For North Miami Beach developer Natalia Wolf, it was the perfect target for her next heist: an aging motel just down the street from a seedy stretch of crack houses and grungy lots.
After drawing up phony land records, she claimed to own the 42-room Hollywood motel – and then proceeded to get a $2.3 million loan on the sprawling building along with other properties.
For the 37-year-old woman, it was another score among a host of others – including a major sale of land in St. Augustine that she didn’t own – before fleeing the country.
The Miami Herald
While Natalia and Victor Wolf are known for their massive land swindle on Florida’s Gulf Coast, records just filed in Miami-Dade civil court show they left a far deeper trail of fraud, leaving stunned victims across the state.
Though law enforcement agencies in two counties probed the fugitive couple, records now show they left their mark in twice as many places before vanishing five years ago.
“It’s so unbelievable,” said Aventura lawyer Jay Gayoso, whose client lost $1.4 million. “No one in their right mind would have thought they could get away with it.”
For the first time, documents show a couple deeply entrenched in Russian organized crime, creating shell companies, straw buyers and brazenly stealing land through phony deeds and forgeries.
While Natalia Wolf was stealing the Hollywood hotel, she also targeted a 12-unit apartment house down the street – and stole that, too.
“To them, it’s like a casino – and every hand they won,” said Roman Groysman, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer who is trying to recover $450,000 for a victim.
Key witnesses say the Wolfs carried out their crimes in the last year before they fled, but court records show the couple actually began years earlier with the creation of more than 36 shell companies.
Many of those companies would become the vehicles they used to commit one of the largest land frauds of the decade in Florida and later Texas, scamming 400 people, four banks and three other lenders of nearly $100 million.
“This was premeditated and calculated,” said Groysman, a former Broward assistant state attorney who filed more than three dozen exhibits recently in Miami-Dade circuit court. “They were highly organized.”
Though lawyers are battling over the couple’s luxury home in North Miami Beach – where the Wolfs created several sham loans to squeeze millions – one of their least known deals involved an upscale condo they owned in Sunny Isles Beach,.
In a dizzying series of moves, the couple sold the same unit back and forth to shell companies five times, including a Latvian mail drop, artificially pumping up the value by $1 million.
In two of the deals, the couple managed to show a $1.1 million sale and then six months later, $2.2 million, without any challenges from lenders, records show.
Making the deals even more striking: The couple acquired the condo for free — a quit claim deed — from a Bahamas shell company run from a Nassau post office box.
Groysman said he could find no evidence the deals were questioned by lenders or title lawyers handling the sales. One of the attorneys, Richard Aronsky, 42, pleaded guilty in February in another bank fraud case and is set for sentencing in May.
While the Wolfs were flipping the condo, they were hosting clients in the oceanfront unit with caviar and vodka, said Alexandra Krot, a retired oncologist who said she lost $4 million.
“They had it furnished to entertain Russian businessmen,” recalled Krot, 70, adding the clients were flying in from New York and other places to tour the Wolfs’ properties in Florida and stay at the condo.
On the surface, it looked like the couple was flourishing — driving a Bentley and tooling around in a 37-foot yacht – but within two years of launching their development company, their empire was imploding.
Loans were due, and they were now churning out fake deeds in Citrus County to sell lots they had already sold to others in a scam that pulled in hundreds of victims.
In a bold plan to get more cash, Natalia Wolf began targeting a new string of properties, including the Hollywood motel and nearby apartment house.
Though the Wolfs were in a partnership with two other investors in the buildings, Natalia Wolf stripped their ownership – creating phony paperwork — and mortgaged the structures for $2.3 million, along with other properties.
After pocketing the money, she then turned to Krot and asked for a loan in excess of $300,000. Krot agreed, but demanded the money be secured by land owned by the Wolfs in a St. Augustine development.
After turning over the money, Krot soon learned she was scammed. “The property was not theirs,” she said. “We were flabbergasted.”
Records in court detail dozens of cases of victims who called police pleading for help in finding the couple – showing far more deals than previously known to the public.
“I never got a deed,” said Harvey Sobler, 71, who plunked down $15,000 for a lot in a quiet 34-acre community known as Grand Ravine near St. Augustine Shores.
Four others said they, too, lost money in the deal, which was being pushed by the Wolfs after they launched their largest project in Citrus County.
Salvina Elkins of Chicago lost more than $750,000, saying she was unable to get her deeds or even property records. Two of the investors in the Hollywood deal, Richard Sajiun and Igor Borg of New York, said they forked over about $1.2 million in loans to Victor Wolf and to buy land.
Groysman, the attorney waging a legal battle over the Wolfs’ home, said records of the couple’s deals – including previously unreleased police reports – show failings on the part of notaries, title agents and banks.
In addition, the deals were approved by a host of mortgage brokers, including the Wolfs’ business partner, Felix Vakhovsky of Globex Lending.
In one of the deals prepared by Globex, the Wolfs obtained a $224,000 mortgage on a house they didn’t own. Vakhovsky, 53, of Hallandale Beach, could not be reached for comment.
Perhaps the most revealing aspects of the records: The Wolfs were part of a much larger organization. “They were professional front people,” Groysman said.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the deals surrounding the Sunny Isles Beach condo at the Pinnacle, he said. “They received a $1 million [condo] via a quit claim deed from a Bahamian company,” he said.
“They flipped it so many times you couldn’t keep up with it, and then they ended up giving it to someone else in a flip – again as a gift – in a quit claim deed.”
Records show that 13 days before the couple fled, they flipped the condo to a shell company known as NYC Investment Group LLC, now dissolved. The managing member, Michael Buyanovsky King, could not be reached for comment.
Groysman said the Wolfs didn’t have their own capital to launch their own enterprise. “She had nothing. He had nothing. Someone literally picked them up out of the gutter,” said the former prosecutor, adding that he has reviewed hundreds of records involving the Russian couple.
“She didn’t have an education to pull off what she did. They didn’t know jack about financial markets.” In fact, records show Natalia Wolf flunked the state mortgage brokers’ exam in 2002.
With victims and police on their trail, they were able to pull off one more event before fleeing the country: They uncorked champagne.
Records show police found empty bottles scattered in the home the day after the couple fled. “It looks like they had a party before they left the country to celebrate,” said Groysman. “It was their final hurrah.”
By: MICHAEL SALLAH
The Miami Herald
