Another Colts Neck murder mystery: Who shot stock promoters nearly 20 years ago?
KATHLEEN HOPKINS | ASBURY PARK PRESS | 12:39 pm EST November 26, 2018
   
Colts Neck Fire: Prosecutor identifies victims
THOMAS P. COSTELLO, USA TODAY NETWORK NEW JERSEY
Editor's Note: The murder of four family members the week of Nov. 19, 2018, in Colts Neck is not the town's only unsolved killings. In 1999, two stock promoters were gunned down in a mansion not far from the recent murders. We are reprinting this story from 2014 in the hopes that someone with new information will help solve the double murders.
[
COLTS NECK – In this wealthy community of horse farms and stately homes, an ornate statue atop a Grecian fountain stands as a silent witness to the dark secrets of the sprawling mansion behind it.
If the statue could talk, it might solve a mystery that has baffled a cadre of investigators for 19 years: who executed two penny stock promoters, gangland style, in the largely unfurnished home behind the black-and-gold, wrought-iron gates?
Nearly two decades have passed since Albert Alain Chalem and Maier Lehmann were found bullet-riddled and facedown in pools of their own blood on the marble floor of the dining room of the white, brick colonial on Bluebell Road, in a community that has boasted residents like Bruce Springsteen and Queen Latifah.
 
Albert Alain Chalem in an undated photo, with is dog, Spikey.
PRESS FILE IMAGE
More: Colts Neck fire: Investigators continue their search for clues in the killings
Although authorities still have not established the identity of the men's killer or killers, they have uncovered a tangled web of the victims' shady financial deals that could have provided more than enough motive for vengeance.
But despite the recent anniversary of the crimes on Oct. 25, 1999, details about the investigation into the homicides are almost as mysterious as the killings themselves.
Save on local news.
Don’t miss your chance for unlimited digital access to exclusive content.
$1 for 6 months. Save 98%.
Subscribe Now
The FBI's Newark and New York offices are involved in the case, as is the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office. Officials with the Prosecutor's Office won't comment because they say it is an active investigation. The FBI didn't say much more.
"The FBI cannot comment on the existence or non-existence of an investigation," Special Agent Barbara Woodruff of the FBI's Newark office said in 2014 response to a media inquiry. "Under limited circumstances, like this one, we can acknowledge an investigation is open, but do not provide any details of the investigation."
Monmouth County Prosecutor John Kaye (r) and Second Assistant Monmouth County Prosecutor Robert A. Honecker walk on the driveway of $1.1 million Colts Neck mansion where two stock promoters were murdered in 1999.
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS/IPTC
What is known is that two of Chalem's friends were planning to spend the night at the Bluebell Road mansion and had been in frequent phone contact with him on Oct. 25, 1999. But when the two friends couldn't reach Chalem after 8:30 p.m., they went to the mansion about 1 a.m. the next day and made the grisly discovery, John Kaye, Monmouth County prosecutor at the time, said in the aftermath of the killings.
The Colts Neck community gathers to remember the four members of the Caneiro family killed when fire swept through their Willow Brook Road home.
THOMAS P. COSTELLO, USA TODAY NETWORK NEW JERSEY
The 41-year-old Chalem, who lived in the mansion owned by his girlfriend's father, had been shot once in the chest and five times in the head and neck, authorities said at the time. Lehmann, 37, a married father of five from Woodmere, New York, was shot once in the leg and three times in the head, they said.
Another Colts Neck murder case is pending in court
Both were laying facedown on the marble floor of the dining room, near a long table scattered with piles of paperwork, Kaye said. Inches away from the right hands of both of the dead men were their cellular telephones, which kept ringing after they were dead, Kaye revealed then. The victims most likely knew their killers, as there were no signs of forced entry, he has said.
"We believed from the beginning it had all the earmarks of a mob-related hit," Kaye said in a recent telephone interview.
But what appeared to be crucial evidence at the scene turned out to be unfruitful, Kaye explained.
