He Ponzi schemed out of Brooklyn in the ’90s, then Ponzi schemed $31 million more in a Manhattan case to pay it back — all the while writing another million dollars in bad checks.
No wonder that the more than 100 victims of real estate investment swindler Joseph Greenblatt — sentenced in Manhattan today to at least six years prison — call him a compulsive dream wrecker.
“He is a financial predator and a genetic sociopath,” said victim Stephen Coffey of Sarasota, Fla, who like most of Greenblatt’s victims was robbed of his retirement savings. Coffey weighed in on the sentencing via an audio statement played aloud in Manhattan Supreme Court, telling the judge, “All our hopes and dreams have been crushed by Joseph Greenblatt.”
Greenblatt, “turned our…dream years into a life of mediocrity and endless depression,” agreed victims Lyle and Rita Maldoon in a written statement read into the record by Assistant District Attorney Michael Kitsis.
Greenblatt and his company, Maywood Capital, plundered the IRAs and family trusts of his victims by promising them safe returns on a series of buy-and-flip real estate ventures primarily involving Harlem brownstones.
He has been incarcerated since 2007 on his convictions in a nearly identical Ponzi scheme in Brooklyn, along with a federal housing fraud case also from Brooklyn.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley handed down a six-to-18-year sentence over the objections of prosecutors, who had asked for a sentence of 10 to 30 years. Under the sentence, he’ll become eligible for parole in roughly six years.
“Crimes committed in office suites are often as those committed on city streets,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance said in a statement issued after the sentencing. “Ponzi schemes harm individuals who lose savings, and also hurt the integrity of our financial markets,” he said, promising his office will seek prison where appropriate for investment swindlers.