At 32 years old, Moshe Silber had it all.
Silber owned two Gulfstream jets, a pad in London, three multimillion-dollar homes and millions worth of luxury cars and jewelry.
Silber, a lanky and youthful-looking native of an Orthodox enclave in Rockland County, was on his way to becoming extremely wealthy in 2022, at least on paper. He claimed to have $1.3 billion in total assets with his equity position at over $600 million.
Silber’s quick rise and growing real estate portfolio of 10,000 units impressed the bankers at Piper Sandler, and the investment bank offered its clients and employees a chance to get in on Silber’s real estate play.
Piper Sandler worked with Silber to issue $200 million of unsecured bonds in one of Silber’s companies, Crown Capital Holdings, through a private placement. The money would be used to fund and purchase real estate, mainly consisting of Section 8 housing. Large and small life insurers, community banks and some high-level Piper Sandler employees bought the notes offering rates between 6.75 percent and 12.5 percent.
Since the bonds were unsecured with no properties pledged as collateral, the investment relied on Silber, the whiz-kid from Monsey, who survived a difficult childhood and amassed a real estate empire out of an office on the 85th floor of One World Trade Center.
In the best-case scenario, the $200 million would go into Crown Capital to buy real estate at a lower interest rate, allowing Silber to flip the properties at a higher price, and increase cash flow to investors.
But, according to the bondholders and a fiduciary appointed to oversee Silber’s former companies, that is not what happened. Instead, Silber was charged and sentenced in a mortgage fraud scheme. No one is quite sure where all the money went.
Birth of an entrepreneur
Moshe Silber was born in Brooklyn and moved to Monsey when he was 12.
His father, Zalman Silber, was an entrepreneur best known for Skyline Entertainment, a company that offered virtual helicopter rides inside the Empire State Building in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
In about 2008, Zalman faced serious allegations as he underwent a divorce. Silber’s mother accused Zalman of performing fake “gynecological exams” on her, according to news articles from the time. The accusations led to Zalman’s arrest and charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorney and Rockland County and some crude headlines in the press. Moshe was also questioned by law enforcement.
The charges against Zalman were dropped when Silber’s mother lied under oath on an unrelated matter, according to press reports.
Moshe’s parents divorced. Meanwhile, Zalman ventured overseas on business to Australia.
“He [Moshe] was completely unloved. And he had, you know, a terrible time as a young man. He was terribly scarred,” Jerome Ballarotto, an attorney for Moshe Silber, said years later, during Silber’s fraud-sentencing hearing.
Ballarotto said Moshe experienced his mother’s wrath, but also “spent a lifetime chasing the shadow of his father’s approval.”
“Confounding.”
After graduating from a yeshiva in Brooklyn, Moshe Silber went into real estate in 2010. He worked with a large operator controlling 5,000 units in New York City where he claimed to be in charge of all “operations, including rent collections, maintenance and repairs, lease negotiations, tenant buy-outs and building refinancings,” according to an SEC filing.
Outside of work, he became a volunteer EMT in Rockland County, going out days and nights and once reportedly saving a child’s life by performing CPR. He got married, had six kids and moved into a house in Suffern with eight bedrooms and eight bathrooms. People have described him as a nice, unassuming young man and devoted father who happened to have expensive tastes. His attorney, noting Moshe’s work as an EMT, referred to his client as a “caped crusader.”
At a certain point, Silber became connected with Fred Schulman, a lawyer with a degree from Boston College, three decades older than Silber.
While Schulman saw himself as a father figure to the younger Silber, it appears that Silber was the brains of the real estate operation. In 2012, Silber, then in his early 20s, created Rhodium Capital, which he described as a “real estate syndicator.” He also founded a real estate holding company, CBRM.
Silber’s companies bought mostly low-income real estate across the U.S., including in New York City, where Rhodium paid $98 million, or $394 per square foot, for 361 rental apartments in Harlem and Washington Heights in 2016. Other acquisitions included a 462-unit portfolio in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and office buildings in Jersey City and Somerset, New Jersey.
His wealth grew rapidly in the Covid years when cheap interest rates created a bonanza for investors like Silber who started buying real estate.
By early 2022, Silber had surpassed his industry contemporaries with master’s degrees from Columbia University or internships at Blackstone or KKR. He owned multiple real estate companies, a private jet business with planes valued at $60 million, and a bank in Westchester County. His real estate holdings totaled nearly $1 billion. Silber did not return a request for comment and an attorney representing Silber in bankruptcy proceedings declined to comment.
