The neighborhood, a stronghold of the city’s Hasidic community, has its own ambulance corps, rabbinical courts and civilian security squad, the Shomrim. The Observer had been drifting around the area, a stranger in a strange land, and given our mission, we weren’t surprised to see a neighborhood enforcer bounding towards us. He had a huge belly that parted his suspenders, a sandy beard and noticeably thick hands.

Ben Herbst (Photo: Tracy Collins)

Seeking to avoid a confrontation, we gestured to the house next door. On a block of McMansions, the place stood out. It was encircled by a chain link fence. Behind it, a porchlike appendage that seemed as if it had been slapped right onto the front of the home was strewn with dust and rubble. A vague framework of bare steel girders rose from the platform, as if some structure had been planned and then abandoned. The house itself was in shambles, with pieces of the facade ripped away, windows broken and boarded up and the roof bowing and in some places missing altogether.

“Do you know what happened here?” we asked the Shomrim volunteer, whose name was Abraham. He shook his head.

The Observer explained the situation. Benjamin Herbst appeared to have destroyed his neighbor’s home, and we were there to ask him why in person. He refused to come out.

“Well why don’t you call him?” Abraham suggested.

We had called Mr. Herbst, but the tale he’d spun over the phone was so outlandish and confusing, and the litany of papers he had emailed us so convoluted, we had hoped to persuade him to guide us through it face to face.

“Try coming back another time, it’s getting close to Shabbos,” Abraham said.

He was right. The shadows were getting longer and soon, most people in the area wouldn’t so much as flip on a light switch, forget about answer the door for an obvious outsider. Seeing we weren’t much of a threat, Abraham turned away, got on his walkie-talkie and disappeared down the street. It was time for us to go as well.

In 2005, a man named Enrico Mancini died in Brooklyn. He was 98 years old and had been ill for quite some time. He had outlived his wife as well as his only child. Mr. Mancini had come to Borough Park from Italy in the 1950s. There is a decades-old picture of him in court documents, standing in front of his house, 5017 17th Avenue—the one that is now in ruins. He had his arm around Mrs. Mancini in the picture: Proud immigrants who had found a foothold in the land of opportunity.

When Mr. Mancini died, the house and the rest of his estate passed into the control of one of his only remaining relatives, his daughter-in-law, Serafina Mancini, who, at the time, was in her 70s. Thinking 5017 17th Avenue seemed like an ideal place to spend her golden years, she made plans to move in. But when she arrived, she received a rude welcome from Mr.

Herbst, who announced that she was trespassing. To her shock, construction work had begun on the home. Mr. Herbst was in the midst of a full-blown project to integrate 5017 17th Avenue with his palatial house next door, 5019-5021 17th Avenue. It was as if one house were reaching out and grabbing its neighbor, the beams encircling the adjacent residence like tentacles. Intimidated, confused and distraught, she retreated to her lawyer, William Cahill, who specializes in estate work. What the hell was going on?

To Mr. Cahill’s amazement, a quick perusal of property records indicated that Mr. Herbst was actually telling the truth. Four days after Mr. Mancini’s death in August, the deed to 5017 17th Avenue had been quietly transferred into the name of Jacob and Malka Herbst, Mr. Herbst’s son and daughter-in-law, who live with him. Technically, Mr. Herbst was the owner of the Mancini home. And on top of that, a loan had been taken out on the property in the amount of $500,000. The lender was a company called Ay One, which, as it happens, Mr. Herbst himself controls.

Mr. Herbst had likely never paid a dime of this loan to Jacob and Malka, but Mr. Cahill immediately understood what had been done. Mr. Herbst, he said, had forged the deed to put the property in the couple’s hands and then placed a lien against it.

In theory, the problem could be easily solved. Mrs. Mancini would simply need to show that the documents were fraudulent and transfer the property back into her name. But that loan had added a layer of complexity: Even if Mrs. Mancini were recognized as the rightful owner, she would be unable to sell the home now that its title was sullied with Mr. Herbst’s lien. Besides that, he could come after her for the $500,000 he would claim to have lent against the house.

“At first we just thought he was the eccentric neighbor,” Mr. Cahill remembered. “Then we quickly got an idea what a severe character Mr. Herbst is.”

As The Observer soon found, Mr. Herbst is indeed an extraordinary character—a virtuoso at turning the city’s labyrinthine legal system to his own ends. If, as an examination of his dealings suggests, he is a huckster, he is an impressively creative one—an auteur of sorts, whose canvas is New York’s bureaucracy and courts system.