"One of the things that intrigued detectives were drops of blood that went up the semi-spiral staircase," Kaye said in the recent interview.
"Everyone had the impression the drops of blood were coming off a weapon the killer had used, and now the killer was going upstairs to look for another victim," he said.
Investigators later learned it was one of Chalem's two English bulldogs, to whom he was deeply attached, that got its nose in a pool of blood and left the bloody trail, Kaye said.
The two bulldogs, named Sophia and Spikey, were found in Chalem's bedroom, unharmed.
Police cars (above) are among the vehicles in the driveway of the Bluebell Road, Colts Neck, home where two penny stock promoters were murdered 15 years ago. Investigators (below, left) carry files and computer parts from the home. On the day of his funeral, mourners (below, right) place the casket of Maier Lehmann — one of the murder victims — in a hearse.
ASBURY PARK PRESS FILE PHOTOS
Absent from the home at the time of the murders was Chalem's girlfriend, Kimberly Scarola, and her 13-year-old son. Both had left for Florida shortly before the murders, and Chalem had planned to meet them there, authorities said.
Earlier that summer, Chalem, Scarola and the teenager moved into the mansion that Scarola's father had purchased months earlier for $1.1 million. Authorities noted after the killings that, oddly, the expensive home had hardly any furnishings in it.
Both Scarola and Lehmann's widow, Tamara, were ruled out as suspects, authorities said.
But the investigation had plenty of other directions to go in, as the dead men's questionable business dealings spanned the globe.
Colts Neck is quiet, peaceful and tight-knit. They proved just that after firefighters found four bodies in a mansion fire Tuesday.
STEPH SOLIS
Chalem and Lehmann were partners in a website registered in Panama and managed out of Budapest, Hungary, that falsely hyped high-risk, low-priced stocks that the pair would dump at a profit once their prices had been manipulated. Both men already were known to investigators probing shady investment deals. And Chalem was linked to organized crime in published reports after their deaths.
Chalem had worked at A.S. Goldmen, a defunct brokerage house that at one time received its mail at a commercial gym, Body by Boris in Red Bank. Earlier in 1999, the brokerage was charged in a Manhattan grand jury indictment with bilking investors out of almost $100 million, but Chalem was not among the 33 people who were charged.
The previous year, Lehmann paid $630,000 to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges that he illegally helped to manipulate the stock of a small company that cheated unsuspecting investors out of $12 million.
The murders, which occurred at a time when authorities were turning their attention to mob connections in the volatile world of penny stocks, led to speculation that the victims were cooperating with investigators and were killed to be silenced or punished, or that they had ties to American or Russian organized crime.
A Business Week article in December of 1999, citing unnamed sources, said Chalem was a key link between the penny stock trade and organized crime. The article said Chalem was a close associate of Philip C. Abramo, a reputed capo in the Newark-based DeCavalcante crime family who at the time was implicated in a stock fraud case.
The Huffington Post reported in 2011 that Chalem had been partners in a Key West, Florida, scuba-diving business with Brooklyn mobster Alphonse Persico, who is serving life in prison for the 1999 rubout of an underboss. That article said the DeCavalcante crime family was suspected in the Colts Neck slayings early on.
The FBI's Woodruff said the agency's Newark office has focused primarily on the fraudulent activities that came to light as a result of the homicide case, while the New York office is focused more on the killings themselves.
Richard M. Frankel, special agent in charge of the FBI's criminal division in New York, urges anyone with information on the murders of Chalem and Lehmann to call the division at (212) 384-1000.
The Monmouth County Crimestoppers program has posted a reward up to $5,000 for information leading to an arrest and indictment in the case. Tips can be made anonymously on the Crimestoppers hotline: 1-800-671-4400.
Meanwhile, former prosecutor Kaye believes someone in trouble with the law could be the person who will solve the mystery of what happened 15 years ago behind the black-and-gold, wrought-iron gates on Bluebell Road. |