And he had discovered a shortcut to the traditional real estate financing model.
Underwriting Silber
In a normal real estate deal, a sponsor raises equity from investors for a property. The remainder is financed with debt from lenders. The sponsor makes money from rent, but the real returns come years later when the owner refinances or sells.
Silber removed the property from the equation.
In 2020, Silber appears to have gotten a line of credit somewhere between $75 million and $100 million from an affiliate of UBS’s hedge fund O’Connor for Silber’s companies, Crown Capital and CBRM. Filings with the state of New York show Silber pledged collateral for the loan in 2020. A source familiar with the situation said Silber repaid the loan from UBS in 2022.
The line seemed to establish that Crown was creditworthy.
By the first quarter of 2022, Minneapolis-based Piper Sandler was underwriting a new private debt issuance — this time, bonds. Crown Capital, which indirectly owned real estate through various LLCs, would issue the debt as a private placement. While it is not unusual for large companies or REITS to issue bonds to finance their real estate operations, it is uncommon for a company of Silber’s size and obscurity to do so. REITS are publicly traded and are required to disclose financials to their public investors. Private companies do not have the same obligations.
It is unclear how Silber became connected with Piper Sandler in the first place.
Piper Sandler is a six-year-old investment bank formed from the merger of two older companies, Piper Jaffray, a 130-year-old Minneapolis investment bank that specialized in servicing mid-market companies, and Sandler O’Neill, started by former Bear Stearns executives in New York City in 1988. Sandler’s idea was to work with small firms whose value its founders thought went underappreciated on Wall Street, and it built an early fixed-income desk, which it rebuilt after 40 percent of its employees were killed on Sept. 11, 2001. When Piper Jaffray bought Sandler O’Neill in 2019, it was hoping to double its fixed-income revenue, the firms told the Wall Street Journal.
“Money and material wealth do not define who we are. True fulfillment comes from serving others. Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of what truly mattered. I let money and a deal take priority over everything.”
Over the course of 2022, Piper Sandler privately underwrote three rounds of bonds on Crown. It was part of a wave of interest in private placements, where companies can issue debt in the private market to accredited investors. This type of debt has become increasingly common with life insurers as they search for higher returns for cash. Privately placed debt accounts for 20 percent of life insurers’ bond investments in 2022, compared to 13 percent in 2004, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Buyers of the Silber bonds included Customers Bank, Federated Mutual Insurance, Cincinnati Life Insurance Co and a list of midsize insurance firms and banks, including First Catholic Slovak Union, Western Catholic Union, First Dakota National Bank, Bar Harbor Bank & Trust and Ukrainian National Association.
Its own employees also bought in, including senior managers from the Sandler side: Edward Stein, Jacques de Saint Phalle and John Beckelman. Beckelman is head of Piper Sandler’s fixed-income division and on the firm’s leadership team. In total, the three Piper employees purchased $2.3 million of Crown’s paper.
The Real Deal was unable to review the bond offering, but sources indicate that it was persuasive. The fundamentals of the firm seemed strong. Silber and his real estate holding company, CBRM, had $66 million sitting in various checking accounts as of March 2022, Silber’s financial statements show. Silber had $219 million in equity interests in properties held by CBRM, he claimed, giving him skin in the game. His dozens of multifamily rental properties had solid cash flow, with predictable revenue from tenants in subsidized federal housing programs. At the time of the appraisals in 2021 and 2022, multifamily valuations were at an all-time high.
As part of the private offering, Silber offered a guarantee in Crown’s parent company, CBRM, of which Silber was the sole shareholder. If Silber defaulted, bondholders could pursue Silber or his company, but they could not immediately seize Crown’s properties.
By December, clients had picked up $200 million in Silber bonds.
Double dipping
In practice, the bonds were an ingenious way to finance real estate, but in actuality, the money was like a blank check.
Bondholders did not have a lien or a secured interest in the properties that had made the firm look so creditworthy.
Silber controlled Crown’s books, records and the financials that were ultimately presented to them.
And so, at least some of the bondholders did not appear to know about the extent of Silber’s leverage, which saddled the properties with a total of $450 million in property-level mortgages.
Lenders on Silber’s properties were also in the dark. They were not aware there was such a vast sum in bond financing for the same buildings, according to sources familiar with the matter.
