Catch Arntsen If You Can: Accused Real Estate Lawyer Thief Faces the Music
The grim-looking fella wearing a black Adidas tracksuit hanging slackly from his broad frame didn’t appear to be the sort you’d figure for a globetrotting, multi-million-dollar-swindling, authority-duping mountebank that the female Assistant District Attorney was describing late Friday night inside a Manhattan Criminal Courtroom.
Perhaps that’s the most obvious knock on Douglas Arntsen, a 34-year-old real estate attorney who, according to his attorney Allen Alan Lewis, is a native Staten Islander with deep ties to the borough and the two parishes he attended as a kid—St. Peter’s Church and Our Lady Star of the Sea—not to mention his hardworking parents. Indeed, in testimony now immortalized in criminal court documents, the defendant, insisted Mr. Lewis, was raised by a law-abiding architect and an assistant principal at a local school.
“He deserves to be treated as a person who has never been arrested before,” said Mr. Lewis during a criminal court arraignment proceeding late Friday night–”[as a] US citizen with deep community ties.” Read More
