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Colts Neck murder still unsolved

Bodies of two stock promoters were found in mansion in 1999
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 10/30/06
BY DAVID PORTER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

COLTS NECK — The gated mansion with its ornate fountain still sits at the bend of a quiet cul-de-sac, in a spot where the only sound that interrupts the chirping of birds is the occasional distant hum of an airplane passing overhead.

Little has changed outwardly in this tucked-away corner of one of New Jersey's most picturesque communities since the night two stock promoters were found slain on the marble floor of the mansion's dining room, shot multiple times as they reached for their cell phones.

Seven years after the killings, the case remains unsolved. Despite an apparent wealth of potential suspects and some promising leads at the outset, the killers of Alain Albert Chalem and Maier Lehmann have never been found.

"As time goes by on any crime, especially a homicide, the trail gets colder and colder," said former Monmouth County Prosecutor John Kaye, whose office initiated the investigation in concert with the FBI, local authorities and investigators with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The multi-agency investigation reflected the tangled web of the victims' business dealings, which authorities strongly believe played a part in their deaths. The execution-style killings were widely seen as a sign that the volatile world of small-cap Internet stock trading, which had already been infiltrated by organized crime, was starting to unravel.

The slayings also reverberated through the leafy streets of Colts Neck, a town of horse farms and sprawling homes that had one of the lowest crime rates of any town in the state.

"At the time it was rather shocking for us all here," said Lillian G. Burry, Colts Neck's mayor in 1999. "We're a very quiet, well-manicured, semi-agrarian community. This was the kind of thing you read about in a magazine, not that you'd see in your hometown."

Colts Neck was hardly a stranger to white-collar crime, however. Living across town from Chalem in 1999 was Jeffrey Pokross, a mob-connected stockbroker who was arrested for stock fraud and later helped the government arrest more than 120 people in one of the nation's biggest securities fraud stings. Disgraced penny stock tycoon Robert Brennan, currently serving a federal prison term, owned a stable and golf course in the township, and former New Jersey Devils co-owner Marc Cooper, convicted of swindling clients of his bill-processing firm out of $78 million, also lived there.

"Because it's very quiet, and by virtue of the way homes are laid out and the open spaces, you don't have neighbors knowing what neighbors are doing," Burry said. "From that point of view, if you were thinking of something illicit, it would be a good place to hide out."

The list of Lehmann's and Chalem's potential enemies was lengthy. Lehmann, who lived on Long Island, had cooperated with the government in an insurance fraud case in the early 1990s that led to the arrest of more than 100 people. Chalem had worked at A.S. Goldmen, a corrupt brokerage accused of stealing nearly $100 million from investors, though he was never indicted.

Both men also were heavily involved in promoting stocks on a Web site that was registered in Panama and operated out of Hungary. After the killings there was intense speculation that the two had been involved in "pump and dump" schemes — inflating a stock's price using bogus press releases, taking a profit and then dumping the worthless stock on unsuspecting investors — and had been slain by people they had ripped off.

"A lot of people had bad feelings toward these people, but that didn't mean they killed them," Kaye said. "We went down some very promising paths that in a normal case would have resolved it. One resolution we thought was certain, but our use of DNA confirmed this person had nothing to do with it."

Whoever killed Lehmann and Chalem on the evening of Oct. 25, 1999, left little behind. At one point, investigators reportedly tried to get human DNA samples from two dogs that were in the mansion at the time, but that proved fruitless.

"There was very little evidence left at the scene," Colts Neck Police Chief Kevin Sauter recalled. "Months later, someone came back and said someone may have dumped a gun in a pond, and we had a team come out, but they didn't find anything. Since then it's kind of died out, as far as leads go."

Long Island attorney Alexander Novak, who had represented Lehmann in a securities case, said he has a theory about the killings based on conversations with his client.

Investigators never interviewed him formally, Novak said last week. Even today, he declines to divulge details of the conversations with Lehmann, citing ethical constraints.

Meanwhile, the house at 3 Bluebell Road is still owned by Russell Candela, whose daughter, Kimberly Scarola, lived with Chalem at the mansion but was in Florida with her son from a previous marriage on the night of the slayings. A phone number is listed for Scarola at the address, but she did not return messages.

The Monmouth County prosecutor's office would only confirm that the investigation is still open.

Novak, for one, is not optimistic.

"It sounded like an extremely professional hit," he said. "It sounded like the perpetrators were on a plane back to Eastern Europe before they even found the bodies."

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