Victim testifies in adoption scam trial

Deborah Josephs sat in a Pennsylvania hotel room one morning in September 2009, waiting to hear that the baby she planned to adopt had been born in a nearby hospital.

Instead, the Port Jefferson woman testified that she got a call from her adoption attorney Kevin Cohen, saying that the delivery had been traumatic and the birth mother was in no shape to sign off on the adoption. Josephs should make the five-hour drive back home and wait for news, Cohen said.

It took several more weeks, and there were several more such stories from Cohen before Josephs and her husband realized that there never had been a baby and that they'd given $60,000 to a man running a scam, Josephs said.

"We wanted to believe him, but it was becoming not believable," she said on the stand in Nassau County Court in Mineola. Josephs was the first witness in Cohen's trial on a 69-count indictment on charges he scammed her and 12 other couples out of more than $300,000 in what amounted to an adoption Ponzi scheme.

Cohen, 41, of Roslyn, an attorney who is representing himself, chose not to cross-examine Josephs.

In his opening argument, Cohen said he admits to "98 percent" of the allegations against him.

"I will show that I was so heavily undermedicated at the time of these acts that I did not have the capacity to possess the intent required under the law to have committed a number of these offenses, if not all of them," he said in court. Cohen has contended he suffers from multiple illnesses ranging from a thyroid problem to bipolar disorder.

Cohen has grown his hair since he was arrested last year, and now wears it loose around his shoulders. But Josephs said the Kevin Cohen she knew was well-groomed and articulate. Prosecutors showed her photos of Cohen's attractive Roslyn home and Josephs told of meeting him, his wife and his children there.

In his opening argument, prosecutor Andrew Garbarino said Cohen went to great lengths to manipulate the people he called his clients.

He told a woman who wanted to adopt a child as a single mother that he had found a birth mother who had been raised by a single mother, and who specifically wanted a single mother to raise her child, Garbarino said. He told a gay couple that he had found a birth mother who was happier knowing that she could provide a child to a couple who could not have one otherwise, Garbarino said.

He accepted $7,500 from a couple who already had two adopted children, even after they told him that $500 of that money was their adopted children's life savings, since the couple wanted to take part in building their family, Garbarino said.

"Every piece of information he gave to his clients was a lie," Garbarino said.