Sex Offender Finds Millions, Keeps Yeshiva

Incarcerated sex offender Rabbi Daniel Greer’s nonprofit housing organizations received a $12 million boost from a mystery lender — and then saw two longstanding lawsuits ditched by Greer’s sexual-abuse victim.

That’s the upshot of a whirlwind of recent filings on the city’s land records database and in various state and federal court cases in which Greer and his nonprofit organizations have been entangled for more than half a decade. 

Greer received the $12 million in March in the form of loans from an unnamed lender, with an 8 percent interest rate that kicks in in September and a repayment due date set for a year and a half from now. 

The money came soon before separate agreements marking the end of two lawsuits, including a 2017 foreclosure case involving the Edgewood Yeshiva at 765 Elm St. and a 2019 ​“reverse veil piercing” case involving the nearly 50 multi-family rental properties Greer’s nonprofits own in the surrounding Edgewood neighborhood. 

Both of those lawsuits were filed by Greer’s former student and victim, Eliyahu Mirlis. Mirlis filed the suits to try to collect on some of the mostly unpaid $22 million owed to him from a separate 2017 civil judgment against Greer and the Yeshiva. (The Yeshiva property is owned by a nonprofit that lists Greer as president, secretary, and treasurer.)

All the while, Greer remains in prison, serving a 12-year sentence after a jury found him guilty in 2019 of four counts of ​“risk of injury to a minor.”

What all of this means for the future of the Edgewood Yeshiva property and dozens of nearby apartment buildings is uncertain. 

But at least two developments are clear: Greer’s nonprofits will retain ownership of those properties for now; and Greer’s companies are still being run by Greer, even as he is in his mid-80s and in prison. 

Mortgages Received

So. What happened?

In March, four Greer-controlled housing nonprofits — Edgewood Village Inc., Yedidei Hagan Inc., F.O.H. Inc., and Edgewood Corners Inc. — received a total of 35 mortgages worth $350,000 each for 35 different rental properties in the Edgewood neighborhood. In total, that’s $12.25 million in mortgage loans.

Each of those mortgages lists Long Wharf-based attorney John Kennedy, Jr. as the trustee. 

Each was signed by Greer on March 12 in the town of Suffield, where he is currently incarcerated at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution. 

Each identifies Greer as the president of the respective organization borrowing money. 

None of the mortgage documents name who exactly has loaned Greer’s companies this money. 

Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment about who is the lender behind these mortgages. 

Instead, two New Haven attorneys working for Greer’s companies — Richard Colbert of the firm Day Pitney LLP and David Grudberg of the firm Carmody Torrance Sandak & Hennessey LLP — told the Independent that Kennedy ​“agreed to serve as a trustee and keeper of the records” on these mortgages. They said Kennedy ​“has no personal interest whatsoever in the mortgages or the properties related thereto.” 

Colbert and Grudberg — the former of whom represented Greer’s companies in the ​“reverse veil piercing” case, the latter in the Yeshiva foreclosure case — declined to identify who the lender is behind these mortgages.

Neither did Matthew Beatman and John Cesaroni, Bridgeport-based lawyers who represented Mirlis in the ​“reverse veil piercing” and Yeshiva foreclosure cases. 

Text in the top left of each of the 35 recent mortgage filings indicates that, after each mortgage was recorded on the land records, a copy was to be returned to Beatman at the Bridgeport address of his firm Zeisler & Zeisler P.C. Reached by phone, a secretary at the law firm said, ​“Attorney Beatman has no comment.”

The 35 $350,000 mortgages were for properties located at 799 Elm St., 396 Whalley Ave., 243 Ellsworth Ave., 25 Pendleton St., 96 Hubinger St., 203 Norton St., 209 Norton St., 187 West Park Ave., 177 Norton St., 788 Elm St., 748 Elm St., 792 Elm St., 826 Elm St., 786 Elm St., 376 Whalley Ave., 784 Elm St., 834 Elm St., 178 Ellsworth Ave., 179 Maple St., 49 Hubinger St., 51 Pendleton St., 34 Brownell St., 43 West Park Ave., 193 Maple St., 155 Maple St., 201 Ellsworth Ave., 820 Elm St., 733 Elm St., 975 Elm St., 166 Norton St., 179 Norton St., 225 Norton St., 211 Norton St., 153 Norton St., and 439 Edgewood Ave.

Click here to read an April 2021 court filing by Rabbi Greer in which he described in his own terms the role that his companies have played in the Edgewood neighborhood over the past five decades in rehabilitating rundown rental housing and and building a religious school at the Elm Street yeshiva, which used to be the Roger Sherman School.

Lawsuits Withdrawn

Not long after Greer’s housing companies received those $12.25 million in mortgage loans, Mirlis agreed to drop the ​“reverse veil piercing” and yeshiva foreclosure lawsuits. 

Mirlis’s and Greer’s companies’ lawyers all did not respond to requests for comment about whether or not these two incidents — the receipt of the mortgage loans and the dropping of the lawsuits — were related. However, documents show that Mirlis’s attorney was being kept in the loop about the mortgage transactions.

Mirlis and the Greer-controlled housing nonprofits Edgewood Elm Housing Inc., F.O.H. Inc., Edgewood Village Inc., Edgewood Corners Inc., and Yedidei Hagan Inc. filed a ​“joint stipulation of dismissal” in the ​“reverse veil piercing” federal case on April 3. 

Mirlis first filed that federal lawsuit in May 2019. The lawsuit sought to hold the companies financially accountable for a debt owed by the individual, Greer, who controls them. As recently as last October, the two sides were in mediation as they gathered discovery related to the defendants’ motion for summary judgment.

The dismissal of the case means that Greer’s companies are no longer bound by a ​“temporary restraining order” that a federal judge imposed in September 2020. That ​“temporary restraining order” had forbid the companies from selling off properties before the case was over.

Then, on April 10, in the Yeshiva foreclosure state court case, Mirlis and the Greer-controlled nonprofit that owns the Yeshiva property at 765 Elm filed a joint motion to open and throw out a prior foreclosure judgment so that Mirlis could withdraw the lawsuit entirely.

“As the motion indicates that both parties are in agreement and appeared to have privately resolved the matter, the motion is granted,” state Superior Court Judge Walter Spader, Jr. wrote in his April 11 order OK’ing the motion. Mirlis then filed to withdraw the lawsuit on April 12.

Mirlis first sued to foreclose on the Elm Street property back in July 2017. After more than six and a half years of prosecuting that case, Mirlis was on the brink of taking ownership of the yeshiva property in late May before filing to withdraw the case this month.