Philly house-flipper sentenced to more than 2 years for threatening witness in Sheriff’s Office corruption case

A Center City real estate investor, who was previously convicted of bribing a Sheriff’s Office employee, was sentenced Thursday to more than two years in federal prison for threatening a witness in the case against him.

Behzad Sabagh, 41, admitted to sending menacing messages to fellow investor-turned-witness Gregory Guzman after both men pleaded guilty to offering payoffs to a deputy of former Sheriff Jewell Williams to gain an edge in competitive sheriff’s sale auctions of seized and foreclosed properties across the city.

The texts — which included vows to rape Guzman’s wife while he was in prison and anonymously sent photos of his children — constituted threats not just to Guzman’s family but the ability of the government to secure cooperation in significant public corruption cases, prosecutors said.

But as Sabagh stood Thursday before U.S. District Judge John R. Padova, he wavered between apologizing and insisting that he hadn’t done anything worthy of prison time.

“We’re talking about the city of Philadelphia, where people get away with murder,” he said. “Just Google my name, I’m like the Bernie Madoff of Philadelphia now.”

Padova disagreed. He sentenced Sabagh to 33 months in prison, ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine, and found him in violation of his probation from the earlier 28-day stint he served behind bars in the bribery case.

“Don’t kid yourself anymore … that it wasn’t serious,” the judge said. “It was dramatically serious.”

Prosecutors charged Sabagh, president of Northeastern Real Estate Services, in 2018, and Guzman, a partner in the firm Enterprise Properties LLC, in 2015 as part of a long-running investigation into corruption in the sheriff’s sale process.

Investigators alleged that they and others plied Michael Riverso, the Sheriff’s Office employee at the heart of the scheme, with cash-stuffed envelopes, pricey dinners at Le Bec-Fin, and free rent to gain an inside track in the potentially lucrative sheriff’s sale market.

In exchange, Riverso — who was sentenced to one year in prison in 2019 — provided them early access to the list of properties to be sold at each auction and granted them more time than normally permitted to make payments on properties they’d bought at the auctions.

Guzman, who cooperated with the authorities in the investigation, is still awaiting sentencing in the case — a fact that Sabagh said left him feeling humiliated and disrespected.

After he was released from serving his own 28-day sentence in the case, Sabagh told the judge, he just wanted to “wipe the smile off [Guzman’s] face” and began texting him from anonymous numbers.

Still, Sabagh’s lawyer — Peter J. Scuderi — maintained Thursday that prosecutors had overreacted to the messages his client sent. He shrugged off the description of them as threats as an “expansive interpretation.”

“All these texts can be interpreted two ways,” Scuderi said. “They can be interpreted as ‘I’m going to rape your wife’ or ‘I am worried about your wife and your kids while you’re in prison.’”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Diviny scoffed, calling Scuderi’s attempts to minimize Sabagh’s conduct as “nothing less than absurd.”

Between December 2019 and March 2020, Sabagh sent him dozens of anonymous texts, including photos of men behind bars, messages indicating he was outside Guzman’s house, and photos of Guzman’s children.

“Maybe you should suicide before the sentencing,” one December 2019 message read. “Maybe the judge will give you a break then!!!!”

As for the messages that Scuderi suggested were Sabagh expressing concern for the well-being of Guzman’s wife, prosecutors quoted them in court filings.

“I am gonna [expletive] your wife,” Sabagh wrote Guzman in February 2020.

Four days later he followed up with another text.

“I know you think I am kidding but I’ll promise I’ll [expletive] your wife while you’re away,” it read.

The next day he sent another: “Every second I get [one] step closer to [expletive] your wife. What a good day.”

Sabagh maintained Thursday he wasn’t serious and that he’d lashed out only because he thought that Guzman — whom Scuderi described as the “ringleader” of the bribery scheme — had been allowed to cut a deal with the government and inform on less culpable participants.

“I just wanted to humiliate him — to shut him up and that’s it,” he said. “I had no intention of threatening anybody.”

Diviny, the prosecutor, insisted that Guzman’s role in the scheme didn’t matter.

“Nobody is entitled to inflict such terror on a family,” he said in court filings leading up to the sentencing. “Witnesses must be secure to give their evidence or the hope for the justice system to find truth is lost.”