Jared Solomon was sentenced to 11 years in prison for the $9.5 million leasing scheme he ran from inside Vornado Realty Trust.
Solomon, pale and 20 pounds lighter than when he was last in court in April, wept inside the Federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan Thursday as he expressed remorse for his crime and said he acted with a “complete lack of a moral compass.”
“To be clear and to be completely blunt, I engaged in fraud,” the 49-year-old said, dressed in a tan prison uniform and his legs shackled.
Solomon was convicted at a trial in April on two counts of bank fraud and one count each of wire fraud and identity theft.
His defense team had asked for a prison term of four years with five years of supervised release. The prosecution asked for 11 years, which his defense pointed out is just three months less than Elizabeth Holmes got for stealing $400 million from Theranos.
Judge Loretta Preska, however, said Solomon’s crime required a serious sentence in order to deter others who might try the same thing.
In a pre-sentencing memo, Solomon and his attorney wrote that he worked in an unrelenting environment where there was tremendous pressure to close deals, hit his performance metrics and meet quarterly goals.
He prioritized work over family, which led to problems and home and issues with his emotional and mental health.
“Over the years, I desperately wanted to leave Vornado,” Solomon wrote. “Yet despite a dozen interviews I was told time and again, due to conflict between companies, ‘we cannot hire you directly from Vornado,”
“Jared remained in an environment that had become a significant source of stress and unhappiness,” Solomon’s attorney wrote. “He did not have a clear path forward. His mental health was deteriorating, his relationships with his children, wife and friends were strained, his professional life was untenable, and, as a result, his judgment suffered.”
Solomon worked as an executive in Vornado’s vaunted leasing department, where he oversaw a billboard atop the REIT’s 1540 Broadway office tower in Times Square.
He created a pair of fake brokerages and used burner e-mail accounts and phone numbers to make it seem as though they were representing tenants leasing space from Vornado. In fact, those tenants didn’t use brokers and it was Solomon on the other side the whole time, billing his own employer for brokerage work that was never done.
He was also apparently not doing well at his real job, and in December 2023 Vornado fired him for unrelated performance issues. That’s when the company spoke to one of their tenants and realized Solomon had submitted invoices for bogus brokerage work.
He was indicted a year later and went to trial in the spring.
His attorney argued that Solomon’s brokerages were legit and had done bona fide work — he just never told Vornado about his supposed side hustle. The defense never really made a compelling case, though, and it didn’t take very long for the jury to deliver a unanimous guilty verdict.
Solomon has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since his conviction in April.
The government is working on a forfeiture plan for two properties he bought with the stolen money — an apartment on the Upper East Side he bought for $3.6 million and a $4.2 million Westchester home — in order to recoup the stolen money.
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