Kris Roglieri Arrested for Wire Fraud, in Jail

Update: Roglieri to stay in prison indefinitely while awaiting trial after shocking revelations.

Kris Roglieri has been arrested by the FBI for wire fraud. He is currently in jail pending a June 3 hearing. The sealed criminal complaint was unsealed on Friday May 31 after months of news headlines and civil court proceedings revealed that his commercial lending business may have actually been operating as a fraudulent ponzi scheme. More than $100 million of customer funds are alleged to have gone missing. Roglieri himself is in personal Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The criminal complaint focuses on just one alleged crime, however, wire fraud for how Roglieri dealt with a client named 1800 Park Avenue LLC. As part of that, Roglieri committed to fund a $98.9M line of credit to 1800 Park in exchange for a $5M upfront interest payment that would purportedly be held in trust. Roglieri is then alleged to have misappropriated all the funds for his own personal use.

Among all the former clients of Roglieri claiming they were victims of fraud, 1800 Park was one of the last to enter the picture. 1800 Park didn’t file its civil suit until April 3, months after several others, where it not only named Roglieri and his companies Prime Commercial Lending, LLC and Prime Capital Ventures, LLC as co-defendants but also three of Roglieri’s employees. Roglieri was the only person named in the criminal complaint, however.

Although Roglieri had represented in his Chapter 11 bankruptcy (now converted to Chapter 7) that his businesses had stopped operating, one of those businesses (NACLB) has publicly represented that it had merely rebranded to a new name, and it is still soliciting payments from potential customers under that name.