According to sources familiar with the matter, Silber took a distribution not long after the bond issuance. The amount: $90 million.
An independent fiduciary and financial advisors are investigating the exact whereabouts of the rest. The fiduciary who took over Silber’s firm alleges that he extracted at least tens of millions and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars for his own benefit, according to the fiduciary’s attorney.
Default and disarray
After the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022, Silber’s financing costs increased and values of his multifamily holdings declined.
The portfolio started to collapse. By 2023, the Department of Justice and the Federal Housing and Finance Agency were looking into Schulman and Silber for their involvement in a mortgage fraud scheme.
The scheme, one of many being investigated by the DOJ, involved investors flipping properties to affiliates at higher prices than they’d just paid in order to secure inflated loans. (Silber’s scheme was particularly bold because he used a stolen identity instead of an actual associate to facilitate the flip, resulting in a $74 million inflated loan from Fannie Mae and JLL.)
Silber and Schulman prioritized defending possible criminal charges, which stole focus from their real estate operations, according to court filings.
Properties fell into disarray and Silber lost eligibility for affordable housing programs, which had sustained his rent rolls. Without revenue, he defaulted on loan obligations, according to a report from a financial advisor to the debtor in bankruptcy court.
In 2024, Silber pleaded guilty to the mortgage fraud scheme, and Silber and his partner Schulman effectively became unbankable.
Silber agreed to appoint an independent fiduciary, Elizabeth LaPuma, and management company, Lynd, to oversee his properties. Silber still remained the sole shareholder.
He also looked to obtain financing from high-interest lenders of last resort to ensure he did not default on bond payments by providing personal guarantees and a pledge of assets.
Other lenders started going after Silber personally on guarantees.
Twice pledged
Both UBS O’Connor and the bondholders had a claim on CBRM, they soon discovered.
In mid-2024, a New York state judge issued UBS O’Connor a default judgment. A company called Spano Investor acquired the judgment and then put CBRM, which controlled Crown Capital’s real estate, up for auction.
Days before the auction, the fiduciary of Crown Capital and CBRM put the entities into bankruptcy protection, to stop the sale, listing the bondholders as unsecured creditors with a $200 million claim.
Among the bondholders, the largest claims came from Customers Bank and Federated Life Insurance with unsecured claims of $41.5 million and $32 million. A total of 69 insurance companies, banks and Piper Sandler employees have claims on Crown Capital.
The debtors set up a litigation trust to pursue possible claims against Silber, Schulman and even Piper Sandler.
“We are aware of the bankruptcy of Crown Capital Holdings and have monitored the events concerning Moshe Silber that preceded it,” a spokesperson for Piper Sandler said. “The situation is deeply disappointing and is likely to have a negative impact on our clients and our own employees.”
What truly matters
In March 2025, a judge sentenced Silber to 30 months in prison for participating in the mortgage fraud scheme.
Six months later, while in prison, Silber filed for bankruptcy. Not only was the $200 million gone, his filing showed, but so was everything else — the jewelry, jets and London flat.
He listed zeros for his assets and income and claimed his father Zalman paid his legal fees.
At his recent deposition taken in prison, Silber pleaded the Fifth. In a typewritten letter from prison, Silber attributed the properties’ poor state to the management company and the independent restructuring officer.
Yet Silber’s father was giving him about $300,000 a month, or over $3 million a year, U.S. Judge Robert Kirsch noted. Silber’s attorneys said this money went to keep his real estate operations afloat.
Silber’s financial situation overall was “confounding,” Kirsch said: Silber was affiliated with over 184 LLCs and had 300 bank accounts. His house was valued at $1.7 million; he had BMWs and Mercedes and possibly a boat. Yet he claimed to have nothing.
Bondholders are calculating their losses. They could get repaid for a piece of their investment through bankruptcy; for example, if four of Crown’s New Orleans properties sell at a profit, bondholders would get up to 30 percent of the proceeds.
But some aren’t counting on anything. One bondholder, Thompson IM Funds, marked the value of its $7 million investment to $4.2 million in May.
To hear Silber tell it, it was all just paper — the wealth and the debt.
“Money and material wealth do not define who we are,” Silber told the court before his sentencing, arguing he was a changed man. “True fulfillment comes from serving others. Somewhere along the way,” he added, “I lost sight of what truly mattered. I let money and a deal take priority over everything.”