Jared Solomon was living the life of a big-time Manhattan real estate exec.
He had a seven-room co-op on the Upper East Side just steps from Central Park, a 10,000-square-foot home in a leafy Westchester suburb and membership to a pricey country club.
In reality, Solomon was a frustrated mid-level dealmaker who was constantly comparing himself to those around him.
“The defendant had a good job. He was making good money. But he just wanted more,” said Rita Maxwell, one of the federal prosecutors who tried him last month for stealing nearly $10 million from his employer, Vornado Realty Trust.
The jury found Solomon, 48, guilty, and he faces up to 82 years in prison. A vice president in Vornado’s high-powered leasing office with a salary in the high six figures, Solomon enriched himself on leases he negotiated across the table from his employer. When there was no broker representing the tenant, he created phony brokerages, inserted them into his deals and billed Vornado for the leasing commissions.
How was he able to run a scam inside one of New York’s biggest commercial landlords for more than a decade without anyone noticing?
Solomon’s job gave him a vantage into one simple fact: which deals didn’t have brokers on the other side.
He was also able to exploit the complex way multi-million-dollar real estate contracts are put together. But he also deceived his co-workers by playing the regular Joe; they never suspected a person they saw every day would go to such lengths to deceive them.
He falsified business certificates to set up bank accounts. He forged the signatures of real people he worked with, and when that wouldn’t do, he made up fictitious people at his companies. He spoke to his co-workers as though it wasn’t really him on the other side sending emails and talking on the phone.
The money, the government said, funded “a lifestyle he had not earned.”
Advisory business
With his neat navy suits and perfectly parted WASPy hair, Solomon looks the part of a blue-blooded real estate guy.
He joined Vornado in 2007, hired by the company’s head of leasing, Glen Weiss.
Weiss oversaw a team of about six leasing agents and worked closely with Solomon, even visiting his home at the time in Short Hills, New Jersey.
“I trusted Jared Solomon,” he testified at the trial.
The first time Solomon tried his scam was in 2009. He created a company called Cobalt Advisors, opening up a business account at the Chase Bank branch across the street from Vornado’s headquarters at 888 Seventh Avenue.
Over the years, Cobalt billed Vornado 10 times for more than $750,000. No one seemed to notice the brokerage only worked on deals Solomon negotiated.
In fact, there were several checks and balances that should have raised red flags but didn’t. Most leasing agreements disclose whether there were any brokers who worked on the deal, but this proved easy to miss.
When Kambiz Shahbazi, president of KS Advisors, signed a lease renewal at Vornado’s 150 East 58th Street in 2018, he didn’t use a broker. Yet Solomon put Cobalt Advisors into the lease. Shahbazi focused on the business terms and his attorney went over the finer details of the lease, but they didn’t catch Solomon’s tweak, he said.
When Shahbazi confirmed over email with Solomon that there was no broker on the deal, Solomon simply didn’t respond.
Pricey plot
Glowing over Times Square, the 84-foot tall LG sign is one of the most visible digital billboards on the famed “bow-tie” intersection between West 42nd and 47th streets.
“Very highly desirable,” Weiss said about the sign attached to Vornado’s 1540 Broadway, which has been used by the likes of HBO, VH1 and Allied Bank.
The valuable piece of real estate was in Solomon’s portfolio and at the center of his scheme.
LG, the multinational electronics company, leased the sign through Havas Media, a French advertising agency with an office in Hudson Square.
In 2015, Havas signed a six-year extension worth $4.5 million a year. Havas didn’t use a broker, and Solomon saw another chance to enrich himself.
“He needed to keep lying. He needed to keep the fraud going.”
He created a company called Margoux Media run by an executive named Mark Mallet. When he opened a bank account at the same Chase branch, he submitted a doctored business certificate with the same filing number as Cobalt Advisors and a forged notary seal.
Solomon then had Vornado pay a $750,000 commission to Margoux Media. Three years later, he repeated the play.
When Havas did repairs to the sign in 2019, Vornado paid $1.4 million to reimburse the costs. Except Solomon slipped the reimbursement agreement into the deal without the advertising agency knowing. Solomon had the invoice paid to Margoux Media.
All told, Solomon had Vornado make six payments to his brokerage totaling $8.6 million.
He went to lengths to deceive his Vornado co-workers into thinking his brokerage was an independent third party.
When someone at Vornado’s New Jersey payments office emailed “Mark Mallet” to verify wire instructions for a payment, Solomon sent a phone number from the Mallet email where he could be reached. Prosecutors showed that the number was registered to a vacation home in the Hamptons that Solomon was renting at the time.
Another time, when a Vornado employee emailed Mallet asking to talk on the phone, Solomon left his office and walked to a T-Mobile store a block away. An hour and a half later he had purchased a cell phone he used to impersonate his alter ego.
