If you wanted to know how disgraced Buffalo developer and current Niagara Falls developer Frank Parlato can fund his various schemes, consider this, from an article in the New York Post.

In an e-mail about the real-estate deal, one of Raniere’s closest advisers, Kristin Keeffe, revealed that Parlato was being paid $1 million by the group to wrest control of the project from Plyam.

How does a Frank Parlato find himself a millionaire?

Clare and Sara Bronfman, heirs to the Seagrams fortune, are caught up in NXIVM – a group that is commonly referred to as a cult, run by a person named Keith Raniere. Their father, Edgar, desperately wants them out of NXIVM.

NXIVM, based in Albany, sponsored a recent visit to that city by the Dalai Lama. Several local people who associate with Parlato got to travel to see the Dalai Lama speak last year.

From an expose in the Times-Union:

The case is Precision Development LLC vs. Yuri Plyam, a claim first brought two years ago by NXIVM principals. The initial suit alleged Plyam embezzled some of $26 million the Bronfman sisters had invested in a failed real estate venture in which Plyam was supposed to manage the construction of residential homes around Los Angeles.

Plyam had been Raniere’s commodities trader, the motion says. Plyam countersued, and the case has become a complicated argument involving him, Raniere, other NXIVM leaders and the Bronfmans.

In Plyam’s countersuit, in which the new complaint emerges, his attorney seeks to highlight Raniere, portray him as a commodities market loser and list him as a defendant.

Evidently, Raniere was involved in some sort of commodities/real estate scheme with the Plyams, but had allegedly run out of money; no less than $100 million, much of it from the Bronfman sisters. The Post story alleges that Raniere wanted to cut the Plyams out of the deal, and paid Parlato $1 million to pose as a representative of Edgar Bronfman to the Plyams in an effort to remove them from the deal.

Parlato’s goal was to convince Plyam that Bronfman wanted to buy into the real-estate deal and cut Raniere out, the papers allege.

Parlato told Plyam that Bronfman “had been trying to get the girls out of the cult for a long time,” and that getting in on the construction project would allow the old man to keep an eye on his — and his daughters’ — investment, according to the documents.
Plyam believed Parlato, who continually disparaged the “destructive” Raniere and said Bronfman was desperate to “get his daughters out of NXIVM.”

“The father feels that Raniere took advantage of his babies,” Parlato told Plyam, according to the legal documents.

In reality, Parlato — who in the 1990s was accused by Buffalo-area lawmakers of running a housing scam — was working for Raniere, another set of court papers claim.

Naturally, as you might expect, it was Steve Pigeon who introduced Parlato to NXIVM.

It’s a tangled web indeed, and one that is being played out in court right now. But the allegation of affirmative fraud and misrepresentation is shocking.

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• NXIVM is back in the headlines… (dave-lucas.blogspot.com)
• Court documents claim NXIVM is a ‘cult’ (timesunion.com)