the feds broke up in 2001.
After getting sprung, Zhigun told probation officials that he was making only $400 a week as a "real-estate development researcher." But in reality, he was helping Lipkin run a crooked loan operation out of a Brooklyn-based brokerage owned by Zhigun's mom, Galina Zhigun.
SOURCE
http://www.nypost.com/seven/10202008/news/regionalnews/its_on_the_house_134417.htm
Six people were busted for allegedly running a 10-year scheme in Brooklyn that filed bogus health claims and ripped off Medicaid by more than $47 million, authorities announced yesterday. The fraud's accused mastermind, Alexander Levy, had the help of a handful of employees in allegedly setting up a string of clinics and ambulette stations, using unlicensed doctors to treat the sick and elderly -- and pocketing the cash.
Levy had been barred from any participation in the Medicaid program by the state Department of Health in 1997 for submitting false claims to Medicaid for unnecessary services and for care that was never actually given. But he illegally circumvented the system and continued to make claims, going to great lengths to hide his involvement in the care facilities he ran.
Levy is accused of squandering the cash on at least three luxury cars and a divorce settlement. The people who allegedly ran his operation -- employees he paid as little as $35,000 a year -- made no cash from the scam, their attorneys said yesterday. Levy, 54, from Staten Island, grinned as he was led to his arraignment in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn yesterday. He faces up to 25 years for grand larceny, health-care fraud and money laundering. He was held on $250,000 cash bail.
His alleged accomplices at the clinics -- Zona Castellano, 69, Aaron Bethea, 53, Leonid Sklyar, 30, Yelena Bogatyrov, 43, and Arthur Gutman, 42 -- were also charged with grand larceny and fraud. Prosecutors claim Levy operated ANR Advance Home Care Inc., on Avenue U, as well as two ambulette companies and three clinics in Brighton Beach (Russian immigrant enclave).
Levy "set up a series of corporations elaborately structured to conceal his control.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07172009/news/regionalnews/brooklyn/quack_hirer_busted_on_47m_medicaid_rap_179705.ht m
Nice folks