Santa Fe jury convicts ex-homebuilder
Kalinowski faces 80 years in prison
SANTA FE — It took 12 days for the fraud and embezzlement case against former Santa Fe luxury home builder William “Kal” Kalinowski to play out in court, but the jury took less than four hours to find him guilty of nine counts that expose him to over 80 years in prison.
The state District Court trial against Kalinowski, 71, started Nov. 7 and ended with closing arguments Thursday.
The jury of six men and six women went into deliberation just before 1 p.m. and announced around 4:45 p.m. that it had found him guilty of three counts of fraud over $20,000 and six counts of embezzlement over $20,000.
Kalinowski, who’d been working as a public school teacher while awaiting trial, was taken immediately into custody after the verdice by Santa Fe County deputies because Judge T. Glenn Ellington said he was a “heightened flight risk” and noted the long prison term he could be sentenced to.
A sentencing hearing will be scheduled at a later date.
Several subcontractors claimed Kalinowski never paid them for work they did on homes Kalinowski built in the upscale Las Campanas subdivision near Santa Fe. He also was accused of bilking investors and homebuyers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars after he failed to complete several houses. Kalinowski’s construction business went under in 2008, during the housing market crash, and he moved to Massachusetts.
The charges against Kalinowski were for alleged crimes committed between November 2007 and October 2008. He wasn’t indicted until 2013 and was then brought back to New Mexico by law enforcement. He got his state teaching license and was hired by Albuquerque Public Schools to teach at Lyndon B. Johnson Middle School. He was teaching 8th-graders at Rio Rancho Middle School when his trial began.
While prosecutors from the state Regulation and Licensing Department argued that Kalinowski had intentionally lied to people to take their money and even implied he may have used it at casinos, defense attorneys said Kalinowski was another victim of the economic collapse of 2008 and that he was dead broke after his companies went under.
“The problems in ’08 were uni-
versal,” public defender Jeffrey Buckels told the jury Thursday. “Mr. Kalinowski was not the only builder having problems.”
Kalinowski had a reputation for building quality homes in the Santa Fe area. Buckels said the only time he ever left any incomplete was when everything went sour for Kalinowski’s business.
“That only happened in the environment of the financial crisis in 2008,” Buckels said. “He had finished every house he had ever started.”
But prosecutor Ben Gubernick said money paid to Kalinowski by investors and homebuyers somehow made it to Kalinowski’s personal bank account, which undermined the trust they’d given in him.
“No one would have given this man a dime if they knew what he was going to do with their money,” Gubernick said.
The trial had been scheduled to last nine days, but Ellington blocked off more time after the trial failed to con-