Probe of unsolved murders in Colts Neck looks at fraud angle
Published in the Asbury Park Press 6/15/00
By JAMES W. PRADO ROBERTS
and PETER EICHENBAUMSTAFF WRITERS
A FEDERAL GRAND jury in Newark is investigating numerous people for stock fraud, tax evasion and other possible crimes in connection with two penny-stock promoters who were gunned down in a Colts Neck mansion last year.
The grand jury investigation -- which is looking only into the shooting victims' business dealings and not the murders -- centers on hundreds of business deals, worth millions of dollars, that also may involve money laundering and theft, two sources said.
The suspected illegal deals were conducted across the country and around the globe and included the manipulation of specific stocks at the expense of unwitting investors, the sources said.
The transactions under investigation were exposed in the wake of the Oct. 25 killings of Maier S. Lehmann, Woodmere, N.Y., and Albert Alain Chalem, Colts Neck, when an assailant or assailants used two guns to fire 10 bullets into the men and left them for dead in Chalem's dining room.
In other developments in the case, Chalem's longtime fiancee, Kimberly Scarola, and Lehmann's wife, Tamar, have been cleared as suspects, according to First Assistant Monmouth County Prosecutor Alton D. Kenney. And tests for dog DNA, which Monmouth County Prosecutor John Kaye had hoped would lead to an arrest, have failed to do so.
Nearly eight months after the killings, the investigators still have not narrowed the list of suspects, Kenney said.
The federal investigation focusing on the financial transactions began almost immediately after the killings and is being presented to the grand jury in Newark by Assistant U.S. Attorney John J. Carney. That investigation is separate from the Monmouth County prosecutor's office probe of the murders themselves.
Carney would not confirm or deny that he was conducting an investigation into the matter.
Chalem and Lehmann were involved in promoting inexpensive stocks on the Internet at the time of the killings, according to prosecutors, and their killing sent a shock wave through the investment world, which had considered itself immune to such violent crime.
But in recent years, Internet stock fraud has grown.
Yesterday, 120 people -- including members of all five of New York's mob families -- were indicted in Manhattan on charges of taking part in the largest securities fraud in U.S. history. Much of the fraud was conducted using the Internet to hype companies, some which were wrongly touted as "dot-com" companies poised to benefit from rising interest in Net stocks, the indictments and complaints charged.
Chalem, 41, and Lehmann, 37, also were involved in hyping stocks on the Internet. Prosecutors have said Lehmann and Chalem were partners in a Web site, www.stockinvestor.com, that was used to pitch low-price stocks, or penny stocks, to investors. The Web site, which is no longer available on the Net, was registered in Panama and managed in Budapest, Hungary.
The website promoted two companies at the time of the killings: Global Datatel Inc., a Delray Beach, Fla., company specializing in installing and operating computer network systems in South America, and BigHub.com Inc., an Internet search-engine and shopping-portal company based in San Antonio. Both are having financial difficulties.
It is not publicly known whether Chalem and Lehmann were financially involved in these companies.
Mark Vincent, a Freehold securities lawyer who represents Global Datatel, said he did not know if anybody in the company has been contacted by investigators.
A BigHub representative did not return a call yesterday.
Both Lehmann and Chalem had shady business associations.
Chalem had worked in the now-defunct brokerage house A.S. Goldmen, which has an office in Woodbridge. A Manhattan grand jury indicted the brokerage last summer on charges of running a criminal enterprise that bilked investors out of nearly $100 million. Chalem was not among the 33 indicted.
In 1998, Lehmann paid $630,000 to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges that he helped illegally manipulate the stock of a small company that cheated unsuspecting investors of $12 million.
Since the killings, the county prosecutor's office has maintained that a business deal gone awry led to a "professional hit" motivated by revenge. Kenney, the assistant prosecutor, said the investigations were separated because the U.S. Attorney's Office is better equipped to deal with the possible international financial crimes in this case.
"The United States attorney's office in Newark is in cooperative effort with us in reviewing many of the financial areas concerning Mr. Chalem and Mr. Lehmann," Kenney said. "This has been ongoing from the early stages of the investigation."
Monmouth County continues to pursue leads to the killing but has not narrowed the list of potential suspects, Kenney said. While Scarola and Tamar Lehmann have been ruled out as suspects, Kenney said Tamar Lehmann was "initially hesitant to come forward." She since has been very cooperative and provided many helpful details in the case, Kenney said.
Once Tamar Lehmann cooperated with the authorities, Kenney said, he wrote a letter to the insurance company that held Maier Lehmann's life insurance policy clearing her as a suspect. That paved the way for the company to write a check to Tamar Lehmann. Kenney said the dollar val-ue of the insurance policy was "sub-stantial."
Her lawyer, Jack Arseneault, a promi-nent criminal trial lawyer based in Chatham, said Tamar Lehmann was always very willing to help the Mon-mouth County investigators. But be-cause she had learned that she might be a suspect, and because her insur-ance company would not issue a death benefit until she was cleared by the prosecutors as a suspect, she sought legal advice.
As a result of her cooperation, "it was obvious that she was not involved," Arseneault said.
All 10 bullets fired at Chalem and Lehmann hit their targets, prosecu-tors have said. Two guns were used, but prosecutors would not say wheth-er two people pulled the triggers. Chalem was shot in the eyes, ears, mouth and back, while Lehmann was shot in the leg and three times in the back of his head.
In February, Prosecutor Kaye told the Asbury Park Press that there could be an arrest within a few weeks and said it hinged in part of the results of DNA examination that investigators were conducting on dog samples. Kaye would not say why the dog DNA was needed, but hair or saliva or other bodily fluids left behind by a dog can be matched for DNA much as DNA samples left behind by humans can be tested and compared.
Chalem kept two English bulldogs, Sophia and Spikey, to whom he was devoted and from whom he was rarely separated, according to people who knew him.
When Chalem's and Lehmann's bodies were found in Chalem's dining room by his friend Allen Lloyd Conkling and another man in the early morning hours of Oct. 26, the two dogs were in Chalem's bedroom, the door to which was open.
"We were hopeful," said Kenney, "It didn't work out."James W. Prado Roberts: (732) 922-6000, Ext. 4317, or jwr@app.com
Published on June 15, 2000
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