Re: November 7, 1999: A. S. Goldmen: Gangland-style killings rock stock world
Story by GINA EDWARDS
Photos by DAN WAGNER
COLTS NECK, N.J. - Sprays of gold, red and brown leaves hang over the two-lane roads that wind through western Monmouth County, where pristine views of rolling pasture lined with split-rail fences lead to giant colonial mansions.
Monmouth, whose eastern edge touches the Jersey shore, is a bedroom community to New York City.
Two weeks ago, the city's violence shattered this quaint place - home to horse breeders, Wall Street executives, rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and, according to local lore, mobsters who pay for their mansions with suitcases stuffed with cash.
In a white brick mansion in Monmouth County's tiny Colts Neck township late on Oct. 25, two stock promoters were executed in a gangland style shooting.
Albert Alain Chalem, 41, was shot once in the chest and five times in the head and neck. The other man, 37-year-old Maier Lehmann, was shot once in the leg and three times in the head.
The victims, partners in a stock-touting web site, traveled in the shady world of penny stocks - a world authorities say has been infiltrated by Italian and Russian organized crime in recent years. It's that world where the defunct Naples-based brokerage A.S. Goldmen & Co. played a key role before its demise last year.
One of the victims used to work at A.S. Goldmen.
Five of the defendants in a stock fraud investigation involving A.S. Goldmen live in Monmouth County, in towns within five miles of where the killings occurred.
At the Colts Neck General Store, where red-checked curtains adorn the windows, a clerk there said locals are saying one thing about the killings. "Mob," said Ginger Spicer.
Ron Avery, a local cab driver, said people speculate that organized crime figures live in Monmouth. "This area is so hush-hush. It's an aristocratic area."
Plain and simple, he said, the killings are probably about money.
Tangle of leads
Chalem and Lehmann recently ran the web site stockinvestor.com, registered in Hungary, that promotes small and risky company stocks to investors.
Prosecutors are considering whether the victims' violent deaths are linked to an organized crime business deal in the penny stock world gone bad.
Investigators are also looking into the possibility that someone may have decided the men, one of whom had once worked for A.S. Goldmen, talked too much. Perhaps, say some, the killings intended to send a message to other would-be informants.
An A.S. Goldmen connection to the killings is one possibility, Monmouth County Prosecutor John Kaye said. An SEC case that involved Lehmann is another.
"The problem with this case is it has too many interesting parts, cons and scams," Kaye said. "There's too many trails to go down...It's almost like a maze in which these men were involved."
Detectives with the Monmouth County prosecutors office are untangling voluminous leads to solve the murders. Twenty Monmouth detectives are on the case sharing information with the FBI, New Jersey State Police, federal and state securities regulators and the Manhattan District Attorney's office, Monmouth County prosecutors say.
"We haven't ruled out any theories as to why they were killed," said Robert Honecker, second chief assistant prosecutor for Monmouth.
Naples brokerage case
Naples and Monmouth are joined by the lives of twin brothers from Brooklyn - Anthony and Salvatore Marchiano, who've made their homes in these affluent communities in Florida and New Jersey with money New York prosecutors say came on the backs of cheated investors.
The 38-year-old brothers opened their brokerage more than a decade ago and named the firm A.S. Goldmen, initials for Anthony and Salvatore, the men who make gold.
Dozens of former A.S. Goldmen brokers have cycled in and out of penny stock brokerages identified as mob-connected by authorities in the last decade, an investigation by the Naples Daily News shows.
In July, a Manhattan grand jury indicted the Marchiano brothers and 31 others who were accused of running a corrupt enterprise that prosecutors say bilked investors of $100 million over the course of six years in myriad stock crimes. The Marchiano brothers are fighting the charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau in the case that's still in the very early stages in a Manhattan state court.
Anthony Marchiano's attorney told the Naples Daily News that Marchiano is a victim of mob extortion directed at A.S. Goldmen house stocks back in 1995, and that will play a role his the defense.
Silenced?
One of the Colts Neck murder victims, Chalem, worked at A.S. Goldmen in 1994 and 1995. Known to law enforcement as a would-be snitch in the penny stock world, Chalem had provided some information on the A.S. Goldmen case, the New York Times reported.
The other victim, Lehmann, paid a $630,000 penalty to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission last year for participating in a $10 million stock manipulation scheme.
The Newark Star-Ledger also reported that Lehmann provided information to federal authorities following his indictment in a 1992 insurance fraud scam and helped convict many of the more than 100 people charged.
Since the killings, reporters from all over have swamped the Monmouth prosecutor's office with calls about the Colts Neck killings in the past two weeks, more than 50 a day in the beginning.
"We seem to have generated a thousand other detectives out there who want to solve this case," Honecker said.
Those detectives include on-line sleuths who started an Internet chat group about the killings on the popular web site, SiliconInvestor.com.
The Killings
Information released by prosecutors and garnered from neighbors and public records reveal this about the killings:
Chalem lived in a $1.1 million mansion on Bluebell Road with his girlfriend, Kimberly Scarola and her 13-year-old son. Scarola's father, Russell Candela, owns the house.
He bought it in December 1998. Land records show that Chalem and Scarola had planned to buy the house in October 1998, but the purchase fell through.
Chalem and his girlfriend moved in sometime early in the summer and construction crews began fixing up the five-year-old mansion that had been vacant and on the market for years. The couple installed an ornate horse-clad water fountain in the front yard, a decoration that stands out in the neighborhood of trim and tidy properties.
