House-flipper gets a year in prison for bribing Philly Sheriff’s Office employee with cash and dinners

A Philadelphia real estate investor was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison Tuesday for bribing a Sheriff’s Office official with pricey dinners, cash payments, and offers of free rent in exchange for an edge in the competitive auctions through which the city sells off seized and foreclosed properties.

Gregory Guzman, 51, cofounder of Enterprise Properties LLC, described the more than $9,000 in kickbacks he paid a former deputy of ex-Sheriff Jewell Williams between 2011 and 2013 as a mistake and told U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone that he was committed to atoning for his crimes.

But efforts by his attorney to minimize those misdeeds won Guzman little sympathy with the court. Beetlestone balked at defense lawyer Stephen Lacheen’s contention that there were no victims of Guzman’s bribery scheme and that “everybody does it.”

“Everybody does not — does not — do it,” the judge insisted as she announced Guzman’s sentence, adding later: “I’m not sure you fully understand the enormity of what you did.”

Tuesday’s sentencing ended a decade-long probe into corruption in the sheriff sale process, and Guzman was the last of three real estate speculators to face sentencing for bribing the same former deputy — Michael Riverso.

Riverso, 55, was sentenced to a year in prison in 2019 after admitting he accepted more than $40,000 in payoffs from the men, offering them in exchange lists of properties up for auction before they became available to the public and fast-tracking deed-processing and lien-removal on the properties they purchased.

In some cases, Riverso ignored Sheriff’s Office policies requiring full payment for purchased properties within 60 days of sale. This allowed some of his favored bidders to flip properties they had bought at a sheriff’s sale to new buyers before the initial bill came due, ensuring they never had to put down any of their own money before securing their profit.

In an interview with FBI agents after his 2013 arrest, Riverso admitted he made little effort to hide the payoffs. He recalled one frequent bidder wandering into the real estate department office and handing him a stack of cash.

Another passed him hundreds of dollars — sometimes tucked into greeting cards — during their meetings in the lobby of the Sheriff’s Office at 100 S. Broad St.

Guzman admitted that he showered Riverso with meals at the now-shuttered Le Bec-Fin and South Street’s Serpico, and even offered him marijuana in exchange for the special perks.

Guzman also gave Riverso a regular cut of the profits that he and his business partner, Binyamin Maoz, made flipping the houses they bought.

When Guzman delivered one of those kickbacks in the form of a $1,000 bribe during a December 2012 meeting at a Queen Village coffee shop, he specifically told Riverso, “This money [is] not a Christmas gift.”

In court Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah L. Grieb cast Guzman and Riverso’s crimes as part of a culture of graft within the Sheriff’s Office that led to the convictions of other employees in separate corruption schemes — including ex-Sheriff John Green, who was sentenced to five years behind bars in 2019.

“The Sheriff’s Office has been a corrupt institution, and people like Greg Guzman are the reason it’s become that way,” she said. “The City of Philadelphia was harmed by that. The Sheriff’s Office was harmed by that … It’s a significant crime and there’s significant harm here.”

Still, she acknowledged that despite the severity of Guzman’s crimes, he was key to helping prosecutors unravel the scheme.

He immediately confessed when FBI agents first arrived to search his home in 2014 and later wore a wire to help ensnare others involved in the plot, including Riverso, Maoz, and another real estate developer, Behzad “Ben” Sabagh, all of whom later pleaded guilty.

Guzman said his prosecution provided a needed wake-up call.

The son of Ukrainian immigrants, he’d been raised in a household that valued fraud as a means of survival, Lacheen said.

According to the attorney, when Guzman was just eight, his father induced him to fake an injury so his family could file a spurious lawsuit and collect a settlement.

Guzman was invited into the bribery scheme with Riverso in 2011. The success he and Maoz found in their house-flipping efforts, combined with Guzman’s heavy drinking, soon became an addiction, Lacheen told the court.

Since Guzman pleaded guilty to counts of honest services fraud and tax evasion in 2014, he’s made a concerted effort to make up for what he had done, said Lacheen.

He voluntarily gave up his real estate license, the lawyer said, and wrote an open letter to the real estate community acknowledging the crimes he’d committed. He’s since entered rehab for alcoholism and has already paid nearly $115,000 of the $436,000 in restitution and back taxes he owes as part of the plea agreement he struck with prosecutors.

“Why would we throw him out now?” Lacheen asked the judge. “He’s at a point at his life now where he’s better than he ever was.”

While crediting Guzman’s progress so far, Beetlestone didn’t quite agree, saying she remained “deeply disturbed” by defense efforts to argue no one had been harmed by his crimes.

Lacheen continued to press his case after the judge imposed the sentence and the courtroom began to clear out. He insisted he hadn’t claimed there were no victims but rather that there were no intended victims of Guzman’s crimes.

Beetlestone stopped him with a baleful expression.

“Sir,” she said before abruptly leaving the bench, “it’s done.”