Living the high life will come at steep cost for Miami developer Rishi Kapoor
Rishi Kapoor, an up-and-coming developer with ties to Miami’s former mayor, has decided to plead guilty on Friday to a pair of money-laundering and payroll-tax conspiracy charges only two months after he was arrested on a federal indictment accusing him of directing an $85 million fraud scheme, according to court records.
Kapoor was initially charged in the 37-count indictment with swindling investors of millions of dollars, lying to financial institutions to obtain funds to buy a luxury yacht and failing to pay millions in personal and payroll taxes.
Kapoor, who formerly lived in a waterfront estate in the Cocoplum neighborhood of Coral Gables, was unable to obtain a bond after a magistrate judge and federal judge found him to be a flight risk. His trial before U.S. District Judge Michael Moore was scheduled for Monday, putting pressure on him to cut a plea deal to limit his potential prison sentence if jurors convicted him.
Kapoor, who had moved from Atlanta to Miami to attend college, faces 10 years or more in prison on the money-laundering and payroll-tax violations. At his sentencing, the remaining charges would be dismissed.
In late March, Kapoor pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from his role as the chief executive officer of Coral Gables-based Location Ventures and its subsidiary URBIN. Both companies, before their collapse in 2023, developed and planned a dozen mixed-use condo and single-family home projects in Coral Gables, Miami and Miami Beach.
On Thursday, his defense attorneys, Fred Schwartz and Jane Raskin, declined to comment.
Kapoor was arrested at a hotel in Fort Lauderdale on March 6 on what happened to be his 42nd birthday. The developer gained notoriety in 2023 when the Miami Herald broke a story revealing that he had hired then-Miami Mayor Francis Suarez as a $10,000-a-month consultant for URBIN while the company was developing a major project in Coconut Grove. Suarez, whose second term as mayor ended in 2025, is not charged in the new federal case and has denied any wrongdoing.
The indictment, filed by prosecutor Elizabeth Young, included charges for money laundering, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and various tax violations.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida said that while Kapoor raised about $85 million from investors, most of his promised real estate projects were never built. Despite being entitled to a capped salary of $400,000 plus certain fees, Kapoor diverted substantially more funds for personal use, including the purchase of a 68-foot yacht and a residence in Cocoplum.
Prosecutors further alleged that Kapoor misrepresented to investors the amount that he had personally contributed to Location Ventures, claiming he and his business partner and family had invested $13 million, when, in reality, they contributed roughly half that amount. He was also accused of deceiving escrow agents to secure the release of pre-construction condominium deposits and then misappropriated those funds for personal expenses unrelated to the developments. As a result, condominium projects in Coconut Grove and Miami Beach were never built.
Prosecutors also alleged that Kapoor withheld payroll taxes from employees but failed to turn that money over to the government, effectively stealing from his own employees. Instead of remitting those taxes to the IRS, prosecutors alleged Kapoor diverted over $2 million from company accounts for his personal benefit.
Kapoor is expected to plead guilty to a conspiracy to defraud the United States for failing to remit his employees’ payroll taxes between 2020 and 2022. (He also did not file personal income-tax returns for the years 2019-2023, according to the indictment.)
Kapoor also plans to plead guilty to one money-laundering charge accusing him of transferring $820,559 from his personal bank account as a down payment on a $5 million purchase of a 68-foot Princess yacht on Aug. 15, 2022.
SEC alleged Kapoor ‘shuffled investor funds’
Kapoor, a University of Miami business-school and law-school graduate, was under investigation by the FBI, IRS and U.S. Attorney’s Office for more than two years. In November 2024, he reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve a lawsuit claiming he defrauded dozens of investors in his companies’ projects. That civil case is still unresolved, however, as both sides have failed to reach an agreement on how much Kapoor must compensate those investors.
The SEC case underscores the charges in the federal criminal case. In the SEC case, Kapoor admitted liability in a consent judgment with the regulatory agency without admitting or denying allegations that he misappropriated $4.3 million for himself while raising about $93 million from more than 50 investors in his South Florida real estate projects.
According to the agreement, Kapoor was barred for five years from serving as an officer or director of any company that sells security investments.
Calling his conduct as an executive “fraudulent,” SEC lawyers noted that Kapoor used the ill-gotten money to purchase the 68-foot Princess yacht for more than $5 million, bought a marina slip at the Cocoplum Yacht Club for $695,000, leased a 2020 600LT Spider McLaren sports car and paid a private chef $10,000 a month. Kapoor, who is married, also bought a waterfront home in the exclusive Cocoplum area of Coral Gables for $6 million — one of several assets that he was forced to sell to pay back lenders and investors, according to a judge’s order.
Notably absent from the SEC’s motion to freeze Kapoor’s assets and its civil complaint was any mention of his hiring Suarez as a consultant for URBIN while the Location Ventures affiliate was seeking approval from City Hall for a residential and retail project at Commodore Plaza in Coconut Grove. Suarez, featured in the Herald investigative series “Shakedown City,” was not mentioned at all.
URBIN ended up paying Suarez more than $200,000 from July 2021 through at least March 2023, according to corporate records and sources familiar with the payments. In the past, Suarez has maintained that, as a consultant for URBIN, he did not use his mayoral office to help Kapoor or his development company on permitting issues before the city of Miami.
Suarez was subpoenaed in 2024 by the SEC to testify in Kapoor’s case about his relationship with the developer and his URBIN consultant duties, which involved raising funds from potential investors. His statement to the SEC was not included in the court record.
The regulatory agency’s civil investigation of Kapoor was first reported in June 2023 by the Herald in a story that also revealed the FBI was examining his relationship with Suarez in the parallel criminal probe. The following month, Kapoor was forced out as the head of Location Ventures and URBIN. Suarez was not a target of the federal investigations.
This story was originally published May 14, 2026 at 1:32 PM.
