Re: 11/10/99 - Killings hint at a grisly message
Killings hint at a grisly message
11/10/99
By Josh Margolin and John T. Ward
STAFF WRITER
If someone was trying to send a message with the murders of two stock promoters in a Colts Neck mansion two weeks ago, it was a particularly gruesome one.
Alain Chalem, 41, was shot once in each eye, once in each ear and once in the mouth, according to an investigator who has seen the autopsy, which has not been made public.
"That's message stuff," said Howard Abadinsky, an expert on organized crime in Chicago.
"Someone heard too much, saw too much and spoke too much. You don't kill a person with five shots to the head. Obviously, someone had a bit of a poet in them," he said.
The other victim, Maier S. Lehmann, 37, was shot once in the leg, apparently while seated, and three times in the head. He is believed to have been shot first. At least two guns were used, according to prosecutors.
Lehmann and Chalem, said by prosecutors to have been partners in an Internet-based stock-promotion Web site, were found sprawled on the marble dining room floor of a house at 3 Bluebell Lane in the early morning of Oct. 26. Chalem lived in the house with his girlfriend, who was not home at the time, police said. Lehmann lived in Woodmere, N.Y.
Two weeks after the murders, police have made no arrests and have not named any suspects.
The case remains a mystery, officials acknowledge, despite a marshaling of investigative resources rarely seen in Monmouth County.
"It's one of the largest commitments of manpower we've had in the prosecutor's office," said Robert Honecker Jr., the second assistant prosecutor. Working on the probe, he said, are 20 investigators from the county's major crimes unit, the economic crimes unit, forensics and the computer crimes section.
State and local police as well as the FBI, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission and the Manhattan District Attorney's office also are involved.
Investigators in the Colts Neck case still haven't sorted out which man, if either, was the primary target, said Honecker.
"One day it's Chalem, one day it's Maier Lehmann. Who knows?" said Honecker. "At this point, it's premature to say that one was a target more than the other."
The complexity of the case -- and the various interpretations of its meaning -- can be seen in the fact that another investigator says he is not convinced that the pattern of Chalem's wounds add up to a message.
The wounds may have been inflicted randomly as Chalem was on the floor, trying to escape his killer, said that investigator, who also asked not to be identified. According to this source, the wounds were not dead center, but were near Chalem's eyes and ears.
As recounted by the source, Chalem was seated and had reached for a cell phone when the first shot was fired, smashing through the phone and knocking him to the floor. As he tried to crawl out of the room, the killer or killers apparently came around the table and fired again and again.
Complicating the case, authorities acknowledge, are the pair's murky business dealings. Each had crossed paths with players in some of the biggest penny-stock fraud cases in recent years, and Lehmann had settled a stock fraud case with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
Lehmann was also an informant, implicating brokerage firms and individuals who authorities say amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits.
Whether either man or both were targeted because they were informing on others is an open question, said Honecker.
"No one's been excluded yet and there's a lot of leads to run down," he said.
In recent days, stock market watchdogs and a Wall Street publication have described Lehmann as a voluntary witness against individuals now under indictment for a variety of penny-stock frauds.
In one case, Lehmann's information was about employees of the now-indicted firm of A.S. Goldmen, based in Naples, Fla., although there is no record he had worked for the firm, which had an office in Woodbridge. The firm and 33 officers, brokers and their spouses are under indictment for stock fraud in New York. The frauds netted $100 million in illegal profits, prosecutors allege.
Chalem had been an employee at Goldmen, but was not charged with any wrongdoing and had no record of disciplinary problems on file at the market regulating National Association of Securities Dealers.
None of the sources interviewed for this article had ever heard of Chalem as an informant.
Lehmann also implicated other unidentified individuals already under investigation for a complex web of stock-manipulation schemes, according to an official at the New Jersey Bureau of Securities who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Those individuals were said to be associates of Robert E. Brennan, the discredited founder of First Jersey Securities, but Brennan was not the object of Lehmann's information, the source said.
Lehmann approached the bureau "because of some IPO (initial public offering of stock) one of the principals screwed him out of, and he wanted to get even," according to the source.
Lehmann's cooperation was not necessarily crucial to the probes, another bureau official said. "As an investigator, you cultivate a lot of sources, and Lehmann was a source," he said. "He might not have been able to give first-hand information about deals, but he could add to the picture."
A story appearing in the current issue of Barron's supports the claim that Lehmann was peddling information and that he was motivated by revenge. The paper reported that Lehmann met with journalists at the financial publication in late 1997 to implicate one person in particular.
"Lehmann's main goal seemed to be to interest prosecutors and reporters in the financial dealings of one of his former business associates, Judah L. Wernick," Barron's reported. "Lehmann felt that he was owed money by Wernick and admitted that grudge upfront."
Lehmann's assertion, Barron's reported, was that Wernick was "the latest in a long line of front men" for Brennan.
Wernick, 37, could not be reached for comment. A woman who answered the phone at his Woodmere, N.Y., home said she was referring inquiries to her lawyer, whose name she did not have at hand. She identified herself as "the baby sitter." In response to a later call, the woman said that Wernick would have no comment.
Wernick and Lehmann lived just blocks apart in Woodmere, and worked together at the Manhattan brokerage of Patterson-Travis, often commuting together, according to Barron's. Wernick was listed in SEC filings as the firm's office manager. No information was available about Lehmann's role.
A former federal prosecutor in New York said Lehmann made the rounds among law enforcement agencies two years ago, offering evidence of wrongdoing by Patterson-Travis.
"The degree of information he was providing was so detailed that he was obviously right in the middle of the criminal conduct, even though he denied it," the former prosecutor said.
Wernick and six others are currently under federal indictment in New York for their purported roles in a stock scam that authorities contend was secretly run by Randolph Pace, the head of another shuttered brokerage firm, Rooney Pace. All have denied the charges. Three officials at a defunct brokerage, Investors Associates of Hackensack have pleaded guilty in the alleged scheme, which prosecutors allege netted $200 million.
Brennan was sued by the Bureau of Securities in 1995 over an alleged $300 million worth of illegal stock dealings he was alleged to have masterminded. In June, Brennan settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay the state $100 million, though he continues to deny any wrongdoing and is bankrupt.
Brennan could not be reached for comment. But he told Barron's that it is "preposterous and absurd" that Wernick was fronting for him in deals.
Court documents filed in 1992 as part of the state's probe of Brennan, however, said Wernick "was materially involved in key transactions which appear to be part of the manipulation" that gave Brennan an alleged $70 million profit in trading on one stock.
Last week, a Chalem friend, Ada Garay-Logan of Clifton, told The Star-Ledger that, contrary to Monmouth County Prosecutor John Kaye's assertion that Chalem and Lehmann were partners in the Web site stockinvestor.com, "They were not business partners. The family is upset. They don't know and we don't know where you get that story from."
The Web site, which touted two small stocks, has since gone offline. And Stuart Bockler, an independent stock analyst in Marlboro, is threatening to sue whomever owned the site, which he said stole his research reports.
Staff writers Kimberly Brown and Guy Sterling contributed to this report. |
