SEC, FBI label Delray's HomePals a Ponzi scheme

DELRAY BEACH — HomePals, an investment club that operated out of Delray Beach, all but guaranteed it would make a people rich. Instead it made them poorer.

By design, if you believe the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI.

Federal authorities say the club was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme that took at least $14.3 million  from hundreds of Haitian-Americans in South Florida and New Jersey by selling them unsecured notes that promised returns that conventional investments could not deliver.

HomePals is now defunct, and its founders, Ronnie Eugene Bass Jr. of Miami, Abner Alabre of Miramar and Brian J. Taglieri were indicted on federal fraud charges last October. Alabre has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

It was HomePals that entangled Tampa businessman Michael J. Muzio in a separate stock scam hatched in desperation to keep the investment club alive. Last week a federal jury convicted Muzio of wire and securities fraud, and he faces a maxium of 190 years in prison as a result.

According to court records, HomePals hooked its victims by offering them a deal that was too good to miss: unsecured notes that promised 100 percent returns every 90 days.  A $10,000 investment would become a $180,000 nest egg within a year. Give the scam two years, and you're a millionaire several times over.

Minus, of course, a 10 percent commission.

HomePals was able to make such an extraordinary promise  to its investors because of  the allegedly extraordinary trading talents of Ronnie Bass (not to be confused with the Ronnie Bass of Remember the Titans fame). And in case Bass couldn’t read the market tea leaves quite right, there was supposedly a $25 million insurance policy backing him up.

In reality, HomePals invested very little of the money it took in, using most of it to pay off early investors in Ponzi-scheme fashion. By the time HomePals closed its doors in December 2008, it had about $7,000 in the bank and owed its investors more than $12 million.

It told its investors that unforeseen problems had caused it to cease making payments but it promised to resume by March 6, 2009. That never happened; instead federal investigators were hot on HomePals’ trail by then, and the scam had completely unraveled.

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