Brighton Man Accused Of Posing As Secret Israeli Spy To Con Wealthy Widow
It seems a Manhattan widow should have taken a cue from the theme song of the 1960s television show, Secret Agent: “Beware of pretty faces that you find. / A pretty face can hide an evil mind.”
Except his face ain’t all that pretty. But, according to the now deceased widow’s daughter, it hid a mind evil enough to nearly dupe the vulnerable woman and her family out of $20 million, and sparked a change in her will that caused her daughters to lose their inheritance.
Brighton Beach resident Yehuda Sadok, 48, is accused in a lawsuit filed by the widow’s daughters of posing as an Israeli spy who pals around with Vladimir Putin and Robert De Niro. The purpose, they say, was to get the widow, Emilie Martin, to hand over $20 million in jewelry for a deal with a Saudi sheikh.
From the Daily News:
Using the name Oody Geffen, Sadok “convinced my mother that he is a former intelligence officer from Mossad (the Israeli Secret Service), keeps a cyanide capsule in his mouth, has a close personal connection to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the Israeli Prime Minister, and is a friend of film actor Robert De Niro,” DiFabrizio said in court papers.
… Oody — who also claimed to be a movie producer — convinced Martin in the fall of 2009 to let him sell her jewelry in Dubai, telling her she should hand over $20 million in inventory from her business so he could have a “private sale” for Sheikh Mohammed, his family and friends, according to court papers.
He convinced Martin they’d use the profits to buy “a fancy condominium in Abu Dhabi where they would live happily ever after,” court filings say.
According to DNAinfo, that deal came on the heels of another one, in which Sadok had successfully pursuaded Martin to sell $1.4 million in jewelry to a company serving as an agent of the Sheikh of Dubai. The daughters say Sadok took home a $420,000 commission on the deal, even though the business lost $170,000.
Ultimately, the daughters, who own a portion of the business, successfully stopped the $20 million Saudi jewelry deal in court in 2009. The elder Martin died in 2011, but as a result of the bad blood caused by the deal, the daughters say, they’ve been cut out of the will and her estate has been split up between the mother’s estranged siblings.
The current lawsuit seeks to get the existing will tossed out of court, saying that it was written up under “an insane delusion.”
Sadok said the daughters have got the story all wrong, and that his relationship with Martin was nothing more than a close friendship.
Sadok, a married father of six, told DNAinfo New York on Friday that he was a close friend to Emilie but never claimed to be a spy or have famous friends.
“Robert De Niro, Mossad, who says something like that?” Sadok asked. “I never met Robert De Niro in my life.”
When asked how he met Emilie, Sadok said that a former FBI agent had introduced him to her. Sadok said he was helping the FBI agent retrieve jewels for Emilie.
Sadok also said that he had a platonic friendship with Emilie and that his whole family, including his mother, got to know her.
“I heard all these stories. I’ll be honest with you. Does it make any sense? I think it’s very silly to say something like that,” Sadok said when asked if he tried to romance Emilie.