Eliyahu “Eli” Weinstein, a 45-year-old former used car salesman from Lakewood, had a history of preying on others in his tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community, authorities said.
He ran a $200 million Ponzi scheme involving a virtual portfolio of fake real estate investments and land deals, authorities said. Then while awaiting trial in what was called one of the largest cases of fraud they’d encountered, he struck again with a new con game. He duped an investor in a $6.7 million scam involving claims he had an inside track on hard-to-get shares of the Facebook initial public offering, they said.
Pleading guilty to both charges, Weinstein was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump commuted his sentence, citing the support of Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd Dist., the former Democrat-turned-Republican who earlier this month joined a majority of his House Republican colleagues in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The president’s statement also referred to “numerous victims” who have written in support.
“Mr. Weinstein is the father of seven children and a loving husband. He is currently serving his eighth year of a 24-year sentence for a real estate investment fraud and has maintained an exemplary prison history. Upon his release, he will have strong support from his community and members of his faith,” the president wrote.
Alan Dershowitz, the law professor who represented Trump during his impeachment trial, represented Weinstein in his bid for clemency.
New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, who had been one of the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Weinstein in federal court, expressed his anger at the decision to grant him clemency.
“I’m disgusted,” he said in a statement. “It’s no surprise that President Trump granted clemency to Eli Weinstein: it’s one huckster commuting the sentence of another. Both men have consumed far more of my professional life than I ever wanted, and I’m not going to spend more time thinking about them now.”
Weinstein was among 140 people who were either pardoned or had their sentences commuted by the president early Wednesday morning. They included the president’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, rapper Lil Wayne, as well as friends and political allies
The president last month also pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is a senior White House adviser.
Before Wednesday, Trump had granted clemency to 94 people, including 49 he issued in the week before Christmas.
Even before he became the focus of federal prosecutors, Weinstein had been the target of countless civil lawsuits over the years by investors who claimed he took advantage of the trust he enjoyed in his own community, and accused him of bilking them out of tens of millions of dollars.
In the civil fraud complaints filed against him, he was accused by former partners in North America and Europe of taking more than $470 million through complex real estate deals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Great Britain and Israel. The deals, they allege, never materialized and the money disappeared.
Many of his transactions involved those who knew him, or were introduced to him by others in the Orthodox community. One of his deals involved Solomon Dwek, long before Dwek himself became the infamous informant behind the biggest corruption and money laundering sting in New Jersey history.
Indicted in 2010, Weinstein was criminally charged by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey in a real estate investment scheme stretching from New Jersey, Florida and California to Israel, soliciting investments for properties he either never owned or had already sold.
As part of the conditions for Weinstein remaining free on bail, he was prohibited from engaging in any monetary transaction in excess of $1,000 without approval of a special counsel named to the case.
FBI agents escort Weinstein from his home in Lakewood after he was arrested in 2010.Andrew Mills | Star-Ledger file photo
But soon after he was charged, Weinstein concocted a new scheme, prosecutors later alleged. Federal investigators said he convinced an investor that he had the inside track on the public offering of Facebook in what was then the hottest stock offering in internet history. He claimed he had “special access” to the hard-to-get shares in the social networking company’s highly sought initial public offering in 2012.
There were no shares of Facebook. According to a 2013 criminal complaint, Weinstein used the money to mostly pay for his mounting legal fees, take his home out of foreclosure, support a Brooklyn synagogue and send his kids to religious school — as well as fund his own investments, including a gold deal in Africa.
“Shamelessly, he even used the money he stole to pay the legal fees he accumulated from the previous scam,” said then-U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman at the time.
He ultimately pleaded guilty in the two separate cases and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
Weinstein later appealed both cases, seeking to withdraw his first plea and toss out the second set of charges. In that appeal, he claimed the judge was tainted for the second case because he oversaw the plea deal in the first case. He also argued his lawyer had a conflict of interest because he had advised investors so was also at risk of prosecution, and that the Facebook case amounted to double jeopardy.
But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals Third Circuit rebuffed those claims.
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Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL.