New York Deed Theft Sentencing: 7 to 21 Years for Two Brownstones

New York State Supreme Court Judge Michele Rodney sentenced Joseph Makhani to a combined total of seven to 21 years in prison on November 10, 2026, for stealing two Harlem brownstones worth approximately $4.7 million. The criminal case is finished. Whether the deeds he recorded get wiped off the land records is a separate proceeding that has not happened yet.

Information last verified on November 12, 2026.

Status: Sentenced on November 10, 2026 in New York State Supreme Court before Judge Michele Rodney. Restitution of $500,000 to Flushing Bank is due by May 7, 2027. A later hearing, for which no date has been announced, will decide whether to vacate the deeds and mortgage recorded against the 107 West 118th Street property. Appeal status is unknown; the Attorney General's announcement does not mention an appeal.

Jurisdiction: This article describes New York law. Deed-theft crimes, the civil remedies for cancelling a fraudulent instrument, and the deadlines that govern both differ substantially from state to state. Recording itself is a county-level function, so the alert and lookup mechanics described here are New York City's and do not transfer to other counties or states.

What Happened

Attorney General Letitia James announced the sentencing on November 10, 2026. Judge Michele Rodney imposed four to 12 years for the theft of 107 West 118th Street and three to nine years for the theft of 135 West 131st Street, ordering those two terms to run consecutive to each other, plus one and one-third to four years for the scheme to defraud to run concurrent. That produces the combined total of seven to 21 years.

The release also states that Makhani must pay $500,000 in restitution to Flushing Bank by May 7, 2027, and that the court will hold a later hearing to determine whether to vacate the deeds and mortgage he recorded against the 107 West 118th Street property.

"After years of scheming and deceiving New Yorkers, Joseph Makhani is finally facing justice," James said in the November 10 statement. "Makhani's heartless deed theft operation caused years of chaos for tenants and left the rightful owner of a valuable Harlem brownstone homeless."

The conviction came earlier. On July 1, 2026, after a seven-week trial, a jury found Makhani guilty of two counts of criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree and one count of scheme to defraud in the first degree. The Attorney General's office identified him then as Joseph Makhani, 63, of Kings Point, Long Island, said he was remanded into custody, and said he faced a maximum sentence of eight and one-third to 25 years in prison on the top count. That release listed a sentencing date of July 28, 2026; the sentencing actually took place on November 10. One wrinkle in the record: the subheadline on the November 10 release says the case was won "In June," while the body of that same release places the conclusion of the seven-week trial in July 2026 and the conviction release is dated July 1, 2026. We follow the body text and the dated conviction release.

How the office says the thefts worked

The sentencing release does not explain the mechanics. The conviction release does, and this is the part that generalizes beyond one defendant.

For 107 West 118th Street, the office says the evidence at trial showed that beginning in 2012 Makhani used fraudulent deeds, other false documents, and shell companies to take the brownstone from an elderly and vulnerable homeowner. In a 2012 filing, a corporation he controlled claimed to have paid only $10 for the building. In a mortgage application he filed, he falsely claimed to have paid $975,000 for it, in order to obtain a $650,000 construction loan; he then refinanced into a $1.2 million long-term mortgage loan on the property. He also submitted a forged application to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development to convert the building into market-rate rentals. From 2016 to 2023 he collected more than $12,000 a month in rent, with individual units going for as much as $3,400, while the true owner received nothing and lived in a homeless shelter. The office valued that stolen home at approximately $2.9 million in 2023.

For 135 West 131st Street, the pattern was different. The last true deed recorded on the property was dated 1975, in the name of an elderly homeowner who died soon after. Around 2012, the office says, Makhani told one of the building's tenants that he had bought the brownstone and secured that tenant's signature by pretending to offer him a job. He then filed a fraudulent deed misrepresenting the tenant as the owner and transferred the building to a company he controlled. When his ownership and the deed were questioned during eviction proceedings he had brought against the tenants in 2013, he filed a new fraudulent deed claiming that the heirs of the last recorded owner had transferred the property to his company. The office says the evidence also showed he orchestrated fraudulent civil lawsuits as part of the scheme.

Both patterns share one feature: the fraud ran through the recording system. Nothing in either account required breaking into a building. It required getting paper accepted at the register.

What the Law Actually Says

Makhani was convicted of two general theft and fraud crimes, not of a deed-specific offense. The distinction matters for anyone reading this case as a template.

Criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree, Penal Law 165.54, applies to someone who knowingly possesses stolen property with intent to benefit himself or someone other than the owner, or to impede the owner's recovery, "when the value of the property exceeds one million dollars." It is a "class B felony." New York's larceny article defines property broadly enough to reach land: Penal Law 155.00 includes "real property" in its definition.

