Former Rothstein Rosenfeldt & Adler Employee Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud in Connection with Ponzi Scheme
| U.S. Attorney’s Office June 22, 2011 |
Wifredo A. Ferrer, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida; John V. Gillies, Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Miami Field Office; and Jose A. Gonzalez, Special Agent in Charge, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CID), announce that William Corte, 38, of Plantation, pled guilty today in Fort Lauderdale to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371.
Sentencing is scheduled for September 8, 2011 at 1:15 p.m. before U.S. District Court Judge William P. Dimitrouleas. At sentencing, Corte, a document management specialist in the IT Department at the former Fort Lauderdale law firm of Rothstein Rosenfeldt and Adler, P.A. (RRA), faces a maximum statutory sentence of up to five years in prison.
According to the charging documents and statements made in court during the plea, Corte and a co-defendant created a fictitious web page copying the legitimate web page of TD Bank. At Rothstein’s direction, Corte and his co-defendant posted false account balances on the fictitious web page to make it appear as if the accounts were well-funded. On one occasion, the defendants modified the phony TD Bank web site to reflect that RRA held between $300 million and $1.1 billion on deposit at TD Bank. In fact, however, no such funds were in the accounts. The false account balances were shown to investors to induce them to invest into the fraudulent investment scheme.
Mr. Ferrer commended the investigative efforts of the FBI and the IRS-CID. This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Lawrence D. LaVecchio, Paul F. Schwartz and Jeffrey N. Kaplan.
A copy of this press release may be found on the website of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida at http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/fls. Related court documents and information may be found on the website of the District Court for the Southern District of Florida at http://www.flsd.uscourts.gov or on http://pacer.flsd.uscourts.gov.