Investigations

On December 9, 2021, Alexander Xavier, Timothy Castracane, and Henry Hattendorf were each sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to forfeit $1,242,417. Another defendant, Robert Wann was sentenced on November 18, 2021, to a forfeiture of $1,242,217. Between November and December 2021, the four defendants were also sentenced to a total of 196 months of incarceration and over $2.6 million in joint and several restitution. The defendants had been indicted a year earlier for using various businesses to obtain payments from construction companies in exchange for fraudulent surety bonds secured by valueless gold certificates. The scheme included the March 2015 sale of a fraudulent surety bond, purportedly worth nearly $23 million, to contractors working on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s Goethals Bridge replacement project funded by the Federal Highway Administration. The victims paid over $919,000 for the fraudulent surety bond.