Scheme to defraud in the first degree, Penal Law 190.65, reaches a "systematic ongoing course of conduct with intent to defraud ten or more persons" and obtaining property from one or more of them, and separately covers a scheme against more than one person where the property obtained exceeds one thousand dollars, or where more than one of the intended victims is a vulnerable elderly person. It is a "class E felony."

The numbers in the sentence track Penal Law 70.00 exactly. For an indeterminate sentence, the maximum term for a class B felony "shall not exceed twenty-five years" and for a class E felony "shall not exceed four years." The minimum period for either class "shall be not less than one year nor more than one-third of the maximum term imposed." Four to 12 and three to nine are both inside the class B ceiling with minimums at one-third; one and one-third to four is a class E maximum with a one-third minimum. The eight and one-third to 25 figure the office quoted in July is the class B statutory ceiling with its one-third minimum.

New York did eventually create a deed-theft crime

In July 2024 the Attorney General announced that a new law making deed theft a crime was taking effect that day, July 19, 2024. The office said that under previous New York law deed theft itself was not a crime. The amendments put deed theft inside grand larceny regardless of dollar value. Penal Law 155.42 now provides that a person commits grand larceny in the first degree, a class B felony, when "such person commits deed theft, regardless of the value," of residential real property occupied as a home by at least one person, of a home owned by an elderly person, an incompetent, an incapacitated person or a physically disabled person, or of three or more residential real properties. Penal Law 155.40 makes it grand larceny in the second degree, a class C felony, for one residential property, a commercial mixed-use property with at least one residential unit, or two or more commercial properties. The 2024 law also extended the limitations period and gave the Attorney General original criminal jurisdiction over deed theft.

Makhani's conduct began in 2012 and he was indicted in 2021 and again in July 2023, so none of that applied to him. The case was built on the pre-existing statutes.

Clearing the title is a different proceeding

A prison sentence does not change what the land records say. New York provides several separate paths for that, and each one is its own case.

Criminal Procedure Law 420.45, titled "Post-trial motion relating to certain instruments affecting residential real property," lets "the district attorney, the attorney general, or any law enforcement agency" file a motion in supreme court after a defendant has been convicted after trial or pled guilty to a qualifying crime affecting title to, encumbrance of, or possession of real property. The court may declare the instrument "void ab initio," meaning void from the beginning rather than cancelled going forward, or grant other appropriate relief to the victim. The Attorney General's release does not say which vehicle the pending hearing will use, so treat the mechanism as unstated.

Real Property Law 329, "Actions to have certain instruments canceled of record," lets an owner of real property or of an interest in it sue to have a recorded instrument, "other than those required by law to be recorded," declared "void or invalid" or "canceled of record." RPAPL article 15 is the quiet-title route; section 1501 lets a claimant sue "to compel the determination of any claim adverse to that of the plaintiff."

New York added civil leverage in 2023. Chapter 630 of the Laws of 2023, signed November 14, 2023, lets the Attorney General and district attorneys move to stay proceedings where possession or title is at issue while an investigation is open, lets them file a notice of pendency as a red-flag warning to buyers and lenders, and expands the crimes that support voiding a fraudulent instrument. It added RPAPL 1501(6), under which a conviction for a criminal offense in connection with a deed theft or fraudulent transaction involving real property "creates a rebuttable presumption that such deed transfer was fraudulent." It also amended Real Property Law 266, which otherwise protects a purchaser or encumbrancer for value, to add a rebuttable presumption that such a party "had notice of fraud or fraudulent intent" in defined circumstances involving an unsatisfied mortgage. Section 266's long-standing limit is that its protection is lost where the party "had previous notice, whether actual or constructive, of the fraudulent intent of his immediate grantor."

If you want to see what any of this looks like on the ground, the recorded chain of title for a given property is public, and our guide to looking up a deed and owner in your own county's records explains where those records sit state by state. The formal requirements a deed has to satisfy before a clerk will accept it are also state law: see what New York requires before a deed can be recorded for the local version, and how deed rules change from one state to the next for the comparison.

What Happens Next

Three things are outstanding, and none of them has a published resolution.

The vacatur hearing is the one that affects the land records. The Attorney General's release says only that the court will hold a later hearing to determine whether to vacate the deeds and mortgage recorded against 107 West 118th Street. No date has been announced, and we are not predicting the result. Note the scope: the release ties that hearing to one of the two properties.

The restitution deadline is May 7, 2027, for $500,000 to Flushing Bank. The releases do not name the lender on the $650,000 construction loan or the $1.2 million refinance described at trial, so do not assume those are the same debt.

