Four Rothstein associates charged

They are: Howard Kusnick (a lawyer), Stephen Caputi (IT department), William Corte (IT department), and Curtis Renie (person who posed as a plaintiff in fake cases). They are all charged by information, so it appears that they have cut deals and are cooperating.

They drew Judges Marra (Kusnick), Dimitroleas (the two IT guys), and Zloch (Renie).

From the USAO press release:

The Information against Howard Kusnick alleges that, while an attorney at RRA, Kusnick engaged in a scheme to defraud two clients of RRA by authoring a letter purporting to settle pending litigation in the clients’ favor. In fact, however, no such litigation had been instituted 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, in fact, the clients’ funds had been used to pay off earlier investors and to further the investment fraud scheme.

The Information against Stephen Caputi alleges that Caputi at times acted as both a purported banker and plaintiff during meetings with potential investors. For example, the Information alleges that Caputi, posing as an official from TD Bank, provided investors with fraudulent bank statements that reflected purported balances of trust accounts at TD Bank. In this way, Caputi lulled the investors into believing that the account balances were sufficient to fund their investments. On another occasion, Caputi posed as a plaintiff during a meeting with potential investors who had requested to meet with plaintiffs. Caputi pretended to be a plaintiff who had purportedly executed a $10,000,000 settlement agreement, thus raising potential investors’ confidence in the deal.

According to the Information against Curtis Renie and William Corte, these defendants worked at RRA’s IT Department as chief of information technology and as a document management specialist, respectively. Renie and Corte created a fictitious web page copying the legitimate web page of TD Bank. At Rothstein’s direction, the defendants posted false account balances on the fictitious web page to make it appear as if the accounts were well-funded. On one occasion, the defendants modified the phony TD Bank web site to reflect that RRA held between $300 million and $1.1 billion on deposit at TD Bank. In fact, however, no such funds were in the accounts. The false account balances were shown to investors to induce them to invest into the fraudulent investment scheme.