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At the same time, our court reporter, Oliver Mackson, was preparing a piece marking the anniversary of the shooting, which remains the most high-profile unsolved killing in the area.
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Weekly records check snowballs into probe of million-dollar looting, murder
Donald Boehm reportedly lets his German shepherd out to bark at unwanted visitors, including process servers. Boehm faces police scrutiny for allegedly defrauding a cousin's estate and for possible involvement in the death of a former business partner.
My two-year investigation of a local businessman started simply enough with my weekly check of bankruptcy filings. But it would explode and culminate in the publication of a 16-page special report showing how Donald Boehm - "Teflon Don" - had taken millions from business associates, banks and a cousin's estate, all in a desperate effort to keep his ventures afloat.
Police continue to investigate his possible role in the shooting death of Cosimo DiBrizzi, a prominent, beloved local businessman who had filed a lawsuit accusing Boehm of stealing from their partnership.
The reporting for "Teflon Don" began with the March 2004 bankruptcy filings of three companies. I checked for local bankruptcies using PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records, http://pacer. uspci.uscourts.gov), which provides fee-based access to federal court records.
The initial filings appeared to be a rush job. Each was just two pages long, where normal business bankruptcy filings are at least 30 or 40 pages. All three listed the same debtor address: the New Windsor residence of Donald Boehm.
The filings suggested these were small but not insignificant companies, each with between $1 million and $10 million in assets and debts.
With little to go on, I started a file and monitored the Web site for additional documents. Within a few weeks those documents appeared, and details about Boehm's companies emerged, including boat companies in the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands.
I contacted the few people listed in the filings, but none were willing to talk.
When I checked the county clerk's office, a few property transfers for Boehm turned up, as did the DiBrizzi lawsuit. It dated back to the late 1990s and appeared unrelated to Boehm's current troubles. So, I focused instead on the property records and bankruptcies. Over the following months, I sat in on a few hearings when my schedule permitted but couldn't yet see the full picture.
High-profile killing
On May 10, 2004, about six weeks after the bankruptcy filings, a man walked into DiBrizzi's home and shot him and his son, Nicolas. Father and son were hospitalized, and Cosimo DiBrizzi died that August.
For a long time, our coverage didn't progress beyond what the police told our reporters, which wasn't much. A year later, in the summer of 2005, the pieces of the Boehm puzzle began to come together. I was working on a story about Nicolas DiBrizzi, who was assuming a more prominent role in the family's restaurant business, which at its height included some 60 restaurants along the East Coast.
At the same time, our court reporter, Oliver Mackson, was preparing a piece marking the anniversary of the shooting, which remains the most high-profile unsolved killing in the area.
Mackson stopped by my desk one day and told me that the police had identified a person of interest in the DiBrizzi shooting. His name was Donald Boehm.
I nearly fell out of my chair, then swore a bit and walked quickly to the filing cabinet where, I'm ashamed to admit, my sizeable Boehm folder had been sitting untouched for weeks.
Mackson and I met with Newburgh Detective Sgt. Margaret O'Neill, who was overseeing the shooting investigation. O'Neill had had little to say about the case, but she was now more forthcoming, though still guarded.
Boehm and DiBrizzi had been due in court two days after the shooting, at which time Boehm could have been jailed on a contempt charge for failing to repay DiBrizzi. Police were investigating the possibility that Boehm hired the intruder, perhaps to scare DiBrizzi into backing off in court.
O'Neill said she also was looking into allegations that Boehm had looted millions from the estate of his cousin, Fred Warmers. Warmers had accumulated a small fortune in cash and investments, as well as hundreds of acres of land in eastern Orange County. When Warmers died at the end of 1998, Boehm had been named executor of his estate.
Mackson wrote a story mentioning the investigation of Boehm, and my research continued. I figured we'd be ahead of the curve if and when Boehm got indicted.
I already had tracked some of Boehm's sales of Warmers' land through deed and mortgage records, but I hit the mother lode after spending half a day reading the estate case file. It included contracts, bank records and even Boehm's written ledger for the estate accounts.
Using the bank records, I traced the path of more than $1 million out of Fred Warmers' estate and into Boehm's boat companies. The file also included an inventory of Warmers' land, as well as documents detailing more than $600,000 in loans made to Boehm by local real-estate broker Richard Shulkin and his various associates.
Boehm repaid those loans with land from the Warmers estate.
