The Hull swindler currently serving a five-year federal prison sentence for bank fraud has been convicted of failing to pay more than $87,000 in child support in Louisiana. Jamie Edelkind, 43, was found guilty in June on the charge of willful nonpayment of child support, according to U.S. Attorney Donald Washington. The federal jury deliberated for three and a half hours before convicting Edelkind of failing to pay $87,221.34 owed for the care of his daughter. He faces a sentence of up to two years that would run concurrently with his existing prison time. He is scheduled to be sentenced at a later date. Edelkind is already behind bars, after being convicted of fraudulently obtaining mortgages on his Hull home, which was once owned by President John F. Kennedy's grandparents.
Authorities began investigating Edelkind's child support delinquency in 2002 after he failed to pay $1,400 per month. In July 2003, a Louisiana judge increased the support amount to $1,537.09 per month and ordered Edelkind to bring his payments current.
Instead, Edelkind issued fake certified checks and fake cashier's checks in an effort to act as if he was paying child support, according to a statement from Washington's office. "Evidence showed that he and his new family lived extravagantly," Washington charged. "During trial, Edelkind claimed he had no resources and no ability to pay child support despite hiring computer programmers, renovating the Kennedy mansion, hiring au pairs, and spending thousands of dollars on clothes, lunches and shopping sprees." In March 2005, Edelkind was found guilty of fraudulently obtaining $3.3 million in mortgages on former John 'Honey Fitz' Fitzgerald mansion at 940 Nantasket Ave. on Allerton Hill.
In July 2005, U.S. District Judge Morris E. Lasker sentenced Edelkind to five years in jail, which will be followed by three years of supervised release. Edelkind was ordered to pay restitution to the banks he defrauded, surrender his home to the government, and forfeit the cash-out proceeds of the last refinancing. The Allerton Hill home — which in the early 1900s was owned by Fitzgerald, a former mayor of Boston and the grandfather of the president and current U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy — was purchased at a foreclosure auction by developer Ernesto Caparrotta for $950,000 in March of this year. At the time of his conviction on the bank fraud charges in Massachusetts, Edelkind was already serving a one-year sentence in connection with earlier bank fraud charges in Georgia. Prosecutors there charged that Edelkind wrote more than $300,000 in counterfeit checks and took out a fraudulent home equity loan for $221,000 on a parcel of property in Cobb County, Georgia. In July 2004, he was sentenced to a year in jail, fined $5,000, and ordered to make restitution of the $221,000.
Before heading to jail on that conviction, however, prosecutors at his trial in Boston said he helped his current wife obtain yet another financial windfall from the Nantasket Ave. property that is easing her new life abroad. Prosecutors say Jamie Edelkind wired $308,000 to a Norway bank account in his wife's name. Linda Edelkind is a Norwegian national who is believed to have moved there shortly after her husband went to prison.
Jamie Edelkind claimed that his wife made more than $200,000 a year from a home-based business called Apostille, Inc. In June 2000, Edelkind had incorporated the business, which sought to attract investors for an anti-piracy software program for CDs that he claimed to have developed. However, witnesses at trial testified that the business never got off the ground and never paid salaries to anyone.
Prosecutors said that Edelkind fabricated W2 forms and other employment and income documents, such as tax returns, to support applications for an ever-larger series of mortgages. In addition to the primary mortgages that ranged from $800,000 to $2.1 million, Edelkind obtained multiple home equity lines of credit as high as $350,000.
By the time of the final refinancing, Edelkind claimed his wife was making $1.1 million annually — $92,000 a month — as chief operating officer of Apostille. In reality, she was a homemaker and had no significant earnings. The company's "human resources director" who verified Linda Edelkind's employment status and salary for the various mortgage companies was an au pair who lived with the couple to care for their children. To maintain the façade that Apostille was, in fact, a bona fide business, prosecutors said Edelkind used a variety of different street addresses for the firm, including one that would have been located in the Atlantic Ocean, a postal carrier testified.
Copyright © 2006 The Hull Times