By Timothy Bolger and Lindsay Christ
Home may be a man’s castle, but in Paul Salamone’s case, the entire fiefdom was allegedly fraudulent.
The Medford man is facing a Suffolk County jury this week after being accused of breaking into seven homes in various states of foreclosure and illegally renting some of them out in a scheme to capitalize on the failing local housing market. In his defense, his attorney points out that 28-year-old Salamone, who prosecutors say had renovated some of the vacant houses before he advertised them as for rent on Craigslist, truly believes what he was doing was right. Despite Salamone’s supposed good intentions, at least two families that rented from him were caught in the crossfire and evicted after the alleged scam began to unravel.
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“Confusion and misunderstanding, not guns or knives, were Mr. Salamone’s weapons,” said Marc Lindemann, the assistant district attorney who is prosecuting the case, in his opening statements at Suffolk County court in Riverhead on June 22.
Salamone allegedly told realtors that they no longer had ownership of the houses and backed his argument with what Lindemann described as official-looking documents. But many of the houses were actually owned by Deutsche Bank, said Lindemann, a prosecutor with the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office’s Economic Crimes Bureau.
It took police several months to connect the dots. A grand jury had indicted Salamone on five counts of burglary, but two more counts were added when additional houses were discovered. He was also charged with grand larceny for the “rent” he received, and criminal possession of a forged instrument for filing more than a dozen fraudulent liens.
Salamone’s attorney, Eric Naiburg, admits that his client made a serious mistake, but insists he is not a crook.
“He had no right to be in these houses,” the Smithtown-based attorney said in his opening statement. “That is conceded. That he went into these houses with the intent to commit a crime, that is not conceded, not conceded at all.”
“If this was a scheme, it was dumb,” Naiburg said, adding that if Salamone was trying to scam people, as prosecutors allege, then “he is the worst scam artist this nation has ever seen.”
When asked about the case in late 2008, Salamone told the Press that he had “every right to be in those properties” [“Can This House Be Saved?” Nov. 13].
Among the first to take the stand this week was Laura Puller, who testified that she signed a 12-month lease for what she thought was a legitimate house for rent in East Patchogue after taking a walkthrough with Salamone. She and her husband moved into the home with their two young daughters in May 2008, but then a realtor and later an attorney showed up and said they were not supposed to be there, she testified.
An eviction notice was posted on the door one week before Thanksgiving and the Suffolk County Sheriff gave her family five days to get out, Puller testified. The family hired an attorney and, after negotiations, was allowed to stay through April, but has since moved in with her mother, she told the jury.
If the prosecution’s claims are true, Salamone gives new meaning to the term homewrecker—and it isn’t the first time Salamone has been in trouble in the real estate world. He and his brother Joe were evicted from their grandfather’s Manhattan apartment in January 2008, according to their aunt, Sylvia Salamone, who is now suing the two for $12,000 in back rent and damages to the apartment.
The Salamone brothers moved into the Alphabet City apartment in 2006 and only paid rent after the first eviction notice came, said Jerald Kreppel, the Manhattan-based real estate attorney representing Sylvia Salamone. What’s more, one of the two brothers—Kreppel is unsure which—changed the locks after the family had them evicted following a trial in New York City Housing Court, though no one was inside when authorities reclaimed the home a second time.
There were no home improvements in the earlier case, either—only destruction. Kreppel said before the two were evicted they wrote on the walls and ripped out the kitchen sink, stove and refrigerator.
To date, the real estate fraud unit formed last year by Suffolk County District Attorney Tom Spota has not seen any cases akin to Salamone’s, though there has been one similar arrest in Nassau and two more are under investigation.
Salamone’s alleged practices have been dubbed “rent skimming” in comparable cases across the country, but on Long Island, the former Home Depot manager—who is said to regularly misquote the law and has tried to sue local news outlets by claiming that his name is trademarked—is in a class all his own.