I used Excel to catalogue the dozen or so Warmers properties, then correlated sale records with tax maps, subdivision approvals, building permits and other documents from the towns where Warmers had owned land. This involved perhaps a dozen trips to planning board and assessor's offices in eastern Orange County. A typical trip might include an hour or two of collecting files, a visit to one or two properties and interviews with one or two minor characters.
I tried to do as many interviews as possible in person, especially with people I suspected were reluctant to talk. And nearly everyone was reluctant to talk. Oddly, though, they seemed to have no problem telling me who else I should talk to. On some days, I parlayed one drop-in visit into a string of conversations simply by driving down the main commercial roads in Newburgh and New Windsor and visiting people to whom I'd been referred.
The collection of bankruptcy files, meanwhile, had grown considerably, augmented by Boehm's personal bankruptcy case. He filed the day before his home was to be sold at a foreclosure auction.
It took months of searching and hundreds of photocopies to compile all the records I needed, but eventually several patterns emerged. Boehm had sold off millions of dollars worth of Fred Warmers' land, most of it at what appeared to be deeply discounted prices, and the vast majority of the proceeds never made it to Warmers' heirs. The land sales came in clusters at crucial moments in Boehm's business or personal dealings. Many of Boehm's boldest acts - the business and personal bankruptcies and the most audacious land deals - occurred as he faced imminent crises such as the loss of his boats or home.
It appears that he had help in carrying out these schemes from his accountant and at least two of his lawyers. One law firm was denied its fee in bankruptcy court for failing to disclose potential conflicts of interest arising from its many dealings with Boehm.
At the same time, the courts had been unwitting accomplices. Boehm had dodged a half-dozen contempt orders in three courts, and, to this day, has yet to be charged with any crime.
Boehm was a master, it seemed, at extricating himself from tight spots. The title of the special report, "Teflon Don," was meant to reflect his many escapes.
Filling in the blanks
Somewhere along the line, I switched gears from waiting for the prosecutors to make an indictment to wanting to scoop them.
My consistent presence in bankruptcy court began to pay dividends even after Boehm stopped showing up for his own hearings. The bankers and lawyers who once had been reluctant to talk eventually loosened up, although many declined to go on the record. Instead, they gave me useful background material or pointed me toward potential sources. One even shipped me a thick box of Boehm depositions, which provided a wealth of personal details about a man whose history is as fuzzy as his memory under oath.
Boehm, now 71, had been a shipbuilder all his life. He had built ships for the Navy and served on the board of a public company.
I found multiple affidavits by process servers who claimed they'd been chased from Boehm's house by his menacing German shepherd.
I met several more times with Detective Sgt. O'Neill. Each time, she opened up a little more. She was approaching retirement and was frustrated by the lack of progress in the estate case, which the district attorney's office seemed unwilling to pursue.
During one fortuitous visit to bankruptcy court, I met Fred Warmers' daughter and granddaughter. They previously had been unwilling to talk because they did not want to interfere with the estate case. But their frustration, like O'Neill's, overcame their reservations. We met for three hours-long interviews. They filled in some blanks on the estate and laid out their personal stories in heartbreaking detail.
To illustrate the story, photographer Jeff Goulding and I spent three afternoons driving around Newburgh and New Windsor, taking pictures of wooded land and cleared building lots from Boehm's deals, as well as a handful of willing interview subjects.
In writing and editing the story, I worked mainly with business editor Douglas Cunningham and executive editor Mike Levine. Armed as I was with a half-dozen boxes of material, the writing presented several challenges. The story of Donald Boehm was incredibly complex, and it included three intersecting story lines: his dealings with DiBrizzi, his handling of the Warmers estate and the shenanigans involving his boat businesses.
The lawyering process to clear the stories for publication stretched across three meetings and perhaps a dozen phone calls. We were making assertions that usually follow an indictment rather than precede it. In the end, the lawyer may have actually improved the story by pushing me to focus on the best-supported claims and lose the rest.
The unfolding Boehm drama has gained an avid local following, and the Herald-Record continues to follow the developments. In early September, the bank made another attempt to auction Boehm's house, only to find that Boehm's wife filed for bankruptcy 45 minutes before the sale. By October, a grand jury began hearing parts of the estate case.
BY MICHAEL LEVENSOHN
(MlDDLETOWN, N.Y.) TlMES HERALD-RECORD
Michael Levensohn is a business reporter for the Times Herald-Record, a daily newspaper based in Middletown, N.Y.
Copyright Investigative Reporters & Editors Nov/Dec 2006