The appeal window is short. Criminal Procedure Law 460.10 gives a defendant thirty days to take an appeal from a judgment of conviction, running "within thirty days after imposition of the sentence." Measured from November 10, 2026, that thirty-day period runs to roughly December 10, 2026. Whether an appeal has been filed is not stated in the Attorney General's announcement, and we have not verified it independently.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The clearest lesson in this case is structural: the criminal conviction and the restoration of the title are two different proceedings, and winning the first does not deliver the second. Makhani has been sentenced. The deeds and the mortgage he recorded against 107 West 118th Street are still on the land records pending a hearing that has no date. A homeowner in that position is not made whole by a sentence; they are made whole by a court order that changes what the register says, and that order is a separate fight with its own schedule.

That gap is worth naming plainly because the public narrative around deed theft tends to end at the conviction. The remedies New York has built, Criminal Procedure Law 420.45, Real Property Law 329, RPAPL article 15, and the 2023 presumption in RPAPL 1501(6), all exist precisely because the criminal case leaves the paper untouched. The 2023 law's addition of a rebuttable presumption after a conviction is an acknowledgment that the civil fight was hard even when the criminal fight was won.

The second point is about why the fraud was possible at all. Recording offices are not title adjudicators. New York City's Department of Finance says outright that it is required to record all documents that meet recording requirements, and that the city assumes no liability for recording documents later determined to be fraudulent. The system checks form, not identity or authority. That is a deliberate design choice with real benefits, since a register that refused filings on suspicion would be its own kind of problem, but it means a convincing forgery enters the chain of title as easily as a legitimate deed and is then relied on by everyone downstream.

The third point follows from the second: a recorded mortgage on a stolen deed creates a third party whose interest also has to be unwound. In this case the trial evidence described a $650,000 construction loan and a $1.2 million refinance on 107 West 118th Street, and the sentence includes $500,000 in restitution to a bank. A lender that advanced real money against what the records showed is now a participant in whatever happens to the title. That is why Real Property Law 266 and its protection for a purchaser or encumbrancer for value, and the 2023 amendment creating a presumption of notice in defined circumstances, sit at the center of these cases. The true owner's claim and the lender's claim both run through the same recorded instrument. Who bears the loss is the whole question, and nothing in a criminal sentence answers it.

Finally, the sequencing in this case is a reminder about the limits of a new statute. New York made deed theft a crime in 2024. This prosecution relied on statutes that predate that by decades, because the conduct began in 2012. New criminal tools matter going forward, and they do nothing for the backlog of older schemes still working through the courts.

How This Affects You

This section is general information about how deed fraud tends to surface and what the available channels do. It is not advice about any particular property, and nothing here is a substitute for a lawyer.

Deed fraud usually surfaces late, and through a side effect rather than a notice. In the cases the Attorney General's office describes, it showed up as an eviction proceeding brought by a stranger, as a tax or utility bill going to the wrong party, as a title problem discovered during a refinance or sale, or as a lender pursuing a mortgage the real owner never signed. The common thread is that the owner learns about the filing from its consequences, sometimes years later, because nobody is required to tell them when a document is recorded.

A recorded-document alert narrows that lag, and only that. New York City's free Notice of Recorded Document program is "a notification sent to registered subscribers each time a deed, deed-related document, mortgage, or mortgage related document has been recorded against a specific property in New York City," typically arriving the day after recording. The Department of Finance says "There are no fees to register or to receive a notification sent via e-mail or regular mail," and registration is per property through the Department of Finance site or ACRIS, with a paper application available. The limits are explicit: it covers only the listed document categories, co-op units and timeshares can only be registered at the building level, the Department "assumes no liability for failure to provide the requested notice," and it does not stop a filing. Outside New York City the recording office is the county clerk or recorder, and whether any alert exists at all is a county-by-county question.

Reporting channels are split by who has jurisdiction. The New York Attorney General's office asks New Yorkers who believe they are a victim of deed theft to call 1-800-771-7755, email deedtheft@ag.ny.gov, or file a confidential complaint online. New York City houses a Mayor's Office of Deed Theft Prevention inside the Department of Finance, with its own intake form, that reviews suspicious filings and helps victims correct property records. The state-supported Homeowner Protection Program offers free housing counseling and legal assistance statewide and can be reached at 1-855-466-3456. Our overview of New York scam and fraud laws covers the state's reporting routes and private rights of action more broadly, and which agency actually takes which kind of complaint is worth reading before you file, because sending a complaint to the wrong office is the most common way these reports stall.

What none of these channels do is fix the land records on their own. Changing what a deed says requires a court, which is the same point the pending hearing in this case illustrates.

