Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
Earlier this week, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough sued to dam a foreclosures sale of Graceland, CNN has reported. In line with Keough’s go well with, paperwork that purport to point out the Memphis residence was collateral for a mortgage taken out by Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s sole inheritor and Keough’s mom, are fraudulent: “Lisa Marie Presley by no means borrowed cash from Naussany Investments and by no means gave a deed of belief encumbering Graceland as safety.” The foreclosures sale, which has been briefly halted, was scheduled for later this week and seems to be a case of deed theft, with an LLC named Naussany Investments & Non-public Lending making an attempt to benefit from Lisa Marie’s dying early final yr.
Older owners are sometimes the targets of deed theft however usually not movie star owners with attorneys on retainer. The swindle steadily entails somebody promising to repay the mortgage in trade for the proprietor signing over the home at a fire-sale value. (The folks behind such a fraud are inclined to go after older owners of shade, typically in quickly gentrifying neighborhoods, who could also be home wealthy however money poor.) As quickly as paperwork are signed and the deed is filed with town, the “purchaser” disappears and the proprietor is left with their debt however no home. Some scammers take a extra direct route, submitting cast paperwork immediately with town and banking on the truth that nobody will discover till it’s too late.
As CNN reported, final yr an LLC (Naussany Investments & Non-public Lending) introduced paperwork “purporting to point out that Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed $3.8 million from Naussany Investments” utilizing Graceland as safety. However Keough’s attorneys declare the paperwork are fraudulent, that Lisa Marie by no means borrowed the cash or put the well-known residence up as collateral. There’s much more at stake than $3.8 million: Graceland is the second-most-visited residence within the U.S. after the White Home and makes up an enormous chunk of Elvis’s property, which is claimed to be value a whole lot of thousands and thousands. Lisa Marie’s 2022 divorce filings present she earned seven figures from it yearly.
A Florida notary whose identify is on the mortgage paperwork stated she “by no means met Lisa Marie Presley nor notarized any doc for her,” in response to courtroom paperwork cited by the information web site, which was not in a position to contact the corporate. An electronic mail message to the LLC acquired an auto-reply that nobody could be within the workplace for the following week, the cellphone quantity was out of service, and the state of Missouri, the place Nassany is allegedly situated, has no report of such a enterprise. Keough’s attorneys declare the corporate doesn’t exist.
Elvis Presley Enterprises, which manages the Presley property, additionally known as the foreclosures a con. “Elvis Presley Enterprises can verify that these claims are fraudulent,” the corporate stated in a press release to CNN. “There isn’t any foreclosures sale. Merely put, the counter lawsuit that has been filed is to cease the fraud.”
Deed theft is reportedly on the rise, with its practitioners, typically LLCs which can be troublesome to prosecute, rising more and more brazen. A couple of years in the past, The New York Occasions reported on a landlord who had constructed a real-estate empire by allegedly stealing not less than 17 properties, in response to prosecutors and owners (he even collected lease cash from metropolis businesses at a number of of them, by means of housing-subsidy packages). Extra just lately, a grifter managed to briefly take possession of the New Yorker Lodge in midtown. After staying an evening within the lodge, he used an obscure housing legislation and a courtroom judgment in his favor to persuade town’s finance division to switch the deed to his identify. However the try to seize Graceland often is the ballsiest, highest-profile try thus far. If solely everybody had the Elvis property’s attorneys on their aspect.