Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Ponzi suspect had many names, games
Arrest in Delray Beach ends 20-year run
Former Coconut Creek businessman Kevin Maddy will never forget one of his first meetings with the silver-tongued stockbroker who called himself Allen Hengst.
“He looked me in eye and said, ‘Kevin, one day you’ll learn to trust me with your life,’ ” Maddy said. “He was very good at drawing peo Massachusetts. ple close.”
Even though Maddy spent days with Hengst hunting on private preserves in North Florida, he never did trust him with his life. But he did trust him with hundreds of thousands of dollars, becoming one of many victims of what federal investigators allege were a series of Ponzi schemes and frauds that played out over decades in Florida, New York and The friend Maddy knew as Hengst is really Scott J. Wolas, 67, a disbarred lawyer who spent 20 years as a fugitive, hiding behind several stolen identities, after masterminding a fraud in the 1990s that bilked investors of up to $100 million, according to federal officials and published reports. Wolas was arrested in Delray Beach last week, ending his long run.
The colorful criminal career of Scott Wolas — aka Eugene J. Grathwohl, Allen L. Hengst, Drew Prescott, Frank Amolsch, Endicott Asquith, Robert Francis McDowell, Cameron Sturge — goes back at least as far as 1993, when he worked in Manhattan for the prestigious Virginia-based law firm Hunton & Williams.
From that first $100 million swindle, involving a scheme to broker high-end liquor from Scotland, Wolas set his course for two decA
ades of life on the run.
While a fugitive, Wolas orchestrated more scams, including two involving real estate development projects in Quincy, Mass., through which he bilked at least 19 investors of more than $1.5 million, according to the FBI.
When Wolas appeared April 7 in federal court in West Palm Beach on charges of criminal wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, he told the judge he had no money and agreed to be sent back to Massachusetts.
If convicted of wire fraud, Wolas could get up to 20 years in prison. Aggravated identity theft carries a minimum term of two years, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“He was always digging deeper into your pocket,” said Maddy, 67, now retired in Clearbrook, Minn. “He not only hurt me, but some dear friends of mine. Good to know he’s arrested.”
When picked up in Delray Beach, where his ex-wife lives, Wolas was using the name and identity of Eugene Grathwohl, according to the federal complaint.
“There is a real person with that name … ” the complaint reads.
Indeed, that real person, Eugene “Mike” Grathwohl, 72, is a master plumber who lives in Delray Beach and until recently had no idea that Wolas was using his identity, including his date of birth and Social Security number, to lure investors into phony development projects.
“Years ago I dated his exwife, and that’s how this all came about,” said the real Grathwohl, who was stunned to get a visit in November from an Internal Revenue Service agent and a Quincy, Mass., police detective.
“They thought I was committing crimes,” Grathwohl said. “They wanted to make sure we weren’t one and the same person, and to know what I knew about it. I knew next to nothing.”
Scott Wolas is the son of a prosperous businessman who owned Great Eastern Liquors, a liquor distribution business on Long Island, according to the many published reports about him over the years.
He grew up a child of privilege, attending Georgetown University before graduating from Fordham University’s law school. After stops at a couple of smaller law firms, he joined Hunton & Williams as a rainmaker who would bring in new banking industry clients.
But Wolas also began making it rain for himself, according to published reports, working on an investment scam in which he used his family’s liquor business as the bait to lure unsuspecting investors into a plan to bring in large shipments of Johnnie Walker Blue Label and Chivas Regal whiskies from Scotland with the promise of 60 percent returns.
Among investors was Cristina Ford, a former wife of Henry Ford II , who lost some $765,200, according to a New York Times report in 1996.
There was no evidence that any shipments of booze were ever made, prosecutors said.
In 1995, Wolas dropped out of sight. His license to practice law was suspended and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office began an investigation. The following year, the Securities and Exchange Commission got in on the act, examining claims from dozens of investors that Wolas had scammed them of as much as $100 million.
