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Rich Realtor Arrested For Abusing $400/Month Rent Stabilized Apartment
By
John Del Signore
Published Apr 12, 2012
Modified Apr 15, 2012
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By
John Del Signore
Published Apr 12, 2012
Modified Apr 15, 2012
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In 1987, Russian immigrant Nataliya Dyakovskaya moved into a rent-stabilized apartment on the Lower East Side, scoring a dirt-cheap rent-stabilized apartment in the Vladeck Houses. In the years since, she's gone on to live the American dream, using income from her successful real estate company to buy a $700,000 Upper West Side condo, and a house in the Hamptons. And all the while, she held onto that $400-a-month subsidized apartment on the LES, bilking the NYC Housing Authority out of $79,000 over the years, federal prosecutors allege.
Dyakovskaya was arrested this morning. According to a criminal complaint obtained by the Daily News, she took $79,103 in rent aid to which she was not entitled from 2007 to last January. She hasn't lived in the cheap apartment for years, and its current occupant is her daughter's boyfriend, who's been living there since last summer paying $400 a month. Because of a strange quirk in our modern justice system, Dyakovskaya was released on $50,000 bond, and not thrown in the stocks in Tompkins Square Park with baskets of rotting vegetables placed within throwing distance.
Meanwhile, an acclaimed pianist who owns a $1 million home in the Hamptons allegedly swindled the federal government out of thousands of dollars in housing subsidies to pay for a Tribeca Apartment. DNAinfo reports that Antonio Fermin, who has performed at Carnegie Hall, was arrested and pleaded guilty last Thursday to "illegally receiving $17,815 in Section 8 housing funds from July 2004 to September 2009, after failing to disclose he owned a three-bedroom, 2,700-square-foot hideaway on wooded Ranch Court in Sagaponack." Prosecutors say he checked the “No” box on his Mitchell-Lama low-income housing Section 8 application. He was sentenced to 40 hours community service after he agreed to give back the $17,815 he received. The system works!
Tagged
real estate
rent-stabilized
scams
subsidized housing
the hamptons
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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