NYC man (no longer George Costanza) sentenced for ‘Vandelay’ con

NEW YORK — Thomas John Sfraga would means chums and neighbors with a promise of phenomenal returns if they invested in his businesses. Sign a check for $40,000, Sfraga told one, and obtain your money again in precisely three hundred and sixty five days, plus more than 30% hobby.

Nonetheless the determine of one industry — Vandelay — turned into a purple flag that the investments personal been about nothing.

Sfraga’s Vandelay Contracting Corp. — whose namesake appears to be like to be Artwork Vandelay, the fake entrepreneur whom George Constanza continually cited on “Seinfeld” — turned into a vehicle for lining his pockets, prosecutors within the Jap District of Unusual York mentioned.

Sfraga, 56, saved traders’ money for himself or broken-down it to pay those that had sold in earlier, in accordance to the prosecutors. On Thursday, Sfraga turned into sentenced to Forty five months in penal advanced, with credit for 15 months served, after pleading guilty to wire fraud closing Could well additionally. Judge Frederic Block also ordered him to pay $1.5 million in restitution.

“What you’ve completed right here is mainly inexcusable,” Block told Sfraga. “On the different hand, you may as well impartial personal some redeeming qualities.”

In court docket, Sam Jacobson, a attorney for Sfraga, mentioned that Sfraga didn’t notify out to dupe his traders. In a assertion, Sfraga apologized to the victims and mentioned he implemented the plot below crushing debt.

A half dozen of Sfraga’s victims attended the persevering with, with 5 offering statements ahead of Block handed down his sentence. They spoke about how Sfraga had ruined them financially, taking money intended for weddings, a brand novel home or retirement. One man, a next-door neighbor in Brooklyn, told the defendant, “I depended on you.”

“This guy is horrifying to the core,” mentioned Michael Mindell, 61, who wore a sad T-shirt with Sfraga’s face on it. The be conscious “grifter” turned into on the head, with “guilty” emblazoned all the map by map of his face.

From 2019 to 2022, Sfraga lured more than a dozen of us to do money in his businesses below the guise of investing in construction projects, home flipping and cryptocurrency wallets, in accordance to prosecutors. He presented himself as “T.J. Stone,” prosecutors mentioned.

Sfraga told one sufferer that if he invested in Sfraga’s crypto industry, he may perhaps perhaps doubtless receive returns of 60% in precisely three months, prosecutors mentioned. Sfraga known as it an “ironclad instruct.” So the investor wrote a check for $30,000 to Vandelay Building Corp., which Sfraga cashed nonetheless by no approach in actuality invested in crypto.

When it got right here time to repay, Sfraga would near up with causes for no longer returning traders’ calls. Sfraga told so a lot of that he had to chat over along with his death father in Alaska. He told but any other that he suffered a heart assault.

George Costanza, the bumbling-but-without halt-scheming “Seinfeld” mainstay played by Jason Alexander, had a lengthy-working Vandelay ploy. George first concocted Artwork Vandelay to video show his presence in an topic of enterprise-constructing lobby the build he turned into staking out a girl. In a later episode, George tells an unemployment counselor that he’s end to securing a job at “Vandelay Industries,” which he says manufactures latex. Vandelay can be an author and a faux buyer at some aspects within the assortment.

Adore Sfraga on Thursday, four most fundamental “Seinfeld” characters also came all the map by map of themselves ahead of a decide within the 1998 assortment finale. The fictional decide’s determine turned into Arthur Vandelay, and the defendants personal been sentenced to a year in penal advanced.

This text on the starting build appeared in The Unusual York Events.