System Failures Part 1: In Black neighborhoods, deed theft hides in plain sight
When a Black person dies without a will in New York City, or falls behind on property taxes or home loans, their families may be at risk of losing the family home.
If they owned property and the deed was in that person’s name, their children, grandchildren, spouses, and cousins could each inherit a share of the house as “tenants in common.” One relative could still live in the home and pay the bills, while others might live upstate, or in New Jersey, Georgia, or Jamaica, or in another part of the world. They might not even know that they have inherited an interest in the property.
Until a predatory investor contacts them.
Jane Sternecky, legislative counsel for the nonprofit Uniform Law Commission — an organization that promotes standard model legislation nationwide — explained that while heirs’ property is often seen as a rural issue, it also impacts urban centers like New York City.
“Heirs’ property can also be an urban issue,” she asserted. It can be seen in something like a Brooklyn or Harlem home that is passed down for generations, and that relatives of a former owner all own as tenants in common. “As we know, that’s a very difficult way to own property,” she conceded. “It presents many problems.”
The Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act was created to help slow one of the main problems this can lead to: a forced sale. New York passed its version of the law in 2019 as Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law § 993. The law provides for special protections of heirs’ property in partition cases, such as valuation, buyout rights, and a preference for selling on the open market instead of at courthouse auctions. The law does not prevent all partition cases, but it can help families keep their long-time homes from being sold cheaply.
Sternecky explained that: “Predatory partition actions happen when an individual acquires just one share of that property.” Once a developer buys out that fractional share, she said, “they’re entitled to file for partition.”
And partition cases can be overwhelming. They can drag homeowners through repeated court motions, notices, affidavits, delays, reports, and eviction proceedings that families end up having to pay thousands of dollars for while trying to teach themselves property law on the fly.
A House Divided in Harlem
Harlem resident Candace Cephas-Niles says that’s just what she and her family have been going through as they try to fight off an alleged partition sale at 305 West 136th Street, a historically landmarked two-family house on Striver’s Row.
Her parents moved into the building in the1980s. They came to live with Julia Miller, whose family has owned the property since the 1920s. Miller was the godmother to Candace’s mother — not a blood relative, but a woman with no children who served as the surrogate grandmother to the Niles’ family.
Niles, who is also running as an independent candidate to represent New York’s 13th Congressional District, told the AmNews, “I’m fighting for [Miller’s] legacy. That keeps me going every day, because she unfortunately never could have kids, and my mother basically was her surrogate daughter, and my brother and I were her surrogate grandkids,” Niles said. “I will be damned if I let somebody take that house from her.”
Niles showed the AmNews a copy of Julia Miller’s will, in which Miller writes, “I devise and bequeath my property, both real and personal wherever situated, including any life insurance policies I may have to the following Three (3) Beneficiaries:
Camille L Cephas who is my God Daughter and entitled to 50% of my Residual Estate.
Candace M Cephas who is my God granddaughter and entitled to 25% of my Residual Estate.
D’andre L Jackson who is my God Grandson and entitled to 25% of my Residual Estate.”
“She left the house to my mother, myself, and my nephew,” Niles said. “She just wanted to make sure we always had some place to live.” Miller’s 50% in share ownership was passed down to Niles and her family, who are the primary residents. Niles admits that her family never filed Miller’s will.
“We never filed it because we were advised we needed an attorney and that we had to pay estate taxes, and we didn’t have the money at the time when she passed, so we left it as is and just submitted the will over to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and ConEd, and they allowed us to change the name on the documents,” she said. “We never thought something like this would happen.”
A little over five years after Miller’s death in 2016, Niles said she, along with her parents and other family members, began receiving phone calls from someone identifying themselves as Joseph Ambalo, who claimed to be a researcher with the Manhattan Foundation, LLC, asking about the property and claiming to represent relatives of Miller. In December 2021, she was notified of a new deed being recorded on her home from the company.
Niles has provided the Amsterdam News several documents from the Department of Finance showing sales of property shares to Ambalo and the Manhattan Foundation. But none of the people who sold to Ambalo are primary residents. Supposedly, they are distant heirs of Miller’s family. But Niles told the AmNews the Ambalos have not brought these individuals to court to prove that they were paid any monies for their heir shares, and Niles’ family hired private investigators to try to find the distant heirs but were not able to track them down.
