Shalon Weiss And Joe Judge Took Different Paths From Scranton

Times-Tribune (Scranton, PA)

Jan. 31—Joe Judge and Sholam Weiss were born in the same Scranton hospital and immediately began moving in different directions.

Weiss grew up in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, participated in the largest insurance scam in American history and fled to an international playboy's life on the lam. He was sentenced in absentia to 845 years in prison — still the stiffest sentence ever imposed for a white-collar crime.

Judge was raised in West Side, graduated from the University of Scranton with a bachelor's degree in accounting and joined the FBI. For eight years, Judge chased Weiss in Israel, Belgium, Brazil and the United Kingdom before catching him in Austria.

What happened in between is the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.

"People always say it's like 'Catch Me if You Can,' " Judge said of the similarities between his protracted manhunt for Weiss and the true story of the years-long cat-and-mouse game between fugitive Frank Abagnale Jr. and FBI Agent Carl Hanratty.

Abagnale, played in the 2002 film by Leonardo DiCaprio, rings up Hanratty, portrayed by Tom Hanks, every Christmas Eve. Neither man had anyone else to call.

"I say, 'Yeah, it's very similar, but I had somewhere to be on Christmas Eve,'" Judge told me. "I had a family to be with. I had someone else to call."

The tangled yarn of Judge's piecework reeling in of Weiss has been unspooled on "60 Minutes," CNBC's "American Greed" and in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Times-Tribune.

The story made international headlines again on Jan. 19, when President Trump commuted his sentence among a slew of 70 pardons and 73 sentence commutations on his last full day in office. Judge, who is 75 and retired from a decorated 30-year career in the FBI, reached out to me soon after.

I interviewed Judge by phone from his Florida home on Wednesday. He is blunt, funny and showed his West Scranton roots while telling a few war stories too salty to share in a family newspaper. Thankfully, his dogged quest to bring Sholam Weiss to justice is a bona fide page-turner.

I was unable to independently confirm that Weiss was born in Scranton, but Judge said it's a fact he verified during his investigation.

"We were both born in the old Hanhemann Hospital (now GCMC)," Judge said. "After that, we took very different paths."

Weiss was educated in a Brooklyn yeshiva and worked in construction before buying a plumbing supply company that was wildly successful for a few years, but eventually went bankrupt and proved the vehicle for his first stint in prison. In 1994, he was charged with mail fraud after falsely claiming that $1 million in inventory was destroyed in a warehouse fire. He was convicted and sentenced to eight months.

Two years later, Weiss was released to a halfway house and requested a four-day furlough to spend Passover with his wife and children. Instead, he and a 23-year-old woman took a private jet to Trump Atlantic City Hotel and Casino, where they stayed in a complimentary $700-a-night suite. Escape charges were filed but dropped.

Weiss was approached by criminal executives who looted $30 million from Florida-based National Heritage Life Insurance Co. and needed help covering it up. The result was a $450 million scam in which nearly 30,000 mostly elderly Americans saw their retirement savings stolen.

Boiled down to its bones, the complicated fraud is astonishingly simple. The crooks who were already bleeding the insurer had a $30 million hole to fill and were looking at long prison sentences when regulators inevitably caught up with them. Weiss offered a way out. If the company would give him $100 million to work with, he would make the $30 million deficit "magically" disappear, Judge said.

"He was given $100 million to buy mortgages," Judge explained. "He bought $60 million in totally crap mortgages and valued them on the books at $100 million, which covered up the $30 million hole that was caused by previous criminals in the company.

"And then he stole everything he could along the way out of that $100 million. When I subpoenaed his account, the first very first transaction is a wire transfer to Switzerland. In this business, we call that a clue."

Weiss was offered a sentence of five to 10 years if he cooperated with investigators. He decided to go to trial, and as the jury was deliberating in November 1999, he fled the country. He was convicted on 78 counts of wire fraud, money laundering and racketeering and sentenced in absentia to a staggering 845 years in prison, $123 million in fines and $125 million in restitution.

In hindsight, Judge said Weiss telegraphed his intention to flee with his waistline.

"During the trial, he gained like 60 pounds and I was thinking, 'This guy's eating nervous,'" Judge said. "No, he wanted the last photos of him to be at 260 pounds. While he was a fugitive, he lost 60 pounds. So we're looking for a 260-pound guy and he's down to 200."

Weiss also shaved his beard and used the identities and passports of relatives and family connections to stay a step ahead of the FBI and Interpol, Judge said.

"I missed him in London. I missed him in Israel. I'm pretty sure I missed him in Monaco and Liechtenstein," Judge said. It was frustrating, because Weiss didn't exactly lay low. He was on the run, but loudly satisfying his lavish appetites and hard-partying lifestyle, almost daring authorities to catch up with him.

"He got thrown out of a hotel in Sao Paulo, and the Brazilian police told me they were watching the hotel and 10 hookers showed up and five of them were dressed like Catholic schoolgirls," Judge said. "I guess you'd call that a fetish."

Judge said he was particularly alarmed to learn that Weiss was in Brazil and had a steady "girlfriend." The nation's courts won't extradite a fugitive who has impregnated a native.

"I knew that if we caught Weiss in Brazil, we would be fighting extradition," Judge said with a chuckle. "But I feared we'd also be fighting ovulation."

Judge followed the girlfriend to Austria, where he found Weiss set up with all the documentation for a new identity. Weiss was arrested and fought extradition, but was eventually returned to the U.S. in 2002 to begin serving the better part of a millennium in prison.

After 18 years, Weiss, 66, was released from a medium-security prison last week and reunited with his family in Monsey, New York. I was unable to reach him, but connected with a friend of the family via the website "Freedomforsholam.com."

The man, who would identify himself only as "Jay," disputed several elements of the government's case and repeatedly pointed out that Weiss was not convicted of theft, but money laundering. "Jay" informed me that he had recorded the call and that I could be sued if I wrote that Weiss was convicted of theft.

The more cordial part of the call was when I acknowledged that 845 years is a ridiculous, indefensible penalty that amounts to a life sentence, which is really just a death sentence with a waiting room. Weiss' co-defendant, Keith Pound, a mortgage broker, was sentenced to 740 years. He died in prison at 51.

More than a dozen other defendants in the case were sentenced to an average of 20 years. Beyond all that, Weiss paid his fines and the restitution. It took years, but the victims of the scam were eventually made whole.

Not all of those victims lived to see Weiss pay for his crimes, Judge noted.

"A lot of those elderly annuitants went to their graves not knowing if their surviving spouses would have those annuities," he said. "If the annuitants got to vote on the pardon, the vote would have been 29,000 to zero."

In the end, Weiss only needed one vote to win his freedom, and it came from President Trump, whom Judge voted to re-elect.

"It didn't make me happy, but I'm telling myself that Jared Kushner put 70 pardons in front of him and said, 'Pardon these guys,' and Trump said, 'OK,' " Judge said. "I don't think he knows who Sholam Weiss is, but no, I wasn't thrilled about it. No."

Judge arrested congressmen, senators and mobsters over his storied career, but the Weiss case is a special source of pride. Judge is thankful he and Weiss took different paths out of Scranton, and that it was a West Scranton gumshoe who finally ran him down.

"In the end we hung 20 years on him for what he did," Judge said. "I have to be happy with that."

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, calls dibs on the screenplay.

Contact the writer:

[email protected],

@cjkink on Twitter.

Read his award-winning blog at times-tribuneblogs.com/kelly

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