Aventura homeowner association prez accused of pocketing $1.5 million in condo fees
The long-time president of a ritzy Aventura condominium was arrested Monday and charged with stealing $1.5 million in association fees, laundering some of it through his dead mother and using the money to buy art and chicken wings.
Gregori Arzumanov, 62, was taken into custody at his apartment Tuesday morning and charged with a bevy of felony counts all related to ripping off maintenance fees of tenants. The charges range from racketeering, organized fraud and money laundering, to grand theft, fraudulent use of a credit card and lying to the federal government.
He remained jailed at the Turner Guilford Knight correctional center late Tuesday afternoon. His bond was set at $500,000.
During an afternoon press conference with Aventura Mayor Howard Weinberg and Police Chief Michael Bentolila at her side, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle read off a list of alleged wrongdoings in Arzumanov’s 32-page arrest warrant and explained how he intimidated unit owners who questioned his tactics through excessive fines and lawsuits.
The state attorney said he was able to do that because at the time of his arrest Arzumanov was not only president of the Turnberry on the Green Condo Association, but the building’s chief engineer and property manager. Bentolila said it took investigators four years to piece together the intricate web of the money alleged to be siphoned. The chief also said more arrests are likely.
“It turns out there was trouble in paradise,” Fernandez Rundle said.
Arzumanov is alleged to have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance fees to himself through fake rental payments to his dead mother, by hiring a security firm he was the sole owner of and by charging potential unit owners for background checks done by his private firm.
By early evening Tuesday Arzumanov remained jailed and it wasn’t clear if he had hired an attorney. Investigators say they took a look at his alleged shenanigans back to 2017.
Not the first time
Fernandez Rundle said Arzumanov’s alleged scheme was reminiscent of another homeowner’s association plot that rocked West Kendall residents two years ago. Thousands of residents were overjoyed when investigators uncovered an alleged scheme cooked up by a group of Hammocks Homeowners Association members in which they were accused of writing bogus checks for $2 million to sham companies and padding their own pockets.
For seven years residents failed time after time to oust the board members who quadrupled some of their fees, destroyed landscaping and playgrounds and harassed residents with threats of foreclosures and code violations. Five members of the largest homeowner’s association in Florida were arrested on mostly fraud charges. The Hammocks, with 6,500 units, boasts more than 25,000 residents.
‘A complete lie’
Aventura’s Turnberry on the Greens at 19501 W, Country Club Dr., isn’t quite that large. But it does have 378 unit owners on its 28 floors, who on average pay a maintenance fee of $661 a month. The association, with a budget of $3 million a year, rakes in about $3.3 million on average.
And far too much of that money since 2017 padded Arzumanov’s bank account instead of homeowner coffers, state prosecutors say.
Fernandez Rundle said as president of the association since 2008, Arzumanov was able to manipulate proxy votes, essentially making hiring decisions on his own. One of those decisions, his arrest warrant claims, was to hire a company called Yuka Security.
Turnberry on the Green then paid Yuka Corp. more than $13,000 for insurance policies and almost $25,000 for a security contract, according to investigators. The company also charged $75 for background checks for potential unit owners or renters. It turned out that Arzumanov was the sole owner of the company and the only signatory on its bank account.
“It was a complete takeover. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” said Bentolila, the police chief.
And prosecutors say that Arzumanov used the name of his dead mother to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to his arrest warrant, before Valentina Arzumanov died, she had a joint bank account with her son. After she died, investigators say, Gregori Arzumanov wrote a series of checks in 2018 and 2019 totaling $225,100 from Yuka Security to pay rent on a fictional unit. The money, instead, went directly into the joint account now solely-run by Gregori Arzumanov.
Investigators also claim that Arzumanov spent the money he obtained illegally on himself, purchasing everything from fast food at a Buffalo Chicken Wings to more than $30,000 worth of art that was in his condominium.
“It didn’t go to the association,” the attorney said of the art work. “It all went to him.”
This story was originally published October 1, 2024 at 6:14 PM.
