A Judge's Illicit and Uncashable Check Was Supposed to Make the Case of the Missing $2 Million Go Away. It Didn't.

Multimillion-dollar bounced checks. Panicked, late-night texts between lawyers. Blurred lines between the Brooklyn worlds of alleged repeat fraudsters and the political circles that help nominate the judges who may hear their cases.

New testimony and court records in unfolding state and federal lawsuits are painting a clearer picture of the financial connections that link a crew of alleged scammers, a disgraced State Supreme Court justice, Brooklyn Democratic Party powerbroker Frank Seddio, and $2 million in missing escrow money. 

If you're not up to speed on our ongoing coverage of this story, the abbreviated version up until now goes like this: In 2024, two international investors, Angelos Metaxas and Pertshire Investments, put $2 million in the escrow account of a Brooklyn lawyer, Mark David Graubard, to prove that they had sufficient 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. 

Along the way, they found themselves sued in Brooklyn State Supreme Court by Seddio, acting as an attorney for Olden LLC, a company they'd never heard of. That lawsuit confounded their efforts to get their money back for the better part of a year, only to have it revealed in January that their money was gone from almost the moment it hit Graubard's escrow account. In violation of their escrow contract, Graubard had passed the money on to an anonymous LLC at the direction of Sprei, according to testimony and court records.