State Senate Hopeful Who Promised Kool Aid, KFC Sentenced For Rent Scam: DA

HELL'S KITCHEN, NY — A former state senate candidate who provoked the ire of Harlem when he promised to hand out "Kool Aid, KFC and watermelons" in the neighborhood is facing a stint in state prison for a rent scheme he ran out of a luxury apartment building in Hell's Kitchen, the Manhattan District Attorney's office announced Wednesday.

Jon Girodes was sentenced to serve three to six years in state prison Wednesday and to pay $54,700 to the victims of a rent scam he plead guilty to in July, prosecutors from the Manhattan DA's office said.

Girodes was arrested in October for scamming 13 victims out of $63,450, prosecutors said. The told his victims that he would rent them his luxury apartment at 635 W. 42 St. — between 11th and 12th avenues — for just $1,000 a month, according to the DA. But when move-in day came around, the deal would fall apart and Girodes would end up keeping the money, according to prosecutors.

"In New York’s competitive real estate market, a luxury one-bedroom apartment on 42nd Street listed at a deeply discounted rate was too good to be true," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a statement. "For weeks, Jon Girodes swindled more than a dozen people out of tens of thousands of dollars and, for some, out of a home."

The former Harlem state senate candidate ran his scheme between Aug. 6 and Sept. 27 in 2016, prosecutors said. Girodes would meet with his victims personally and request payment by cash, check or wire transfer, prosecutors said. Often times the scammer would require his victims to make additional payments to appease a fictional person in building management. At the last minute, Girodes would tell his victims that building management nixed the move, leaving some of his victims with no place to live.

Actual building management, though, had no idea Girodes was even conducting his scheme, according to the complaint. A representative from the building's management told the District Attorney's office that Girodes doesn't even own the apartment, he leases, and that Girodes never told them he was planning to rent out the apartment.

In addition to not knowing about the scam, the building managers revealed that they were deceived by the shifty political aspirant themselves. When Girodes applied to live in the building in March he provided management with a bank statement saying he had $319,593.75 in a TD Bank account, but it turns out those documents were fabricated and the account was inactive, according to the criminal complaint.

Girodes yanked down all of his social media accounts and a campaign website in 2016 after it was reported he would hand out "Kool Aid, KFC and watermelons" at an event he was hosting in Harlem. Girodes ended up losing his race to now-City Councilman Bill Perkins in a landslide. Girodes captured 4.73 percent of the vote, totaling 5,619 votes to Perkins' 113,144 votes, according to the state Department of Elections.

Photo by Jon Girodes via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons