{"id":137148,"date":"2026-02-18T10:35:19","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T10:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/137148\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T10:35:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T10:35:19","slug":"news-12-brooklyn-former-darien-businessman-sentenced-to-7-5-years-in-prison-for-investment-fraud-scheme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/137148\/","title":{"rendered":"News 12 | Brooklyn | Former Darien businessman sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for investment fraud scheme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The owner of a Darien business has been sentenced to over seven years in prison and three years of supervised release for his role in a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.<\/p>\n<p>Former Darien resident John Masanotti pleaded guilty in October to one count of wire fraud and one count of tax evasion.<\/p>\n<p>Prosecutors say Masanotti used his business, Middlesex Mortgage Group, LLC, to defraud 14 clients of more than $4 million.<\/p>\n<p>They say Masanotti claimed to invest clients\u2019 money, but instead used their cash for personal expenses and as payment to other clients.<\/p>\n<p>Officials say, in addition to the fraud scheme, Masanotti failed to report to the IRS more than $3 million in income, which resulted in nearly $1 million of tax loss. They say he also lied to the FBI during the investigation and filed false records.<\/p>\n<p>Masanotti has agreed to pay restitution to the victims of his crime, as well as pay back all he owes to the IRS.<\/p>\n<p>Officials say he is scheduled to report to prison on March 19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The owner of a Darien business has been sentenced to over seven years in prison and three years&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,47784,5970,58297,396,9,24,63,37230],"class_list":{"0":"post-137148","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brooklyn","8":"tag-brooklyn","9":"tag-brooklyn-headlines","10":"tag-brooklyn-news","11":"tag-darien","12":"tag-fbi","13":"tag-financial-fraud","14":"tag-fraud","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-city","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-tax-evasion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}