In surrogate’s court, where Serafina Mancini’s lawyer, Mr. Cahill, started a proceeding to wipe away the phony debt and deed, Mr. Herbst launched a vigorous counterattack. Mrs. Mancini wasn’t a sweet old woman, he asserted, but a disloyal in-law who never visited, even as Mr. Mancini grew frail and increasingly helpless.

“We were the ones who were taking care of him,” Mr. Herbst proclaimed during a telephone interview with The Observer. “He used to come over to our house every Friday night to have my wife’s chicken soup. How do you think he sustained so long? It was her soup!”

Mrs. Mancini was jealous of the relationship Mr. Herbst had with her father-in-law, Mr. Herbst said, telling The Observer she didn’t even come to visit Mr. Mancini during his final days. “Mr. Mancini told me, ‘Call them, I’m dying,’” Mr. Herbst claimed. “‘I’m dying, I want to see my grandaughters.’ But nobody came. I was so disappointed.”

Serafina Mancini’s lawyers scoffed at these claims.

“Mr. Mancini had failing eyesight and hearing, and he barely spoke or wrote any English,” Roy Martin, another attorney of Mrs. Mancini’s said. “He also hated Herbst.”

“Herbst had this Polaroid picture of him kind of propping Mancini up in his hospital bed, and there was a big smile on Herbst’s face,” Mr. Cahill said. “It was like this manufactured photo, ‘See how much he loved me?’”

In court Mr. Herbst claimed that Mr. Mancini had conveyed the house to him for $500,000 and then, shortly before his death, forgiven the debt.

“Ask yourself, what are the odds that a 98-year-old man conveys his house for no consideration?” Mr. Cahill asked rhetorically.

It did seem unlikely, but not impossible. And establishing the facts in court proved to be difficult. Mr. Herbst offered a simple resolution. There was a home health care aide who had lived with Mr. Mancini during his last years who could clear up the whole situation. She had borne witness to all the Friday night feasts at the Herbst household, to Mr. Mancini’s bitter disappointment with his relatives, and to how, ultimately, Mr. Mancini had handed Mr. Herbst his house free of charge because Mr. Herbst was his one true companion.

The only problem was the woman couldn’t be located.

“He’s very good at raising something where there’s a glimmer of truth,” Mr. Cahill said.
All the while, Mr. Herbst was moving ahead with his efforts to join the two houses, erecting 13 heavy-duty steel beams between the properties.

“I was sitting there in court and thinking to myself, what the fuck am I going to do now?” Mr. Cahill remembered. “The legal bills were going through the roof, he was destroying the house. It was a total nightmare.”

Mr. Herbst’s digressions and postponements were stringing out what should have been a routine series of determinations. “His mother must have died in Canada six times,” Mr. Cahill insisted.

In 2008, the New York Daily News reporter William Sherman highlighted how easy it is for fraudsters to take control of a property by simply showing up at the office of the city register and filing bogus documents. To demonstrate, Mr. Sherman placed the Empire State Building temporarily into his possession, listing Fay Wray as a witness in the transfer paperwork and the famed bank robber Willie Sutton as the notary. The system hasn’t been reformed since Mr. Sherman’s stunt.

“If Bill Sherman wanted, he could probably steal the Empire State Building all over again,” Richard Farrell, a lawyer in charge of real estate cases for the Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, told us. “The recording office has a mandate. If you present a document that is the proper format and you pay the fees, they must record it. If there is fraud thereafter, that’s for other agencies to take care of.”

The loose oversight is due in part to the fact that title fraud is usually a clear-cut offense with an easily traceable paper trail.

It’s remarkable then, that Mr. Herbst, who is in his 60s, has been able to work the system for so long. Mr. Cahill soon discovered that he has a history of such shenanigans. In 2006 for instance, Mr. Herbst helped a man named Barry Chaimovitz sell a property owned by Mr. Chaimovitz’s family and said he would channel the proceeds into another building in Detroit purportedly being sold by a Hasidic man named Mayer Goldberger. Instead, they simply pocketed the money. The incident became known as the Kosher Butcher Case, because Mr. Chaimovitz’s family owns a well-known meat shop in Borough Park.

Attorney Roy Martin, who was hired by Mr. Chaimovitz’s brother Abraham Chaimovitz, eventually forced Mr. Herbst and Mr. Goldberger to return the cash, which amounted to about $1.8 million, to the Chaimovitz family. Mr. Herbst coughed up the money only after he was thrown into jail for 15 days for contempt of court.

Mr. Herbst had a different explanation for his incarceration. “I only went to jail because I made the mistake of being disrespectful to the judge,” he said, referring to a moment when he lost his patience during the court proceedings and referred to the judge as “your highness.”

