Janet Bruce, a woman who previously owned the three-bed, two-bathroom single-family home at 161 East 29th Street in Flatbush, Brooklyn, is living in a senior living facility.
Bruce, 73, said she’s grateful to have a place to live after all she’s been through.
She and her lawyers are still waiting to go to trial against Sanford “Sandy” Solny, the former attorney who was recently tried and convicted for stealing 11 residential properties in Brooklyn.
Bruce said that in 2013, when her now-deceased husband, James, told her he wanted to sell their home a mere seven years after they purchased it, she turned to a family friend for advice. James had complained the house was not worth trying to hold onto, particularly since their extended family members were barely speaking to each other.
The Bruces had also missed several mortgage payments to Chase Bank after James suffered a stroke. After their mortgage was transferred from Chase to Citibank, Citibank initiated foreclosure proceedings against them.
Bruce said she reached out to her Realtor friend, Desiree Hooper, for help. “I got back to her, and she said, ‘Look, I know of someone by the name of Sanford Solny who is going to do a short sale, and what’s going to happen is that he’s going to give you guys, pay you guys, some money. And he’s going to pay off the rest of the mortgage, and free you guys totally from the debt.’”
Hooper is now deceased, but Bruce claims in her lawsuit that Hooper introduced her to Solny. Hooper told her that Solny and a company Solny’s daughter owned called A to Z Corp. would help arrange the short sale of the Bruces’ home. They would pay off the mortgage, so the Bruces would no longer be in debt, and even pay the Bruces $7,000 each in cash in return for title to their home.
Just before March 9, someone from A to Z Corp. called the Bruces to ask if they had a lawyer to represent them. When they said they did not, the A to Z Corp. employee said they could provide a lawyer.
The Bruces met with Sanford and his daughter Shandelle Solny at their East 29th Street home on Sunday, March 9, 2014. “The time set up to do the transaction was 6 p.m.,” Janet Bruce recalled. “All of the parties were there: Desiree Hooper, my late husband, his daughter Vanessa Bruce … we were all waiting there for Solny … minutes to 8 (it was very late), minutes to 8, the doorbell rang. Solny came in and saw me, and he said, ‘Are you guys ready to go?’”
Standing in the dining area, Solny laid documents out on the table and pointed out where he wanted the Bruces to sign. Solny, Janet says, presented himself as the Bruces’ lawyer during the signing, even though his law license had been suspended since May 24, 2012, and was not due to be reinstated until May 24, 2014.
“I was never given the chance to read the documents,” said Janet — “none of us were. And what Solny was doing was flipping the pages, part of the pages, and just saying, ‘Sign, initial. Sign, initial.’ And I went straight ahead doing that.
“Before you know it, it was less than 15 minutes, and the transaction was over. A few weeks later, I got a call … from his office and [someone] said we have 45 days to vacate the premises.”
Janet said her husband moved to a rehabilitation facility in a nursing home soon after the signing, and she found herself having to coordinate moving three floors of furniture. After selling some items and having people from her church come by to take others, she simply left everything else.
Back and forth with Solny in court
She was homeless. “One night, I walked into a shelter to see if I could get somewhere to stay, but they told me I would have to be in general population, and when I looked at the persons that were coming in, I burst into tears and walked out.” Eventually, at age 67, Janet was able to get enough money to pay for a single room in a building. “But I lost everything; we lost everything. My husband is deceased, and for the past few years, I’m back and forth with Solny in court, fighting to see what I can get. But everything — I’ve lost it.”
Janet said she’s grateful for the attorneys at the Lienhard & Grumbach law firm who have taken up her fight. “The fight is still on because it’s not over yet.”
Bruce v. Solny, first filed in 2020, was postponed while Solny fought Brooklyn District Attorney charges of defrauding and stealing 11 homes from a total of 15 people. Now, though, the case should be able to proceed.
After initially feeling relieved to have worked with Solny to clear her debts and get rid of the house, Bruce realized that foreclosure notices were still coming to her. She visited Citibank to try to speak with someone about it, but bank representatives refused to talk to her. Janet Bruce said that in 2017, she reached out to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and met with a representative.
The Brooklyn D.A.’s office knew that Solny had been indicted and charged by the Queens D.A.’s Office in February 2017 with stealing various properties between August 2012 and January 2017. A joint investigation into the case by the Queens D.A.’s Economic Crimes Bureau and New York City’s Sheriff’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation had put together a list of the properties Solny and his associates were suspected of stealing. The Bruces’ home at 161 East 29th Street was on the list.
In a press release dated March 1, 2017, the Queens D.A.’s office claimed that Solny and his associates “allegedly collected rental income from individuals or from the City’s Housing Authority or Human Resources Administration (who were paying shelter expenses for individuals residing at the properties), [while] the homeowners’ properties continued to undergo the foreclosure process and the homeowners’ credit continued to be destroyed.” Brooklyn’s D.A. agreed that Bruce appeared to have been scammed out of her home.
By June 18, 2018, Solny pled guilty to a felony in Queens County Supreme Court and was convicted. “Five voided deeds were returned to the rightful homeowners,” a Queens D.A. spokesperson said in an email correspondence with the AmNews earlier this year. “$100,000 in restitution [was returned] to the victims and an additional $100,000 in forfeiture funds. He was placed on a monitor but that has since expired. He also received five years’ probation, which has also expired.”
Solny’s attorneys were asked to comment on the alleged incidents in the Bruce v. Solny case. His attorney, James Kousouros, said in an emailed response to the AmNews: “Mr. Solny continues to proclaim his innocence and maintains that he never defrauded the Bruce family.”
There’s no guarantee that Janet Bruce will regain her former home, but she hopes her Brooklyn Supreme Court case, which accuses Solny and his team of legal malpractice, breach of contract, fraud, and fraudulent inducement, will be among many to dismantle the reported Solny empire of 240 homes. Bruce’s case asserts that Solny and a coordinated group of scammers filed a newly signed deed to Bruce’s home under a limited liability company they created called E. 29 Corp. They placed tenants in the home and allegedly charged $3,000 a month in rent. Solnys’ team, according to Bruce’s lawsuit, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent despite never paying off the Bruces’ mortgage.
When Citibank again attempted to foreclose on the property because the mortgage was not paid and no short sale had taken place, Solny’s associates contacted Bruce, asking her to sign more papers to save the home from foreclosure. When Bruce responded that she thought the short sale had already taken place, she was told the sale was simply taking longer than expected.
“My take on this,” Bruce told the AmNews, “is that a lot of persons are working along with Solny, so whether he is in prison or he’s not, he just continues among the same type of [criminal] people. When I look at Solny, personally –– because every time he goes to court, I look at him –– he has no remorse, his lawyers don’t care. I’m saying this without any apology –– I’m saying exactly what the Pope said to one of our leaders: ‘Enough is enough!’”