Scam for the day

John P. Martin of the Philadelphia Inquirer has an article about arson on the Main Line:

The 53-page document reads more like a screenplay than a lawsuit. If Jerald Batoff's claim is true, that's how it may end up.
More than seven months after his historic Main Line home, a 24,000-square-foot estate designed by Horace Trumbauer, burned to the ground, Batoff says the blaze was part of a multimillion-dollar arson and fraud scheme by a Canadian businessman and his girlfriend who only pretended to want to buy the place. According to the complaint, filed late last week, the plot hatched by Dean Topolinski and Julie Charbonneau went like this:

String Batoff along with a $260,000 down payment, monthly lease checks, and other cash siphoned from a company on the verge of collapse. Move in and get a five million dollar insurance policy for their belongings.
Dismiss the groundskeepers and secretly disable the security system and surveillance cameras. Start a fire in the basement corner near the circuit breaker, one sure to engulf the rest of the mansion. Then wait a few months, and stake their ownership claim.
The alleged payoff: more than twenty million dollars in insurance proceeds, plus seven acres of pristine Radnor Township property, ready to be developed.

Batoff alleges Topolinski and Charbonneau, an interior designer and self-proclaimed Montreal socialite, engaged in "a pattern of racketeering activity" that started a full year before the April blaze that drew a hundred firefighters. The racketeering, he says, includes wire fraud, insurance fraud, and even staging a fake break-in that plunged a company into bankruptcy.
A lawyer for the couple said that neither they nor he would address the allegations. "It's a very inflammatory complaint, which we won't dignify with a response," said the lawyer, Michael S. Doluisio of Dechert LLP.
The claim is the latest salvo in a tortured battle over who will get the millions of dollars left in the ashes of the famed nineteen-bedroom, fifteen-bathroom estate dubbed Bloomfield, built around 1885 and redesigned decades later by the Philadelphia architect Trumbauer. It sits along South Ithan Avenue, a mile or so west of Villanova University.
In late October, U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr. gave the Canadian couple a victory when he issued a temporary restraining order freezing seventeen million dollars in insurance proceeds that Batoff had collected for the fire. Yohn will get this case as well.
Batoff's lawyer, Paul G. Rosen, chairman of the firm Spector, Gadon & Rosen, declined to discuss the lawsuit.

Rico says nice work if you can get it, and stay out of jail...