Fugitive Wales auto broker arrested in Miami
Arraignment set for Thursday in Milwaukee
A former Waukesha County auto broker and FBI informant who authorities suspected of running fraud and money-laundering schemes while on probation has been arrested in Miami after more than a year on the run.
Albert “Alex” Golant, a native of Belarus, made news locally in March when the nation’s largest auto finance firm sued Wisconsin auto dealer Russ Darrow, claiming he and one his dealerships had sold it bogus loans on Range Rovers and Mercedes SUVs that later disappeared without payments — likely exported illegally to China.
Now Golant, 37, faces new federal charges of wire fraud and bank fraud, in part based on his dealings with a Darrow dealership. He faces potential maximum penalties of 50 years in prison. His arraignment is set for Thursday in Milwaukee federal court.
In the Darrow civil case, it turned out that Golant — who had been convicted of fraud in similar auto-brokering schemes in New York in 2013 — was behind the deals.
And, it turned out, the FBI and the IRS had been investigating Golant since late 2016 for tax evasion, bank fraud, wire fraud and money laundering before he disappeared from his $7,000-a-month rental home in the village of Wales last year.
Before Darrow could even respond to the lawsuit from Ally Bank, it dismissed the action in April, and neither Ally nor Darrow would talk about the dispute — or Golant.
But a search warrant unsealed in the spring — and lawsuits in California and New York — revealed a lot about Golant’s activities while he was living in Wales and working from an office in northern Illinois.
He was accused or suspected of taking millions of dollars to buy luxury Mercedes, Range Rovers and Maseratis for exporters, then failing to deliver the vehicles, or selling the same ones twice or using straw buyers to obtain financing from dealerships based on falsified applications.
Investigators also suspected Golant and associates were using money sent to him from export companies to gamble in Lousiana and Illinois instead of purchasing requested vehicles.
Golant came to Wisconsin in January 2016 to serve a three-year probation sentence for a 2013 conviction for auto brokering fraud and gambling in New York. His lenient sentence was delayed until after he had helped federal prosecutors there convict two Russian mobsters involved in illegal gambling and health care fraud, Michael “Fat Mike” Danilovich and Mikhail “Russian Mike” Zemlyansky.
Once in Wisconsin, Golant almost immediately started another auto brokerage business and by March had drawn the attention of investigators. As they began zeroing in on him in spring 2017, he disappeared.
According to federal court records, his wife reported him missing.