Nigerian Yiddish Speaker Charged With Fraud Jumps Bail
John Star, a Yiddish-speaking Nigerian national, has jumped bail after being charged with mortgage fraud, the New York Daily News reported today.
Star learned Yiddish as a child from his adoptive parents who were Orthodox Jews and raised him in Switzerland. Apparently his Yiddish came in handy when committing mortgage fraud in New York.
“He moved easily in Orthodox real estate sources and hatched a scheme that bilked lenders of $10 million, officials said,” the Daily News wrote.
Star is being charged with submitting false loan applications and then pocketing the loans. Last month prosecutors in Brooklyn said they would give him 15 years in jail if he pleaded guilty, but now that he is missing, that offer is off the table.
“Rather than us having to expend valuable resources looking for him, Mr. Star should be a mensch and turn himself in,” FBI spokesman James Margolin told the Daily News.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO