WHITE PLAINS – Monsey real estate developer Kenneth Nakdimen pled guilty in White Plains federal court on Thursday to conspiracy to corrupt the electoral process in connection with an election in the Village of Bloomingburg.
According to allegations in court filings, Nakdimen sought to build and sell real estate in the village with others hoping to make hundreds of millions of dollars. That was in 2006, but by late 2013, the first of their real estate developments had met with local opposition and still remained under construction and uninhabitable.
Instead of trying to advance their projects through legitimate means, Nakdimen and others decided to corrupt the democratic electoral process in Bloomingburg by falsely registering voters and paying bribes for voters who lived elsewhere. Some of those people never set foot and had no intention of moving there.
Nakdimen pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to corrupt the electoral process, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He will be sentenced in September.
His guilty plea “represents the beginning of the unraveling of a major corruption scandal,” said Mamakating Town Supervisor William Herrmann. “This is the first step in vindication for the entire community that has fought so hard to expose the efforts of Nakdimen and his co-conspirators, Shalom Lamm and Volvy Smilowitz.”
Herrmann said the “fraud they committed on our community must be fully revealed.
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