A recently-resigned Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge was arrested for stealing more than $4.3 million from investors in a real estate scam he hatched with a realtor, federal authorities said Wednesday.
Edward Harold King was taken into custody along with real estate investor Sam Sprei and charged with wire fraud conspiracy for allegedly swiping money from an escrow account they set up on a real estate deal in Freehold, N.J.
King, an attorney, was a Supreme Court judge from June 2024 to December 2025, when he agreed to resign from office as federal investigators intensified their probe into the fraud complaint for which he was arrested for Wednesday.
Both King and Sprei are expected to be arraigned on the charges in Brooklyn Federal Court Wednesday afternoon.
“The defendants stole millions of dollars from investors by cynically leveraging King’s position as a sitting judge to lend false legitimacy to supposed investment opportunities,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said in a statement. “Today’s arrests demonstrate that this Office will hold accountable those who exploit victims for their own financial gain.”
While King was a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, both he and Sprei, who also goes by “Yechiel Sprei,” “Shimon Sprei,” and “Eli Shapiro,” hatched a plan to bilk real estate investors, federal investigators said in their criminal complaint against the pair.
Sprei reeled two real estate investors into purchasing a multi-million property in Freehold he claimed was going into bankruptcy and would be going up for auction. But before they could purchase the property, Sprei demanded that they showed “proof of liquidity” by depositing funds into an escrow account set up by King.
The investors wired $6.5 million into the escrow account on Feb. 26, 2025, and were told King wouldn’t be able to move the money into any other accounts. They were also told they could get the money back at any time.
But within days of the money being put into the account, King began withdrawing money from it. First he withdrew $700,000, then he took out $2.7 million, federal investigators allege.
He then wired $850,000 to a bank account used by Sprei, officials said.
All told, King and Sprei allegedly took $4.3 million from the escrow account before the investors realized that Sprei never provided them with any information about when the property auction would take place.
When they demanded their money back, King pushed back, saying he would send a “notice” to a “trustee” although the escrow agreement never had mentioned a trustee before.
King then said that before they could get their money, he would have to have his own lawyer deposit the money into another account run by an unspecified court, federal authorities said.
When the property did come up for auction on March 11, 2025, the investors learned they only needed to provide an escrow deposit of $250,000, not the $6.5 million they gave King and Sprei.
In May 2025, King and Sprei returned some of the money to the investors, but it was only $1.5 million of the original sum.
Federal detectives determined King and Sprei stole the funds “for their own use,” but it wasn’t immediately clear what they spent the money on.
If convicted of wire fraud conspiracy, they could face up to 20 years in prison.