The Terrible Truth About Sherita, Brooklyn’s Beloved Billboard Dinosaur

By Debbie Nathan and Alyssa Katz

This article was originally published on May 19 at 5:01 a.m. EDT by THE CITY

About 25 years ago, people passing a drab industrial stretch of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn started noticing a hand-painted billboard that looked both of the place and out of this world. 

“Attention LANDLORDS,” it said in blocky print, followed by an offer for home heating oil at economical prices. 

The words were a snooze, but the billboard’s image was a wow. Hand painted, it featured a hot-pink brontosaurus with a long neck and a face that looked part amphibian, part simian and mostly saucy young woman. She sported a perky blue ribbon on a little topknot of hair. Her eyeshadow was perfect and her lips pursed into a come-hither bow. She wore a gold collar. It was lettered with a name: SHERITA.

By the early aughts, local hipsters were oohing and ahhing over Sherita, along with the vintage, hand-painted freak-show banners in Coney Island and the giant Kentile Floors sign that once loomed near the Gowanus Canal. 

But who had put Sherita in Brooklyn — and why? No one came forward to explain. By 2024 the image was into its third decade and weathered almost to ruin. People wondered why Sherita’s owners, whoever they were, were neglecting her so badly. 

And then suddenly she was gone, painted over in just a few hours in April last year.

It was as though a dowager Brooklyn diva had died.

A tattoo shop held a one-day Sherita wake, where attendees could be inked with her image. A drag performer donned a Sherita wardrobe and did an emo performance in her memory. Keychains, a poem, t-shirts and scarves would follow in the coming months. A blogger vowed to find the owner of the building that had hosted her and learn her origin story. The owner’s purported name is in real estate records but not his residence address or phone number — though a lawyer’s name also appears. The blogger called and the attorney said he would pass the question to his client. The blogger never heard back. 

What fans don’t know is that Sherita was never about honest, quirky old working-class Brooklyn. Instead she and several frowsier sister signs mark a nasty pattern of Brooklyn real estate manipulation. 

The victims have mostly been immigrants who don’t read English, longtime owners of downtrodden buildings, old people and people of goodwill who trusted too much. The trickery often involved classic deed theft maneuvers — phony notarizations and forged documents that have been used across the city. But the key scams occurred in buildings like Sherita’s, where a seemingly friendly man with a heating oil company rented an empty store and wound up taking over the whole building from its stunned owners. In each case, he’d put a billboard above the store offering cheap fuel, almost like a sly clue to his designs on the building.

Sherita was the most fetching sign of all, adorable on her face — but hiding ugly secrets. 

The person who oversaw the painting of her image calls himself Robert Thomas. But that is not the only name he uses; he appears to be Robert Latora, whose name shows up in multiple publicly available documents. As he and his family members fuzzed their true identities, they created a mind-boggling hall of mirrors of interlocking addresses, phone numbers, and pseudonyms. As a result, aggrieved property owners have been unable to figure out who gained ownership of their buildings by slipping language into leases that they say they didn’t sign or didn’t fully understand. It enabled him to buy the holdings even when the owners did not want to sell. 

One such victim owned the Sherita property, at 1025 Atlantic Avenue in Bed Stuy. He wound up ceding it in the early aughts to Thomas for $300,000. That was a fraction of its value, even prior to the city announcing a major rezoning of the Atlantic Avenue corridor to promote housing development in the formerly industrial strip. The rezoning recently cleared a City Council committee and is expected to sail to full Council approval. 

And Sherita is only the tip of an iceberg of similar sketchy property transfers. THE CITY has identified eight others in which Latora family members used similar tactics to try to grab buildings. They succeeded in four of the nine.   

It took months for THE CITY to beat our way through the evidence: real estate deeds, contracts, leases and liens; civil court complaints, depositions, exhibits and judges’ rulings; criminal justice records; business incorporation applications; old news clips; historic Google Maps photos; moldering papers in New York City’s Municipal Archives.    

