Thomas John Sfraga would approach friends and neighbors with a promise of extraordinary returns if they invested in his businesses. Sign a check for $40,000, Mr. Sfraga told one, and get your money back in just one year, plus more than 30 percent interest.
But the name of one business — Vandelay — was a red flag that the investments were about nothing.
Mr. Sfraga’s Vandelay Contracting Corp. — whose namesake appears to be Art Vandelay, the fake entrepreneur whom George Constanza frequently cited on “Seinfeld” — was a vehicle for lining his pockets, prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York said.
Mr. Sfraga, 56, kept investors’ money for himself or used it to pay people who had bought in earlier, according to the prosecutors. On Thursday, Mr. Sfraga was sentenced to 45 months in prison, with credit for 15 months served, after pleading guilty to wire fraud last May. Judge Frederic Block also ordered him to pay $1.5 million in restitution.
“What you’ve done here is really inexcusable,” Judge Block told Mr. Sfraga. “Nonetheless, you have some redeeming qualities.”
In court, Sam Jacobson, a lawyer for Mr. Sfraga, said that Mr. Sfraga didn’t set out to dupe his investors. In a statement, Mr. Sfraga apologized to the victims and said he carried out the scheme under crushing debt.
A half dozen of Mr. Sfraga’s victims attended the proceeding, with five offering statements before Judge Block handed down his sentence. They spoke about how Mr. Sfraga had ruined them financially, taking money meant for weddings, a new home or retirement. One man, a next-door neighbor in Brooklyn, told the defendant, “I trusted you.”
“This guy is rotten to the core,” said Michael Mindell, 61, who wore a black T-shirt with Mr. Sfraga’s face on it. The word “grifter” was at the top, with “guilty” emblazoned across his face.
From 2019 to 2022, Mr. Sfraga lured more than a dozen people to put money in his businesses under the guise of investing in construction projects, home flipping and cryptocurrency wallets, according to prosecutors. He introduced himself as “T.J. Stone,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Sfraga told one victim that if he invested in Mr. Sfraga’s crypto business, he could receive returns of 60 percent in just three months, prosecutors said. Mr. Sfraga called it an “ironclad situation.” So the investor wrote a check for $30,000 to Vandelay Construction Corp., which Mr. Sfraga cashed but never actually invested in crypto.
When it came time to repay, Mr. Sfraga would come up with reasons for not returning investors’ calls. Mr. Sfraga told several that he had to visit his dying father in Alaska. He told another that he suffered a heart attack.
George Costanza, the bumbling-yet-eternally-scheming “Seinfeld” mainstay played by Jason Alexander, had a long-running Vandelay ploy. George first concocted Art Vandelay to explain his presence in an office-building lobby where he was staking out a woman. In a later episode, George tells an unemployment counselor that he is close to securing a job at “Vandelay Industries,” which he says manufactures latex. Vandelay is also an author and a fake customer at some points in the series.
Like Mr. Sfraga on Thursday, four main “Seinfeld” characters also found themselves before a judge in the 1998 series finale. The fictional judge’s name was Arthur Vandelay, and the defendants were sentenced to a year in prison.
The post N.Y.C. Man (Not George Costanza) Sentenced for ‘Vandelay’ Con appeared first on New York Times.