“He needed to keep lying. He needed to keep the fraud going,” Maxwell, the prosecutor, said.
Keeping up with the brokers
Success in commercial real estate yields a good livelihood. For Solomon, the lifestyle trappings seemed out of reach.
Pamela Caruso, Vornado’s leasing counsel, recalled one interaction in Solomon’s office in 2023. He’d worked on a big deal for the company, but he wasn’t happy with the outcome.
“He expressed anger that other people got bonuses on the deal and he did not,” she testified.
Caruso, who drafts the company’s leases, said she worked on about 15 deals a year with Solomon. In the early years, their relationship was “okay,” but later it deteriorated.
Although Solomon started out with a salary of $160,000 in 2009 and was making more than $772,000 by 2023, Weiss said that the broker was “generally dissatisfied with his compensation.” He talked about homes, cars and material possessions.
He was particularly focused on the brokers he worked with.
“He would say, they make a lot of money and much more than him,” Weiss said.
Documents from the trial show how, almost immediately after Vornado deposited money into Solomon’s phony brokerage accounts, he made withdrawals for lavish purchases.
He paid $3.6 million for his Upper East Side apartment at the Volney Residences at 23 East 74th Street, $4.2 million for the Westchester home at 3 Beverly Road in Purchase and $41,000 for a Porsche Macan SUV.
He bought a $70,000 membership to the Old Oaks Country Club and spent tens of thousands of dollars on home renovations.
At some point, Solomon’s relationship with his wife deteriorated, and a judge issued a protective order for her. Apparently, in the heat of an argument while packing his bags, he’d threatened to kill her. His lawyer, Peter Toumbekis, said that Solomon didn’t intend to follow through. At one point, he violated the protective order and was arrested.
Solomon’s Vornado work also suffered, and the company fired him in December 2023 for what prosecutors called “unrelated performance-related reasons.”
The trial
After Solomon left Vornado, the REIT had a meeting with an advertising agent who worked on the LG sign.
That’s when the company discovered one of the phony agreements.
Solomon was arrested a year later and charged with scheme to defraud, identity theft and two counts of bank fraud. The trial kicked off in April and lasted five days.
Solomon had been concerned that his career and lifestyle could foment a wealth-based bias amongst the jurors. His appearance looked even more moneyed compared to his attorney,Toumbekis, who sports a tuft of uncombed gray hair and scraggly beard.
(In his spare time, Toumbekis moonlights as a Hollywood producer. His credits include the 2018 drama “Bayou Caviar” starring Cuba Gooding, Jr., whom the attorney represented in a 2023 sexual misconduct case. The start of Solomon’s trial was pushed back slightly so the lawyer could travel to London, where he was nominated for an Olivier Award as a producer for Best New Musical for “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.”)
The defense hung on the idea that Solomon’s brokerages were real; the VP just didn’t tell anyone at Vornado he was behind them.
“I want you all to know, there’s no fake company,” Toumbekis said during his opening arguments. “You’re going to see the evidence. They’re real companies.”
But the attorney had little success poking holes in the government’s case.
The prosecution called 14 witnesses, presented hundreds of documents and spent hours meticulously mapping out the paper trail Solomon left behind.
The case seemed like such a slam dunk that the two assistant district attorneys who did most of the heavy lifting with witnesses — Maxwell and Joe Zabel — were trying a case for their first time. It was practice for the rookies.
On his cross examinations, Toumbekis never significantly challenged the prosecution’s story. He called no witnesses, and Solomon declined to testify.
Weiss, head of leasing, had explained that Vornado has a conflict of interest policy that bars employees from the kind of brokerage work opposite the company that Solomon claimed he was doing. He and others testified at the trial that if they had suspected Solomon was involved with the brokerages Vornado was paying, they would’ve put the brakes on the deals immediately and Solomon would have been fired.
The prosecution’s closing statement lasted 90 minutes. Toumbekis took about five. Solomon didn’t tell Vornado he was behind the brokerages because he knew he would be fired if they found out, he concluded.
“The defense maintains that non-disclosure is not a crime,” the lawyer said.
Unanimous decision
It took about an hour and a half for the jurors to find Solomon guilty on all four counts. Sentencing is scheduled for August 4.
The verdict was expected, but there was one surprise.
After his arrest, Solomon had been released on $250,000 bail. During the trial, he was confined to his home and required to wear an ankle monitor — the consequence of failing to tell his pre-trial services officer about his arrest for violating the protective order.
Now, with a lengthy prison sentence hanging over his head, prosecutors are worried Solomon could be a flight risk. Judge Loretta Preska agreed and ordered Solomon taken into custody from the courtroom.
A pair of guards escorted him to a chamber room off to the side. Toumbekis followed. The court cleared out.
A few minutes later, the attorney returned. He was carrying his client’s suit jacket, necktie and belt — remnants of the life Solomon hadn’t earned.