Dawud Bey, a Point Breeze real estate developer who bought five different properties in a stolen-house scam uncovered by the Daily News, was found innocent of criminal charges yesterday, after his lawyer portrayed him as yet another victim of the real house thieves.
Ruling from the bench after a two-day, nonjury trial, Common Pleas Judge Amanda Cooperman said she suspected that Bey might have participated in a ring that stole at least three dozen houses from their legal owners by filing bogus deed transfers in City Hall.”But I cannot say as a judge that there's been proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Cooperman said, finding Bey innocent of conspiracy, forgery and related charges.
A co-defendant, Michael Figueroa, was found guilty of conspiracy and theft by deception. City prosecutors, led by Mary-Ellen Walter, had charged that he advised the scam's ringleader, Rickie Williams, on how to work the city's real-estate system to take possession of abandoned properties that didn't belong to him.
Figueroa, also known as Michael Owens, was the 11th person convicted in the stolen-house scam. Three more are still awaiting trial.
It began to unravel on Easter weekend nearly three years ago, when Devota Clark, 71, a grandmother, returned to her home on Reedbird Place in Southwest Philadelphia after an extended illness.
Clark testified this week that she found a Dumpster sitting in her front yard, several men working in the house, and most of her belongings dumped on the lawn.
As she approached her own front door, a man came out and asked who she was.
“I said what are you doing in my house, and he said he was the owner of the property,” Clark testified.
In court, Clark identified Bey as the man who blocked her from her home.
“First he said he acquired the property because of unpaid taxes and water bills,” Clark testified. “I said those taxes were paid. Then, he said he got it through a sheriff sale. I said they don't do sheriff sales like that. Then, he said he got it through a councilman.”
The first owner of the house in the 1950s was Paul D'Ortona, who later became City Council president.
Bey, co-founder of a youth recreation program in Point Breeze, did not testify at his trial. In a Daily News interview in July 2000, he claimed he had bought several properties at once from a woman he declined to identify who had walked into his office on Point Breeze Avenue.
Bey admitted there were reasons to be suspicious – for one thing, the woman was carrying real estate transfer documents with signatures already notarized, in advance of any sales. But the prices were too good to pass up, he said.
The main witness at Bey's trial was Williams, the admitted leader of the scam, who has already pleaded guilty but has not yet been sentenced.
Williams testified that Bey was one of several people approached to buy houses, but was not part of the conspiracy to steal them with bogus deed transfers.
“You may have some problems with what he [Bey] told Devota Clark,” Bey's lawyer, Fred Perri, told Judge Cooperman. “It's a shame what that woman went through . . . But my client wasn't slinking around, putting properties in someone else's name . . . He said, 'I own this property.' In a sense, he made this situation come to a head.” *