By Anthony M. Destefano
Newsday
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Once businessman Decio Roizman was locked up in the federal detention center in Brooklyn, prosecutors say, he should have stayed out of more trouble.
But while he was kept in the jail awaiting sentencing in early 2006 for jumping bail in a bank fraud case, Roizman, 36, conned a fellow inmate and his family out of hundreds of thousands through a scheme to hire lawyers who never took his case, prosecutors said yesterday.
“This is a case about a simple scam, a simple scam that worked,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Silver in opening statements in Roizman’s trial for fraud before Judge Edward Korman in U.S. District Court, Brooklyn.
Roizman befriended a desperate and depressed Canadian businessman who had been arrested for money laundering and then manipulated him into turning over $300,000 in cash, Silver told jurors.
Silver said Roizman, using outside accomplices, was able to persuade his jailhouse friend and victim, investment banker Martin Tremblay, to have his family wire-transfer the funds to bank accounts in Florida and Switzerland that Roizman controlled. The lawyers Roizman promised would help Tremblay - who was convicted earlier this year of the money laundering - never materialized, according to Silver.
But defense attorney Len Kamdang painted Tremblay, 45, as a savvy financial expert.
“Nobody was pulling the wool over Mr. Tremblay’s eyes,” said Kamdang, who said Tremblay was trying to talk his way out of trouble by cooperating with the government.
Tremblay, a native of Quebec, took the stand as the first government witness and described his career as a certified accountant in Canada who ultimately took over his family’s real estate business. After moving with his family to the Bahamas in 1994, Tremblay said, he set up his own financial consultancy until in 2005 he took a job as a managing director with the subsidiary of a Swiss bank.
Tremblay said he was arrested on the money laundering charges in January 2006 in a stingby federal agents. He is serving a 4-year sentence. Tremblay admitted on the stand that he agreed to send $20,000 in drug proceeds to a lawyer whom the agents wanted to work with in the Bahamas.
During questioning by Silver, Tremblay said he met Roizman in the Brooklyn jail and found him to be “helpful and generous with people.”
Frustrated with the lack of progress in his case with his initial lawyers and their inability to get bail, Tremblay said, he turned to Roizman and got his family to wire funds to hire the lawyers.
During cross examination by defense attorney Mildred Whalen, Tremblay admitted he never learned the names of the attorneys Roizman was in contact with.
Copyright 2007 Newsday