Visiting senior Judge Michael A. Ponsor for the District of Massachusetts will be presiding over the jury trial starting today.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric S. O’Malley, the prosecutor, said: “The evidence at trial will show that over the course of the scheme, [Reksid] repeated a pattern of telling victims that, among other things, he needed to wire money to pay taxes and fees to release ‘his money’ in a New York bank account.”
Reksid then wire transferred the victims’ money, but to locations in Africa, not New York, O’Malley added.
“Time and again he returned to the same victims, asking for more of their money and then writing it promptly away, never to be seen again. He promised always that their next installment would trigger a windfall, which would enable him to repay all of their prior ‘loans’ and more. It was an ongoing scheme of which wire transfers played an integral part,” O’Malley said.
The prosecutor added that the superseding indictment contained the essential elements of wire fraud.
In his submitted response, Mark Hanson, Reksid’s court-appointed defense counsel, argued that “the [U.S.] government’s response suggests a material amendment to or variance from the superseding indictment.”
“Counts two through eight refer to seven very specific wire transfers that have no rational connection to the alleged scheme to defraud individuals out of money by making misrepresentations about the nature of Mr. Reksid’s need for the money, not the location to which Mr. Reksid was going to wire money — a fact which the superseding indictment itself alleges was not told to any of the victims,” Hanson stated.
Such language in the superseding indictment, Hanson added, “does not save the indictment from being defective.”
In this case, Hanson said “the superseding indictment fails to allege any wire transfer that was actually in furtherance of the scheme to defraud as alleged in the superseding indictment — the facts presented to the grand jury. The superseding indictment is fatally defective and should be dismissed.”
The federal government has filed a superseding indictment on March 18, 2011, charging Reksid with seven counts of wire fraud and one count of bribery concerning a program receiving federal funds which he denied.
According to the superseding indictment, Reksid received a bribe of $3,000 from the owner and president of a business engaged in a series of transactions with DPL involving EPA Brownfields grants on or about Feb. 12, 2009.
During this period, the indictment added, Reksid also borrowed money from friends, associates and family members that accumulated to $300,000 and wired them to unidentified persons based in Ivory Coast and Lagos, Nigeria whom he met on the internet.
Reksid managed to obtain the loans through false pretenses that he had substantial sums in a bank account in New York, which he never had, and that he needed to pay some attorney fees to “unlock” it, the indictment stated.
