A Long Island man who forged a deed in order to steal a vacant brownstone building from an elderly homeowner has been sentenced to one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years in prison, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
Craig Hecht, 52, of Mount Sinai, New York, pled guilty to second-degree grand larceny and second-degree money laundering in December 2019.
He was facing up to 15 years in prison.
On December 19, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that Evaldas Rimasauskas, 51, of Vilnius, Lithuania, had been sentenced to 5 years in prison for his role in a business email compromise scam. He will be removed from the U.S. to Lithuania upon his release.
U.S. District Judge George Daniels ordered Rimasauskas to pay restitution of $26,479,079.24. He did not impose any fine. Rimasauskas previously agreed to forfeit $49,738,559.41 to the government.
On May 22, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office announced that Craig Hecht, 51, of Long Island, had been charged in connection with a scheme to steal a vacant brownstone building from an elderly homeowner.
According to the District Attorney’s Office, the owner and her family moved out in 2010 after a fire made the building uninhabitable. Hecht and a codefendant allegedly used a forged deed to transfer the property to an entity they controlled and sold it for $850,000 in 2015.