MANHATTAN (CN) - The Bayrock Group and Nixon Peabody are among 35 defendants sued for $1 billion, whom 13 plaintiffs, including estates of Holocaust survivors, accuse of "the illegal concealment of Felix Sater's 1998 $40 million federal racketeering conviction, and subsequent 2009 sentencing."
The summons and notice in New York County Supreme Court contains few details. Three of the six pages of the document are taken up with names of the parties, their attorneys, and the charges.
The Miami Herald reported last year that the CIA helped Sater conceal his conviction for securities fraud while using him to track down Stinger missiles for sale in his native Russia. This was "a decade before he launched the celebrated Fort Lauderdale Trump Tower," the Herald reported in a Sept. 8, 2012 article.
But the Trump Tower failed, and "a legal battle has ensued between burned investors trying to reveal Sater's background and federal agents who say national security is at stake," the Herald reported.
Prosecutors in that case asked to keep Sater's record sealed, in the national interest.
Sater was fined $25,000 for his original $40 million stock swindle, did no jail time and was not ordered to pay anything in restitution, according to the Herald.
In the new summons and notice in New York, a string of investors want to hold Sater and his attorneys and businesses responsible. The document does not mention the alleged CIA connection.
It states: "Plaintiffs seek relief against those directly and vicariously responsible for the perpetration of perhaps a billion dollars or more of fraud based on the illegal concealment of Felix Sater's 1998 $40 million federal racketeering conviction, and subsequent 2009 sentencing, as well as related and other unrelated relief, and declaratory relief against those persons, primarily financial institution, insofar as to affix by liquidating judgment thereof such liability is owed to them.
"'Bayrock,' as used herein, refers to that certain association of juridical entities including, for example and without limitation, Bayrock Group LLC, Bayrock Camelback LLC, Bayrock Whitestone LLC, Bayrock Spring Street LLC, and Bayrock Merrimac LLC, in the last ten years variously engaged in the businesses of financial institution fraud, tax fraud, partnership fraud, insurance fraud, litigation fraud, bankruptcy fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, human trafficking, child prostitution, statutory rape, and, on occasion, real estate.
"One of the overarching, dominant themes of those Bayrock lines of business has been the fraudulent concealment of the substantial degree to which it was owned directly or equitably by Felix Sater, who was represented at various times at least during the period 2002 to 2008 to be its Chief Operating Officer and at times as its Managing Director.
"Another overarching, dominant theme of Bayrock's lines has been the fraudulent concealment of Felix Sater's conviction for racketeering, to which he secretly pled guilty in 1998, admitting to participating in the operation of a pump-and-dump stock fraud, along with members of Russian and Mafia organized crime, which defrauded investors, many of them senior citizens, including Holocaust survivors, of at a minimum $40,000,000, now in today's dollars some $150,000,000 of stolen wealth as measured by the 'well managed account' theory.