Court documents and transcripts however clearly show he was caught trying to conceal the facts of the case, including how he and Mr. Goldberger had blatantly withdrawn the Chaimovitz family’s money into their personal accounts.

Earlier this year, Mayer Goldberger was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison in Nassau County for an unrelated mortgage fraud.

“Mayer Goldberger is a piece of shit!” Mr. Herbst fumed, pointing out that Mr. Goldberger’s incarceration has nothing to do with him.

Like in the Mancini case, Mr. Herbst’s account is the mirror image of his accusers’; he was only helping Barry fight for his share of the family’s real estate holdings from greedy Abraham, he said. “You’re going to get people who make these claims when you handle as many cases as I do,” Mr. Herbst said.

The Observer learned of at least two other instances of alleged fraud by Mr. Herbst where he illicitely transferred a property into his own control. In 1999, he took 5001 17th Avenue and placed it in the hands of another of his sons, Richard Herbst, then put a phony lien against the house. He was eventually forced to pay off the rightful owner of the property.

In a more recent incident, which is still winding its way through Manhattan Supreme Court, Mr. Herbst allegedly used phony documents to transfer ownership of the mortgage on a Manhattan office building to his control. “He’s just like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the movie Catch Me If You Can, but with a beard,” Stephen Meister, an attorney involved in the case told The Observer.

Mr. Herbst runs an official-sounding company called the Council for Community Preservation, Inc., that he said has helped hundreds of people restructure loans on their homes and other property and avoid foreclosure. “Not just Jewish people,” Mr. Herbst said. “But everyone, Hispanic, black people, white people. Everyone.”

For a man who spends the bulk of his time sticking up for the little man though, he seems conspicuously deft at bobbing and weaving his way through fraud allegations. Mr. Herbst, whose background is in the rabbinical courts, taught himself about the secular court system by studying textbooks in the Brooklyn Law Library. Even Mr. Herbst’s opponents concede that he has a unique talent.

“He’s like an idiot savant of court procedure,” Mr. Cahill said, echoing the sentiments of several people familiar with Mr. Herbst.

While Mayer Goldberger went to jail for forging documents so that he could draw mortgages over and over on the same property in Long Island, an easily prosecutable offense, Mr. Herbst has been more subtle—even disciplined.

In several situations, the facts have been open enough to interpretation as to leave the burden of proof at least marginally in his favor.

“In the Mancini case, the issue was did [Mr. Mancini] sell it or didn’t he,” Mr. Farrell, the assistant Brooklyn DA said, explaining why he hasn’t gone after Mr. Herbst. “Mr. Mancini can’t tell us he didn’t.”

The whole situation infuriates Roy Martin. “How many people have to get ripped off before something is done about this guy?” he said.

Mr. Martin has had success beating Mr. Herbst in their numerous outings by identifying and grasping onto incontrovertible facts. In the Kosher Butcher Case, for instance, Mr. Martin focused on the way Mr. Herbst had clearly forged documents, allowing him to swipe the family’s $1.8 million. Mr. Herbst offered up endless explanations for how the money ended up with him, but in the end, he couldn’t explain the documents themselves.

Mr. Martin has spent so much time battling with Mr. Herbst, he says he has witnessed fleeting moments when the man momentarily acknowledges of his own culpability.

It happened during the Mancini case. After months of wrangling in court, Mr. Cahill had managed to get the deed back in the hands of Mrs. Mancini and the bogus mortgage that Mr. Herbst had placed on the property removed. From there, Mr. Martin took over and won a restraining order that forced Mr. Herbst to cut down the beams.

Steelworkers did the work one afternoon in 2008 as Mr. Martin and Mr. Cahill watched from the sidewalk. Mr. Herbst came out of his house and looked on as well. The three men eventually sat together on Mr. Herbst’s front steps. Though they were adversaries, for a moment, there was a sense of collegiality.

Mr. Herbst gestured at the surrounding neighborhood, where many of the homes appear to fall on the far side of what is probably permitted by code.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “No Jew-boy in Borough Park ever builds legal.”

Mr. Martin went on to win a $569,000 judgment against Mr. Herbst and his family earlier this year, almost seven years after the whole mess began. The Mancini home, or what’s left of it, was recently sold by Mrs. Mancini for $730,000 to a company called MLSMNDR LLC. Mr. Martin wouldn’t disclose the buyer behind the corporation.

“They don’t want to be known,” Mr. Martin said. “If Mr. Herbst was your neighbor, would you?”