Witnesses tied to Par Funding investigation were threatened after attack on lawyer investigating the firm, feds say

Two days after a broad-daylight attack on a Center City lawyer investigating a Philadelphia cash-advance company at the center of an alleged $500 million fraud, at least two other people connected to the probe received anonymous phone calls threatening them with violence, federal authorities said.

Prosecutors disclosed those threats in a court filing Wednesday seeking to keep James LaForte, the man accused of assaulting attorney Gaetan Alfano last week, in custody until his trial.

And while they did not directly accuse LaForte of making those calls, they said in the filing the FBI continues to investigate what appears to be a pattern of intimidation by Par Funding associates as the firm finds itself under increasing pressure from civil and criminal investigations.

LaForte, the brother of Par Funding founder and CEO Joseph LaForte and a former supervisor at the company, “poses a continued danger to the community, including numerous witnesses, parties and lawyers,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Todd Newcomer wrote.

FBI agents arrested James LaForte on Monday, alleging he stalked and ambushed Alfano, a lawyer working to investigate the firm’s assets as part of an ongoing civil suit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Moments before that Feb. 28 attack, Alfano — who represents the court-appointed receiver in the case — had been participating in an online hearing on topics including whether Joseph LaForte and his wife, Lisa McElhone, should have to give up their Haverford home to satisfy a $191 million civil judgment against them on behalf of hundreds of investors their company is accused of defrauding.

James LaForte, prosecutors say, sneaked up behind Alfano as he left his law office near 18th and Market Streets, hit him over the head with what they believe to be a flashlight and left him bleeding in the street, suffering from injuries that required seven staples to his head.

Investigators say they were later able to identify LaForte as the attacker through surveillance video and found the sweatshirt and sweatpants Alfano’s assailant was wearing in the back of LaForte’s car.

“This is an exceedingly egregious and cowardly crime of violence with an exceptionally alarming motive,” Newcomer wrote in Wednesday’s filing. “James LaForte brutally attacked an unarmed lawyer … in retaliation for the lawyer’s legal efforts to hold the LaForte family responsible for their SEC violations.”

But, Newcomer added, the threats didn’t stop there.

Two days after the attack on Alfano, Perry Abbonizio — a former Par Funding insider who pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to defraud company investors and who is cooperating with investigators in an ongoing criminal investigation into Par’s other leaders — reported receiving an anonymous phone call from a fake number.

The caller warned him to “retract those lies or we’re coming for the girls” — an apparent reference to his adult daughters, the government said in its filing.

One of Abbonizio’s daughters also received a threatening call from the same number that night, warning her that the caller knew where she lived, prosecutors said.

Around the same time, that anonymous number also called a potential witness in the case, whom prosecutors did not identify in their filing.

“We’re coming after you,” the caller said, according to court papers. “We’re going to split your head open.”

Though it remains unclear who was behind those calls, prosecutors have said such violent threats were a standard method of doing business at Par — a company they’ve painted in previous court filings as a Mafia-style loan-sharking operation dressed up in a business suit.

Par Funding made its money by raising millions of dollars from investors and then lending it out — often at high interest rates — to cash-strapped small-business owners deemed too risky to borrow from traditional banks.

Several borrowers who failed to pay their debts on time were subjected to threats from the LaFortes or others at the firm, prosecutors have said.

Last year, Renato “Gino” Gioe, a bodybuilder and reputed mob associate of New York’s Gambino crime family, admitted in court that he’d used mob-style extortion tactics — including threatening to “stick a fork in the head” of one borrower and vowing to cut off the hands of another — in efforts to persuade borrowers to pay up.

In their filing Wednesday, prosecutors said James LaForte had warned another delinquent debtor that he was not a person to be messed with because he’d previously torched people’s cars and kicked their teeth in.

That wasn’t just bluster. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to torch the car of a former employee who had left to work for a competitor.

“The government’s evidence suggests that these threats were not isolated incidents by a lone bad actor,” Newcomer wrote, “but were instead a favored method of doing business and ensuring that the LaForte family always came out on top.”

So far, LaForte’s attorney, Thomas Mirigliano, has said little about the accusations involving the attack on Alfano or the suggestion by the government that his client is a danger to others associated with the investigations. A hearing on the government’s motion to detain LaForte has been scheduled for next week.

But in a brief court appearance Thursday, Mirigliano signaled that LaForte planned to plead not guilty and questioned why what he deemed to be a simple assault case had landed in federal court.

LaForte is charged with retaliating against a witness and obstruction of a court proceeding — felonies punishable by up to 25 years in prison.

As U.S. Marshals led him out of court and back to lockup Thursday, the man prosecutors had just portrayed as a menace paused, nodded to family members seated in the courtroom gallery, and quietly blew them a kiss.