FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Four more people have been charged in connection with the billion-dollar Ponzi scheme that rocked Broward County in 2009.
The suspects all worked, or were friends with, Scott Rothstein, the mastermind of the scam, who was sentenced last year to 50 years in federal prison.
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Read: Bob Norman's Blog Watch: Read: Kusnick | Caputi | Corte, Renie
They are Howard Kusnick, 58, of Tamarac; Stephen Caputi, 53, of Lauderhill; William Corte, 38, of Plantation; and Curtis Renie, 38, of Fort Lauderdale.
According to the federal complaint, "The defendants are alleged to have conspired to further Scott Rothstein?s fraudulent investment scheme involving the sale of purported confidential settlement agreements in sexual harassment, discrimination and/or whistle-blower suits.?
According to federal prosecutors, Caputi played several different roles to convince wealthy investors that it was safe to give Rothstein their money. Sometimes he acted as a corporate banker; other times, he portrayed a rich plaintiff who just won a multimillion-dollar settlement, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said his claims of Rothstein's riches were backed up by the work Corte and Renie, who worked as IT specialists at Rothstein's now-defunct law firm, Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, in Fort Lauderdale.
Prosecutors said Corte and Renie duplicated the official website of TD Bank and then altered it to show Rothstein had upwards of $1 billion in his escrow account.
"The instruction came from Mr. Rothstein, and it was basically to duplicate the website, and if nobody in house could do that, he was going to seek an outside IT guy to do that," said Alvin Entin, Corte?s attorney.
According to the complaint, Rothstein would reserve the conference room at the TD Bank branch in Weston. He would invite potential investors to meet with the Caputi, who was acting as the bank?s customer service manager, and they would show the potential investor the bogus bank records, prosecutors said.
"How's that for credibility for Rothstein? I mean, Rothstein must have been loving that," said Local 10?s Bob Norman, who broke the Rothstein story in 2009 and nearly every development since.
Norman said Friday?s arrests show just how elaborate and convincing the scam was.
"You can start to understand how these people would go, 'Hey, this is great. I really can get 100 percent return -- wow,'" Norman said.
Prosecutors said Kusnick engaged in a scheme to defraud two clients of RRA by telling them they had won a settlement in civil lawsuit when, in fact, no such litigation had been initiated and no such settlement existed. Rather, the purpose of the letter was to lull the clients into believing that RRA was pursuing litigation on their behalf when, really, the clients' funds had been used to pay off earlier investors and to further the investment fraud scheme.
Corte and Renie received a $5,000 bonus from Rothstein for their work, according to investigators. Caputi's payoff was a big investment in the Pembroke Pines nightclub he owned with Rothstein, prosecutors said.
All four men are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Corte and Caputi are out of jail on $100,00 bond. Kusnick and Renie are expected to turn themselves in next week.