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Taya “Waldon” Romano, 35, formerly of Ridgewood, pleaded guilty to mail fraud and will be sentenced April 13 by U.S. District Court Judge Peter G. Sheridan in Trenton. She’s facing possible federal prison time, as well as a fine that could hit $1 million.
Romano — who moved to Edmund, Okla., where she opened a new real estate business — admitted that from December 2007 to June 2008, she participated in a down-payment assistance scheme involving 13 properties in Paterson and East Orange.
Three of the properties were bought from a company partly owned by suspended Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa. Neither Zisa nor his associates were named in the government’s criminal complaint.
Romano said she acquired distressed properties that she could “flip” by recruiting ineligible buyers with “no money down” and then submitted bogus financial statements in their names to help secure the mortgages, using proceeds from other loans as down payments.
In one day, she bought three homes for roughly $850,000 and instantly sold them for $1.37 million — a profit of more than half a million dollars, the government said.
The lenders ended up having to default on the loans, and several buyers were left out in the cold.
U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman credited FBI special agents with making the case, which also produced a guilty plea by agent Elizabeth Labruna, 53, of Little Ferry, N.J. Labruna admitted helping Romano and was expected to testify against her if the case went to trial as a way of mitigating her own sentence.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bradley A. Harsch prosecuted the case. Romano was defended by Brian Neary of Hackensack.
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