US News

Fake Israeli spy conned woman out of $20M: lawsuit

Brighton Beach man posed as an Israeli secret agent — regaling a wealthy Manhattan woman 30 years his senior with tales of intrigue and of palling around with Robert De Niro and Vladimir Putin — to try to swindle her out of $20 million of inventory from her jewelry company, court papers claim.

Now her two daughters are suing to overturn their mom’s will, which completely cut them out after they tried to expose the paramour as a con artist.

Starting in 2009, Yehuda Sadok (inset) 48, who also went by Oody Geffen, wooed septuagenarian jewelry- company owner Emilie Martin and convinced her to sell the baubles to the ruling sheik of Dubai, according to the papers, filed in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court by her daughters.

“The stories Oody told Emilie would have been rejected by [James Bond creator] Ian Fleming as ridiculous,” a lawyer for Martin’s daughters, Claudia Difabrizio, of Park Avenue, and Sarah Lee Martin of Connecticut, said in court papers.

“Oody told Emilie that he was a ‘top-five Mossad agent,’ kept a cyanide capsule in his tooth, went fishing with [Russian President] Vladamir Putin, and was friends with Robert De Niro and [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu.”

In the spring of 2009, the twice-divorced Martin, who consigned estate jewelry to stores such as Neiman Marcus, told daughter Claudia she had “a hot date.”

“I asked her who he was,” Claudia recalled in court papers. “She refused to tell me his name, claiming he was a secret agent” and she’d be “jeopardizing his cover.”

That summer, when Claudia met her mother’s beau, “Oody claimed he was supposed to have dinner with Robert De Niro, but chose to have dinner with my mother instead,” Claudia said.

Claudia later tape-recorded a conversation with her mom about Geffen’s purported spy heroics.

“They don’t carry guns. They, they, uh . . . they kill an Arab, right, just from his strength . . . just twist his neck and he died,” she told Claudia.

“Based on Oody’s story, my mother believed that the two of them would fly to Dubai, live in the sheik’s place and . . . live happily ever after,” Claudia says in the suit.

A court settlement resulted in Martin promising to quash the $20 million jewelry deal with Sadok, cut ties with him and split her company with her daughters.

But then she cut her girls out of her will, leaving the bulk of her remaining $11 million fortune to her four estranged siblings and their children, the suit says. She died in 2011 at age 78.

The daughters want to reinstate an will left everything to them .

Sadok could not immediately be reached for comment.