Niles also provided an audio recording of an in-person meeting she and her husband Prince had with both Ambalo and lawyer Eta Vardi in January 2022. One of the voices, allegedly Ambalo’s, can be heard saying, “Eventually we want to buy you guys out … If we can work out something, we can do some kind of partnership, or we can figure out a way we can all benefit from this.”
A 2023 report from The City detailed over fifty different LLC names in connection to the Ambalos, including The Manhattan Foundation, which were used to acquire properties in New York over several years.
The Amsterdam News has made multiple attempts to reach Joseph Ambalo and other representatives of the Manhattan Foundation, LLC, to have them speak to the allegations by the Niles family, but they did not respond to us prior to publication.
Ambalo, along with his brother Elliot and Vardi, have previously been linked to several alleged deed theft cases in Brooklyn and Queens, and were even labeled “Speculator Bros,” in reference to speculators engaging in predatory actions to strip property, often through buying shares from distant relatives. Mortgage fraud, in which these heirs don’t realize what they are signing, is also a tactic used in deed theft.
Niles says it is unclear whether those who sold their shares were in fact real heirs or even real people, as she says it was difficult to get in contact with any of them. For example, Niles says Ambalo claimed to have connected with a Lawrence Miller who was an heir to the property, but she points out that the Lawrence Miller related to the property had, in fact, died in 1968. “The question is, are these the real people or people who happen to share the same name,” Niles said.
Niles’ family is currently in litigation regarding ownership of the house. She says the case has left her mother with lasting trauma.
Niles joined the Coalition to Stop Deed Theft in 2024. Evangeline Byers, a lead organizer with the group, says Niles’ story has to do with “ghost heirs,” in which speculators can lay claim to owning several shares without verification.
“[Speculators] come in and say that they did these transactions. There’s no check, there’s no history of a sale, you just have their word,” Byers said. According to Byers, law enforcement and court officials have allowed these speculators to “steal in peace.”
“No one has ever looked into it or taken it seriously enough to make a big deal out of it,” Byers continued. “If you talk to the sheriff’s office, the DA … Everybody knows who the people are, but they have not done anything to stop.”
Once recorded, a deed is presumed valid
In New York City, a recorded deed can carry the force of truth — even when it is fraudulent — leaving families to prove they are being targeted by thieves while battling foreclosure, eviction, partition, or possession claims.
Vira Jones said she’s been in a paper war with attorney Alan J. Waintraub’s Majestic Crowns NY LLC to get back into her four-family home at 130 Greene Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Majestic Crowns claims Jones defaulted on a commercial mortgage loan, so it foreclosed on the property. But Jones has long claimed that she tried to pay the loan back, yet Waintraub’s company was more interested in repossessing her property than in the loan repayment.
Arguing in court for herself, Jones was this past July able to win an order for her to be allowed to get back into her home. But Waintraub’s attorney filed an emergency counter-motion to block the court order and prevent Jones from reentering the building.
Jones told the AmNews she has been so stressed out from the past four-plus years of court battles for her home that she recently had heart surgery. “You can’t help it,” she said. “Because when this happened back in 2020, yeah, 2020, when they showed up and said, ‘Oh, we own your house now,’ you can’t help but get stressed out. I was in shock for six months. I couldn’t even move from my bed; I was so in shock.” She’s now waiting for a mid-October final decision on her case. “[The judge] said they couldn’t go into the property. They couldn’t try to sell it, because you know they’re trying to sell it. And she said their people couldn’t go into the building.”
Neither attorney Alan Waintraub nor Majestic Crowns NY LLC responded to inquiries regarding the claims raised by Vira Jones before AmNews’ publication.
The Department of Finance sent the following statement when questioned about partition actions, disputed titles, and how the City Register deals with them: “The City Register’s Office takes proactive steps to help prevent deed theft. Staff have been trained to better detect documents that may be forged or fraudulent, and the office has put in place several safeguards to flag suspicious deeds, referring potentially fraudulent filings to the Sheriff’s Office for further investigation. The Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention also works closely with the City Register’s Office to place holds on suspicious deed transfers while the Sheriff’s Office conducts further investigation. We encourage anyone experiencing a suspected case of deed theft to report it to the Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention at nyc.gov/deedtheft.”
The ULC is looking into other ways to combat deed fraud. Sternecky said the goal is not to promise that deed fraud can be eliminated, but to “reduce the likelihood of it, prevent it from happening, and when it happens, give people a straightforward mechanism, potentially through a quiet title action or some other expedited judicial process.” For New York families fighting to keep homes in gentrifying neighborhoods, that expedited process cannot come soon enough.
