Daniel Kenigsberg
Appearances
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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?
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
A couple times a year, somebody would call me up about this land, usually wanting to buy it.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
So I just hopped on the ferry and drove through the old neighborhood and saw this house.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
Usually we don't, but that is now one of the practices that we teach now, including me.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
Yes, I talked to him over the phone. Yeah, there was the country code was South African country code.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.
Planet Money
Title Pirates
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.