Get caught drunk driving and you might get a year behind bars. Embezzle a million bucks, cost fifty people their homes and you get 30 days!
Massoud Aaron Yashouafar is known in three states for his enormously fishy real estate deals. And he’s the big cheese behind the Paradise Spa scandal in Las Vegas. Much of the Homeowners Association burned to the ground in 2010, but somehow a million dollars in insurance money found its way to Yashouafar’s pockets instead of the homeowners.
Nevada, where HOA bigwigs have been smacked with dozens of federal indictments and convictions for racketeering, is now leading the nation in trying to offer due process to homeowners. It’s only a proposal in the Nevada Real Estate Division, but what a concept!
Due process.
It’s just a handful of words in some obscure part of the Constitution.
But it’s almost beyond comprehension that Nevada homeowners might someday have real access to the Bill of Rights.
More than three million pages of investigative information have been given under discovery to defense attorneys of Leon Benzer, the Las Vegas club owner and businessman accused of masterminding one of the largest HOA scams in history. The long running FBI and U.S. Attorney investigation uncovered dozens of lawyers, police officials, business owners and HOA management companies also involved in the scam.
Federal investigators say the suspects rigged elections in Homeowners Associations, putting their own associates in control of the HOA boards. Some of those faux board members were not even residents of the communities where they were ‘elected’. Those rigged boards then diverted tens of millions of dollars of insurance reimbursements into the pockets of Benzer and the other defendants.
I always love to blog about, and link to, Darcy Spears and the HOA Hall of Shame feature she does for KTNV television in Las Vegas. She was one of the first television reporters in the nation to regularly investigate and expose the wrongdoings of Homeowners Associations. Of course, the criminal empire in Las Vegas generously provides her with lots of material. Nevada has some of the most notoriously felonious HOAs in the country, as evidenced by the dozens of indictments in the ongoing FBI/U.S. Attorney investigation.
