The convoluted legal saga involving $2 million dollars in missing escrow money, a year-long attempt to recover that money in the Brooklyn court system, and the so far successful campaign to stymie that effort by Brooklyn Democratic Party power broker Frank Seddio is only getting more elaborate and intriguing.
Seddio's co-defendant in a federal lawsuit, the lawyer from whose escrow account the millions went missing, is now claiming that he was tricked into giving the money away. Meanwhile, a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge has resigned while under an ethics investigation for similar escrow shenanigans (and resulting lawsuits) involving many of the same shifting cast of characters—represented in some of the resulting lawsuits by Seddio.
For those who haven't been obsessively following this saga, in 2024, a pair of investors, Angelos Metaxas and Pertshire Investments LLP, put $2 million dollars in the escrow account of a Brooklyn lawyer, Mark David Graubard, to show that they had the funds to take part in a business deal with a Brooklyn businessman named Yechiel "Sam" Sprei. When the deal fell through, the investors tried to get their money back, without success.
To their surprise, they suddenly found themselves sued in Kings County Supreme Court by people and entities they'd never heard of, represented by Frank Seddio: Olden LLC and its manager, Jonathan Rubin. Seddio used unorthodox legal maneuvers—making emergency ex parte motions to seek restraining orders and open the lawsuit without filing a complaint, delaying the proceedings, and creating conflicts that compelled multiple judges to withdraw from the case—that kept the case in limbo for nearly a year.
At a hearing on January 14 in Brooklyn Supreme Court, it was finally revealed that the money was gone, the escrow account closed, and that the same day the investors' money came in, $2.5 million was wired back out to a mysterious LLC, 536 Holdings. Moreover, the investors lawyers told the court, bank records showed that money from the escrow account was also paid to Seddio's law firm, at the same time that Seddio and Graubard were supposedly on opposite sides of the Kings County suit.
In the weeks since, new court filings and a judicial ethics report have reinforced the ways that Metaxas and Pertshire's case is intricately linked to roughly a dozen others involving similar allegations and many of the same people. Reappearing in many of these cases as an attorney for the alleged fraudsters is Seddio, the Brooklyn Democratic Party boss who boasts of his role in getting Brooklyn judges appointed.