Now they have identical handcuffs — and sentences.
A pair of evil, identical twin securities crooks were sent off, sobbing, to serve at least 3 1/2 years prison today for a $2 million investment Ponzi scheme.
Over the past 10 years, Makara Nkhereanye and his brother Tsele, 39, ripped off more than 30 investors — starting with their own mother, Manhattan prosecutors said at sentencing.
“Guys, I trusted you,” education administrator Ken Williams, 53, of Harlem, said in a victim impact statement. “Over ten years we worked together, had dinner together… This is a sad day. I don’t what’s hurting me more — the trust issue or the loss of funds.”
The Nkhereanye brothers, who grew up on the Lower East Side, were so intelligent, they won slots at top city high schools and Ivy League universities — Makara attending Princeton and Tsele attending Stanford.
By 1999 they had gambled, and lost, their mother’s $180 retirement savings, said assistant district attorney Kim Han.
“They wanted it the easy way,” Han said. “Why work when they can just con it out of people?”
Victims — mostly the twins’ own friends and friends-of-friends — were told they would never lose their initial investment. Money stolen from new investors would pay off old investors in a classic Ponzi scheme.
Each twin made a tearful statement, begging for mercy.
“My betrayal of you and your families hurts so much,” wept Makara. “This pain has punctured my soul,” blubbered Tsele.
“They are not twin Bernard Madoffs, despite what the prosecutor tells you,” insisted Makara’s lawyer, Gene Conway.
Ultimately, though, they were sentenced to the maximum promised them by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon.
“The futures that they had were really thrown away,” the judge said. “That’s the big question — why they would do this, as intelligent as they are.”
As for the identical sentences, Solomon noted, “There’s no distinguishing one from the other, as far as who did more and who did less.”