In 1997, the district attorney’s office issued a warrant for Wolas’ arrest and unsealed a 119-count indictment that alleged he even bilked his own aunt, then in her late 70s. She was taken for $200,000, she told Newsday.
But even as Wolas’ former law firm was agreeing to pay investors $6 million to settle lawsuits, the missing con man had already created an entirely new life for himself in Florida, according to published reports.
Using the name Robert Francis McDowell, in the summer of 1996 Wolas showed up in Fort Lauderdale as a broker with Biltmore Securities, working at the now-defunct firm for about nine months before moving to Orlando.
In Orlando he went to work for Chatfield Dean and Securities America, according to federal investigators, but not as McDowell. Now Wolas was calling himself Allen Lee Hengst — his former roommate at Georgetown, according to the FBI.
Wolas was using the name Hengst when Maddy met him on the recommendation of a friend. Maddy, a sales representative for a kitchen equipment company, invested a few hundred dollars in stocks, saw some return and was enticed to invest more, he said.
“He has a unique ability, over time, slowly and methodically, of gaining a person’s trust to the ultimate degree,” Maddy said. “He worked on me for two years, on hunting and fishing trips. He was one of the most funloving guys you’d ever meet. Charming.”
Exactly how much Maddy was charmed out of he won’t say. But it was “a substantial amount,” he said.
By 2001, Securities America began getting complaints from Hengst’s clients that they were being bilked, and the firm called in the feds. That year the Tampa office of the FBI determined that Wolas was Hengst, and issued a warrant for his arrest.
By then, Wolas was gone — “already relocated to Massachusetts,” according to the federal complaint — with a new name, Drew Prescott, and a new girlfriend he had met online through Yahoo personal ads, according to authorities.
“By 2002, Wolas found work as a bartender and changed his name to Frank Amolsch,” the complaint said. “Wolas explained to his girlfriend that he previously worked for the Secret Service and was currently in the witness protection program, so he needed to change his identity periodically.
“Finally,” wrote investigators, “by 2009 Wolas assumed the identity of Eugene Grathwohl and obtained a real estate license in that name.”
As a broker with Century 21 Annex Realty in Quincy, Wolas as Grathwohl did well, according to reports. He was earning as much as $350,000 a year and was popular with co-workers who seemed to enjoy hearing about his exotic backstory.
He was a trained Egyptologist, he said, a Vietnam War veteran, and had an $11 million trust fund in Switzerland that he could tap to smooth over any problems with the development plans he was promoting. He was fluent in Mandarin and Arabic, he claimed.
Wolas was also spending lavishly on himself, according to federal investigators: $98,000 on stamps, books and collectibles, and $50,000 on dining out in 2014 alone.
Finally, as what investigators describe as a pyramid scheme began to collapse faster than he could prop it up, Wolas decided to disappear again.
On Sept. 8, 2016, a new girlfriend Wolas met on a dating website dropped him off at a Quincy train station. Carrying his laptop computer and a duffel bag, he told her he was going on a business trip to raise money to finish the development projects.
That business trip apparently brought him again to Florida, where his jilted girlfriend would help bring about his capture.
On March 30, the girlfriend was talking to Wolas on the phone when “she overheard someone ask him for directions to a place in Delray Beach, Florida,” investigators said. She asked him if he was in Delray Beach, and he said no, authorities said.
But Wolas later texted the girlfriend, asked her to meet him and admitted he was in Delray Beach, where his former wife, Cecily Sturge, lives. Sturge, the woman who once dated the real Grathwohl, could not be reached for comment.
During a phone call the next day, March 31, Wolas told his girlfriend “that he was going to ‘come clean,’ ” investigators wrote. “He admitted that he was not Endicott Asquith and that his true name was Scott Wolas. Wolas said he was currently using the name Cameron Sturge.”
In closing, Wolas told his girlfriend to Google him and the failed Quincy real estate deal “to find out more about him.”
Wolas was arrested seven days later.
Maddy said he has no hopes of ever seeing the money Wolas took from him. “I’m a realist,” he said. “It’s gone.”