A convicted fraudster was ordered held in custody Friday at the federal jail in downtown Chicago as he awaits extradition to New York to face charges that he bilked a Mexican billionaire out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
During a hearing at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse, an attorney for Vladimir Sklarov presented him as a family man with strong ties to the United States — and “a lot of reasons not to flee” while awaiting the outcome of his case.
Federal prosecutors, on the other hand, painted a picture of a convicted felon with a history of lying to courts and access to hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple foreign passports.
“He has the means, the money and the motive to flee,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Vincenza Lamonica Tomlinson said Friday.
Judge David Weisman agreed, finding Sklarov’s character was “one of untrustworthiness.”
Sklarov will remain in federal custody and soon be transported to the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, where an indictment against him was filed. Weisman said New York prosecutors will then “proceed with the case as they see fit,” but still moved to schedule a status hearing for Sklarov in Chicago next month.
Sklarov is a Ukrainian immigrant who grew up in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood and once lived in a mansion in Lake Forest. He’s accused of ripping off Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego of more than $450 million in a loan scheme.
He was arrested over the past weekend at O’Hare Airport while preparing to board a flight to Greece, where he, his wife and three young children had been living.
Sklarov allegedly posed as the operator of a company that was funded with the fortune of New York’s storied Astor family. He used the aliases Gregory Mitchell and Mark Simon Bentley. His federal defender argued this was to avoid prejudice against his Slavic last name, not to obscure his identity.
Salinas later told a reporter he felt like an “idiot” for entering the deal with Sklarov, a known fraudster.
In 1998, Sklarov was convicted of Medicare fraud for billing the federal insurance program for surgical dressings and a skin cleaner that weren’t reimbursable. He was ordered to repay $14 million to the government.
Stephen Golden, a retired Indianapolis Housing Agency police officer, said he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw a photo of Sklarov in a Sun-Times story earlier this week about the federal indictment against him.
“He’s a guy who could truly sell snow to an Eskimo,” said Golden, who investigated one of Sklarov’s Chicago-based companies in the mid-2000s.
The company, SLS Management Co., operated a seedy apartment complex not far from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Sklarov renamed the complex Las Palmas and put fake palm trees outside. The complex drew the attention of the Indianapolis Housing Agency because of its “third world” conditions, including apartments without doors and a leaking roof, Golden said.
Low-income residents lived in the complex through the federal Section 8 housing program. The problem was that Sklarov was barred from doing business with the federal government.
“He had been selling defective penile implant kits and defrauded [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] of several million dollars,” Golden said.
But Sklarov, who is listed in Illinois business records as the president of long-defunct SLS Management, didn’t sign most of the documents involving Las Palmas, Golden said. So prosecutors in Marion County, Indiana, decided to charge the company itself with felony welfare fraud.
“It was more of a direct line,” Golden said.
On June 16, 2006, SLS Management pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay $425,000 in restitution, court records show.
“People deserve better than to have landlords who let them live in filth like that,” Golden said. “He was preying on that population, who don’t have a lot of choices for housing.”
In addition to the criminal case filed in New York, Sklarov has been sued by Salinas and faces other litigation in the U.S. and abroad.
“He has a history of engaging in this same conduct against other victims all over the world,” Tomlinson said.
In a 2018 affidavit, signed by Sklarov and presented to Weisman Friday, Sklarov indicated he was “destitute” and on the verge of homelessness. Yet three years later, around the time the alleged scheme involving Salinas began, Sklarov started transferring millions to his wife and four adult children, according to Tomlinson.
When Weisman asked Sklarov’s attorney to explain how that “changed so rapidly,” she said she couldn’t provide specifics.
Sklarov is due to appear in court Monday in New York.