Not legal advice. This article is general information about New York criminal and real property law as of November 12, 2026, and about a single public prosecution. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and it is not a substitute for consulting a licensed attorney about a specific property or situation. Statutes, deadlines and procedures change, and the outcome of any individual matter depends on facts we do not have.

Related articles

• Property Records by State: Free Deed and Owner Lookup
• New York Quitclaim Deed: Requirements, Recording and Transfer Tax
• Quitclaim Deeds by State: Rules, Recording and Transfer Tax
• New York Scam and Fraud Laws: Where to Report, Your Right to Sue
• Where to Report a Scam: Which Agency, and Can You Get Money Back?

Last updated: 2026-11-12. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-11-12.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is deed theft?

Deed theft is the recording of a false or forged document that moves the ownership of real property away from its true owner without that owner's knowledge or consent. New York City's Department of Finance, which houses the Mayor's Office of Deed Theft Prevention, describes it as a type of fraud in which someone records a false or deceptive deed, mortgage, or other property document without the owner's knowledge and consent. In practice it usually involves a forged signature, a fabricated transfer from a dead owner's estate, or a shell company created to hold the stolen title.

What was Joseph Makhani actually convicted of?

A jury convicted him of two counts of criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree and one count of scheme to defraud in the first degree. Under New York Penal Law 165.54, criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree applies when the value of the property exceeds one million dollars, and it is a class B felony. Scheme to defraud in the first degree, Penal Law 190.65, is a class E felony. He was not convicted of New York's deed-theft grand larceny provisions, which took effect in July 2024, years after the conduct in this case began.

Does New York have a crime called deed theft?

It does now. A law that took effect on July 19, 2024 amended the Penal Law so that deed theft is prosecuted as grand larceny regardless of the property's dollar value. Penal Law 155.42 makes it grand larceny in the first degree, a class B felony, when the deed theft involves an occupied home, a home owned by an elderly, incompetent, incapacitated or physically disabled person, or three or more residential properties. Penal Law 155.40 makes it grand larceny in the second degree, a class C felony, for one residential property or a mixed-use property with at least one residential unit.

Can a stolen deed be reversed?

New York law provides routes to attack a recorded instrument, but each is a civil or post-conviction proceeding separate from the criminal case. Criminal Procedure Law 420.45 lets a district attorney, the Attorney General, or a law enforcement agency move in supreme court after a conviction to have a qualifying instrument declared void ab initio. Real Property Law 329 lets an owner sue to have a recorded instrument, other than one the law requires to be recorded, declared void or invalid or canceled of record. Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law article 15 is the quiet-title route for compelling the determination of a claim adverse to the plaintiff's. No statute guarantees an outcome, and how any particular case resolves depends on its own facts.

Is a forged deed valid?

New York's statutes treat a fraudulently recorded instrument as something a court can wipe out from the beginning rather than merely cancel going forward. Criminal Procedure Law 420.45 uses the phrase void ab initio, meaning void from the start. The finer line courts draw between a deed with a forged signature and a deed signed by the real owner under deception is developed in case law rather than in the statutes, and it is not something this article attempts to resolve.

How do I know if someone recorded something against my property?

Recorded land documents are public. In New York City, deeds and mortgages are recorded in ACRIS, run by the Department of Finance, and the city offers a free Notice of Recorded Document alert that emails or mails subscribers each time a deed, deed-related document, mortgage, or mortgage related document is recorded against a registered property. Registration is free and is done per property. Outside New York City the equivalent system belongs to the county clerk or recorder, and not every county offers an alert.

Does a recorded-document alert stop deed fraud?

No. The New York City Department of Finance states that it is required to record all documents that meet recording requirements, and that it assumes no liability for failure to provide the requested notice. The alert is a detection tool that tells a subscriber something was filed, usually the day after recording. It does not screen the filing, verify the signer's identity, or block the recording.

How do I report suspected deed fraud in New York?

The Attorney General's office asks New Yorkers who believe they are a victim of deed theft to call 1-800-771-7755, email deedtheft@ag.ny.gov, or file a confidential complaint online. New York City runs a Mayor's Office of Deed Theft Prevention inside the Department of Finance with its own intake form. For free housing counseling and legal help statewide, the state-supported Homeowner Protection Program can be reached at 1-855-466-3456. Which office is the right one depends on where the property is and what happened, so reporting to more than one is common.

Is the restitution the same thing as getting the house back?

No. Restitution is a money judgment entered as part of a criminal sentence. In this case the Attorney General's announcement says Makhani must pay $500,000 to Flushing Bank by May 7, 2027. Clearing the recorded chain of title is a separate question, which is why the court scheduled a later hearing on whether to vacate the deeds and mortgage recorded against 107 West 118th Street.