Re: 10/31/99 - MONMOUTH: Internet stock-consulting business spanned the globe
MONMOUTH: Internet stock-consulting business spanned the globe
Published in the Home News Tribune
By SHERI TABACHNIK
STAFF WRITER
Investigators yesterday continued to search the property of a Colts Neck mansion for clues in the execution-style killing of Albert Alain Chalem and Maier Lehmann.
At 1 a.m. Tuesday, 41-year-old Chalem and 37-year-old Lehmann were found shot to death on a marble floor in the dining room of Chalem's Bluebell Road home. A long table in the sparsely furnished house was filled with papers relating to the men's online stock-promoting business, Monmouth County Prosecutor John Kaye, has said.
As of yesterday, no weapon had been found and no arrests had been made, Second Assistant Monmouth County Prosecutor Robert Honecker said.
The men most likely knew their killers, Kaye has said.
The murders, which Kaye has described as "execution-style," have sparked an investigation that reaches around the globe.
Chalem, Lehmann and an unidentified Clifton man were partners in www.stockinvestors.com, a Web site managed out of Budapest, Hungary and registered in Panama. Using electronic mail, the men talked up certain low-priced stocks to potential investors.
Once buyers bit, they sold their own shares for a profit.
Lehmann, who in January paid the government $630,000 to settle an SEC lawsuit that charged him with illegally manipulating stock prices to rob investors of $12 million, was once an FBI informant in an insurance scam probe.
The scene of the killings was a sprawling white colonial surrounded by a black-and-gold wrought-iron fence and owned by Russell Candela of Brooklyn, N.Y., and East Hampton, N.Y., the father of Chalem's fiance. Candela purchased the house in December for $1.1 million. His daughter, Kimberly Scarola, 39, her son, Jeffrey, 13, and Chalem moved into their new home in the beginning of the summer. Neither Scarola or her son was home at the time of the murders.
"What they're saying in the papers are lies," Candela has said, adding that his daughter loved Chalem and was devastated by the murders. "You didn't know him. He was a great guy, real strong."
At Lehmann's Orthodox Jewish funeral, which took place on what should have been the couple's 15th wedding anniversary, his wife, Tamir Lehmann, grieved alongside the couple's five young children. Several family members cried as they eulogized a man his brother called "generous to a fault."
Both men were buried last week after the county medical examiner performed autopsies on their bodies.
Chalem had been shot once in the chest, and five times in the head and neck. Lehmann, of Woodmere, N.Y., died after being hit by four bullets, one in the leg and three in the head.
Kaye has said there were signs of a struggle. Both men were found face down with cellular telephones inches from their right hands.
The business partners were found dead when two of Chalem's friends arrived at his house intending to spend the night there, Kaye has said. Chalem's friends, who had been in frequent phone contact with him throughout the day, were unable to reach him after about 8:30 p.m., Kaye has said.
October 31, 1999
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