The surrounding homes are spread out on Bluebell Road. It's not a place where people get to know their neighbors much, said one Bluebell Road resident.
The night of the killings, Chalem and Lehmann wore business attire, although Chalem donned a baseball cap.
Chalem sat at a 20-foot-long conference table in the dining room of the sparsely furnished mansion the night he died, business papers sprawled in front of him.
Friends spoke to the two men about 8 p.m. Later around 1 a.m., two friends discovered the dead men, their bodies in a pool of blood on the marble dining room floor, and called 911. The victims' cellular phones lay next to their bodies, along with a cordless phone.
Detectives found no signs of force entry. The doors weren't locked. Prosecutors believe the victims knew their killer or killers.
Local engineers have analyzed the trajectory of the bullets. And detectives have submitted bullet casings found at the scene to the state's crime lab for ballistics tests. "We have a lot of physical evidence," Honecker said.
The ballistics results, due back in about four to six weeks, should reveal if more than one gun and more than one killer were involved.
Detectives have removed boxes of business files and are searching a computer removed from the mansion for clues.
Known to regulators
John McDermott is a U.S. Postal inspector in New York who has investigated federal organized crime on Wall Street cases.
The cases include one in June that snared a dozen A.S. Goldmen alumni and 73 others. Another is the 1997 case involving Ian Richard Hosang, a former A.S. Goldmen broker who pleaded guilty in March to charges he ran a stock scheme for the Gambino organized crime family at another brokerage after he left Goldmen.
McDermott said Chalem and Lehmann were well-known to securities regulators and law enforcement. The two men had many enemies, he said. "They've been pretty shady characters all their lives," McDermott said.
The specter of the Colts Neck killings and possible links to the penny stock world have heightened concerns over the security of witnesses - including 20 cooperating accomplices - in the A.S. Goldmen stock fraud case.
Those concerns, expressed by the Manhattan District Attorney's office, are the backdrop for the A.S. Goldmen case as the legal proceedings move forward.
A.S. Goldmen, which had offices at various times in New York, New Jersey and Naples, was a major player in the murky world of penny stocks before the firm closed its doors last year. Prosecutors say during its hey-day, the firm employed 300 brokers.
A Naples Daily News investigation found that at least 50 former A.S. Goldmen brokers also worked at one time for Meyers Pollock Robbins, a firm linked in to a 1997 federal indictment that included "capos" or captains in the Genovese and Bonanno organized crime families.
Nearly three dozen former A.S. Goldmen brokers also worked at Hanover Sterling, the firm named in a June federal indictment with ties to Russian and Italian organized crime groups.
A former A.S. Goldmen broker now working in Red Bank, also in Monmouth County, said he believes Chalem's death likely had no connection to Goldmen.
"There've been a lot of brokers who've come and gone from Goldmen," said the broker, who worked for Goldmen's Iselin, NJ office and asked not to be identified. "Everybody wanted to work for Goldmen."
Now, the violence of the penny stock world has hit home in Monmouth County, the place where Salvatore Marchiano and four other defendants in the A.S. Goldmen case, call home.
Machiano's home is in Freehold, the hub of western Monmouth. The small town with a narrow Main Street is dotted with antique shops, Victorian homes and a white steeple church with a sandwich board out front advertising a roast beef dinner on Saturday night.
Answering the door to his $400,000 colonial home wearing jeans and a black shirt, Salvatore Marchiano expresses surprise over the killings nearly in his backyard.
At least one of the victims was a stranger, he adds.
I'm totally shocked," said Salvatore, of the two stock promoters' deaths.
"Nobody's ever heard of (Chalem)," said Marchiano.
"He didn't work at the firm." he added, declining further comment.
Other Goldmen ties
Less than two miles from Salvatore's house in Freehold is the neighborhood where John and Chris DelCioppo, two indicted brokers who worked in A.S. Goldmen's Naples office, grew up. The brothers, 28 and 26 respectively, have since moved home to Freehold.
Their parents put up the family's modest split-level house in Freehold as bail for the brothers.
Until a year ago, Salvatore and his wife lived in a $700,000 home in the same neighborhood in nearby Marlboro as Stuart Winkler, A.S. Goldmen's indicted chief financial officer.
Prosecutors say Winkler helped mastermind stock schemes at A.S. Goldmen and used his knowledge as a former securities regulator to conceal illegal activity. Winkler has denied wrong doing.
Winkler answered the door at his gray brick mansion on Thursday, but declined to comment.
Christopher Panza, another indicted former A.S. Goldmen broker who lives in a white-brick colonial near Winkler, also declined to talk, as did Chris DelCioppo.
Talk of the town
Still, among average residents in around Colts Neck and Freehold, the killings are the talk of the town.
Local residents say they don't feel threatened by the violence and few people say they knew Chalem. He hadn't developed many community ties.
"The conclusion is leading that it was a hit," said Colts Neck Mayor Lillian Burry.
Her office in Colts Neck is tucked neatly inside the small white-pillared Town Hall with hardwood floors and colonial style Windsor chairs for the five members of the township committee.
Colts Neck is a quiet, affluent place and the violent killings are contrary to the town's character, the mayor said.
"It might be a sanctuary for someone trying to keep a low profile," she said.
The Town Hall and next door police station that front a pond home to black swans and Canadian geese, are less than a mile from the mansion where the murders took place.
"I think people feel separated from it," Burry said. "It doesn't touch them."
Although Chalem and Lehmann lived in Colts Neck, Burry said, they operated in a different world than local residents.
"It's not a world people want to know about."
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