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Mortgage broker pleads guilty to scheme

BY ROCCO PARASCANDOLA | rocco.parascandola@newsday.com

July 2, 2008

Jacob Milton, a Queens mortgage broker at the center of a scandal involving identity theft and phony mortgages, has pleaded guilty to grand larceny and scheme to defraud.

But Milton, 42, of Port Washington, seemed unfazed by the possibility of serious jail time when Newsday caught up with him outside his home recently. He could spend the next 25 years in prison when he is sentenced on Dec. 16.

"Why should I worry?" he asked. "I've done nothing wrong. In the mortgage business other people, other companies say things about you if their business is not doing well."

The six-month lag between a plea and sentencing often indicates a cooperation agreement is in the works, but neither he nor his lawyer is commenting. The Queens district attorney's office also had no comment.

The probe opened a window into the fairly sizable Queens Bangladeshi community, in which Milton was something of a rock star. He had his own cable TV talk show, he carried himself with a swagger, and he fashioned himself a political player, donating money to several politicians, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, during her 2005 senatorial campaign.

Milton, according to police sources, was in many ways the face of Griffin Mortgage, using his Bangladeshi immigrant success story to convince fellow immigrants he was one of them, someone to guide them through the often anxiety-ridden process of buying a home.

Griffin's owner, John Messer, has not commented on the investigation, but sources said investigators have been trying to determine what, if anything, Messer knew about the fraud.

Milton's accomplice, Shamsun Nira, 38, also pleaded guilty last week, to scheme to defraud, and faces a year in prison. She and her lawyer wouldn't comment.

Milton and Nira made headlines when police arrested them last October and seized records from Griffin, the firm that employed them.

Since the arrests, investigators have pored over records and computer files and concluded that Griffin, which was based in Jackson Heights but also had offices in Jamaica and Garden City, was a legitimate mortgage brokerage that dealt in the illegitimate - stealing identities to buy homes and obtain credit cards. The methods were often as crude as cutting up documents and pasting them on other documents, but the effect was just the same.