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FBI Probes Va. Company's Workers in House Swindle
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In 2005, Salime El-Yacoubi, whose deceased father was one of the three owners of record, discovered something peculiar: Letters addressed to strangers started arriving at the house, according to his attorney.
In June of that year, he filed a lawsuit to reverse the transaction, alleging that the signatures of the three elderly brothers on the deed were forgeries.
In fact, the lawsuit said one of the brothers, his uncle, Salim-Hasan El Yacoubi, had died eight years earlier in Jordan; his own father was terminally ill at the time and the remaining brother was in Dubai.
In September 2006, as the legal battle dragged on, Hetrick and his wife filed for bankruptcy protection in Alexandria. Six months later, the case went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Justin Reiner, the attorney who represented the Hetricks in bankruptcy court, said he defended them against fraud allegations in those proceedings, but deferred to the civil case attorney for further comment. That lawyer, Michael Pritchard, declined comment.
In October 2007, a bankruptcy judge found that the California Street property rightfully belonged to El-Yacoubi and ordered the Hetricks to pay $678,000 in damages.
El-Yacoubi has yet to collect any of that money, and he is still in the midst of getting all the legal paperwork on the house in order, said David Masselli, his attorney.
"He had to get lawyers," Masselli said. "He had to be deposed. We had to get documents from the Middle East. He went through 2 1/2 years of litigation."
The loan on that property was just one of several in which Southern Management's pension fund had invested, according to David Hillman, Southern Management's chief executive. He alleged in an interview that his former son-in-law, Ray Romanick, who was employed at 1st American Mortgage, arranged for those investments, including more than $6 million in bad loans.
The pension fund also invested in a $500,000 mortgage on the house of 1st American's chief executive, John J. Romano. Southern recently foreclosed on that loan and has demanded that Romano vacate the house, but he hasn't moved, yet, according to Hillman.
Romano and his attorney, Jonathan D. Frieden, did not return several phone calls seeking comment.
Romanick said he had done nothing wrong. He said he arranged for loans for the two District houses the FBI is investigating after reviewing the deeds and had no idea anything improper had taken place.
