{"id":284546,"date":"2026-07-02T04:23:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T04:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/284546\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T04:23:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T04:23:15","slug":"news-12-long-island-151","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/284546\/","title":{"rendered":"News 12 | Long Island"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Kings Point man was convicted Wednesday of stealing two Harlem brownstones worth nearly $5 million through a long-running real estate fraud scheme, Attorney General Letitia James announced.<\/p>\n

Joseph Makhani was found guilty of two counts of criminal possession of stolen property and one count of scheme to defraud.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors said Makhani used fake deeds, forged documents and shell companies to take control of the properties. In one case, an elderly homeowner was forced into a homeless shelter, despite being the rightful owner of a brownstone valued at nearly $3 million.<\/p>\n

Authorities said Makhani falsely claimed he purchased the first property, on West 118th Street, for $10. He later said on a mortgage application he paid $975,000 for the building and used that to secure a $650,000 construction loan. <\/p>\n

He collected more than $12,000 a month in rent from 2016 through 2023 without providing any proceeds to the true owner. <\/p>\n

The property was valued at about $2.9 million in 2023.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Prosecutors said Makhani acquired a second brownstone on West 131st Street using another fraudulent deed scheme. He allegedly obtained a tenant’s signature under the guise of him being the new owner and offering the man a job. He then filed a fraudulent deed using that signature to say that the owner of the building transferred the property to a company he controlled. <\/p>\n

He later tried to evict tenants and filed a lawsuit against them, but questions arose about the legitimacy of his ownership claim emerged during eviction proceedings. <\/p>\n

The property was valued at about $1.8 million.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Makhani faces a maximum sentence of 8 1\/3 to 25 years in prison on the top charge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Kings Point man was convicted Wednesday of stealing two Harlem brownstones worth nearly $5 million through a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-284546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284546","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=284546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}