Daniel Kenigsberg

Did I miss things that caused this bad situation to happen?

That's a good question. Because at the end of the day, based on the facts, the answer has to be yes, because it happened, right?

My starting position was you could really make everything go back to the time when this had never happened. You could tear down the house. and you could replant the land, and you could pay me for my expenses, and I would be restored to where I was before this ever happened.

Yeah, that's what I was willing to accept. It's not like somebody lost an arm and you can't put their arm back on. I mean, this could be remedied.

We were all kind of running in and out of each other's houses across the lawns. The dogs were running free. We were playing baseball on the street and so forth.

It was very idyllic. That's really what it was like.

There was an apple tree on this land, which still had, you know, was still producing apples. And we had our tree fort in this apple tree.

A couple times a year, somebody would call me up about this land, usually wanting to buy it.

No. You know, sometimes I would ask how much, but if I'd wanted to sell the land, I would have put the land on the market.

In the course of this phone call, he said, by the way, I noticed that they're building a house next to your old house, finally, after all these years.

And I said, well, that's like pretty crazy because I own that land and I never sold it to anybody. Daniel had to go see for himself. I just took a five o'clock ferry or whatever it was. Oh, that very day? Oh, yeah, that very day.

So I just hopped on the ferry and drove through the old neighborhood and saw this house.

There was a house that was almost completely built and the land that it was on, which, you know, the last time I'd seen it had been a dense forest, was completely like scorched earth.

How could this happen? That's my land. How did we get to this reality?

I got a referral from a real estate agent. Hey, can you represent this guy? He's selling some property that he inherited. And by the way, he's an expatriate.

Usually we don't, but that is now one of the practices that we teach now, including me.

Yes, I talked to him over the phone. Yeah, there was the country code was South African country code.

They found that a gentleman by the name of Daniel Kenningsburg owned this piece of property. And that is what we expected. And so you closed. And we closed.

Several months later, I had received a call from another local attorney who said, hey, remember that closing you did? Yeah, kind of. Well, it was not real. It was a fraudulent situation. And the person who was selling the property wasn't who they claimed to be. And the real owner had his land stolen, basically. And I said, wow.