Put together, those records expose a family with a pattern of terrible acts against unsophisticated people in New York City, in underhanded and even violent attempts to profiteer. Under their original last name, a father and his three sons committed brazen verbal and physical assaults in the early 1980s against apartment tenants in order to get higher rents. 

The perpetrators ended up in prison in connection with the tenant showdown. Then, after serving time, the brothers spent the 1990s and the aughts spinning real estate confidence schemes, again to try to rake in money. 

Their victims didn’t know that he and his siblings used pseudonyms. That is what happened at the property that housed the Sherita billboard, where the owner wound up losing his building to Thomas. 

Here is the sordid story behind home heating oil signs that not long ago dotted Brooklyn — above all, the legendary Sherita. 

Reign of Terror

Robert is the first name of the big, seemingly friendly man who oversaw the painting of Sherita. His father was Salvatore Latora, an immigrant to the United States from Italy who had two children besides Robert: John and Vincent.

In 1981, when his sons were in their 20s, Salvatore bought a 48-unit apartment building in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. According to the Daily News, many of the tenants were elderly and living in rent-controlled apartments, and the Latoras wanted to replace them with higher-paying residents. They began a brutal campaign of eviction that resulted in a 94-count indictment against the Latoras with charges ranging from attempted murder to criminal mischief.

The News called it an eight-month reign of terror. The paper reported that the family were accused by the Brooklyn district attorney of smashing the door of an old man who was the building’s former super in order to make him move out, of dumping him into a bath of scalding water and beating him with a baseball bat. In addition, the DA’s office alleged that a 5-year-old was threatened that he would “have his brains blown out” if his tenant father did not cooperate with the Latoras, and a young mother was sexually abused and called a “slut” and “whore” in front of her children. 

The Daily News reported that when a young public interest lawyer began representing the tenants, the Latoras held her at gun and knife point and threatened her with “cement overcoat” treatment and with cutting out her heart. She was wearing a concealed wire, and the Latoras’ threats triggered a police SWAT team to break in and rescue her. The mayor at the time, Ed Koch, would later award the lawyer a medal and a kiss for her bravery. 

The case made The New York Times and the national wire services and triggered another grisly turn. 

Amid it all, Salvatore’s wife and the sons’ mother, Maria Latora, threw herself off the building’s roof. Police listed her death as a suicide, impelled by fear of being left with no support if her husband and sons were imprisoned, according to press reports.  

The case played out over years with the trial judge’s decision to dismiss the great majority of charges before they reached a jury, leading to furious court challenges by then Brooklyn DA Elizabeth Holtzman. In the end, the brothers were given four-year sentences on charges that included third-degree assault and attempted coercion of the tenant lawyer, first degree burglary and weapons possession, with three of those years served on parole.  

Salvatore Latora died in 2001. His sons live today in the New York City metro area and Las Vegas. THE CITY attempted to contact them during our reporting of this story, by phone calls and email, including to their current attorneys. The brothers did not respond.  

After completing their sentences, the Latoras joined a home-heating oil business, the APRA Energy Group, Inc., and related companies including a trucking firm. They were already being overseen by Vincent’s wife, Susana Wong. Vincent, using an alias, later acquired a large storage facility on Flushing Bay near LaGuardia Airport and used it as APRA’s hub for oil distribution to New York City consumers. 

According to an early 1990s National Labor Relations (NLRB) finding, the APRA workers got a taste of the family’s aggressiveness when they tried to join the Teamsters union. The Latoras quickly and illegally pushed back. They threatened workers with firing, offered rewards not to join the union, pressured Spanish speakers to sign papers in English that they did not understand, and fired a third of the staff.   

The family got off with a wrist slap from the NLRB: they had to post notices at the work site stating that the fired workers would be rehired and the Latora family would stop violating labor laws. 

But their earlier misdeeds had garnered them notoriety that continued into the early 1990s, when the Daily News recapped the Latora family’s tenant-terror crimes in a “Landlords From Hell” piece. The brothers started adopting different last names. Vincent chose “Bove.” John was both “John Parker” and “J.J. Gorin.” Robert at times used “Salvatore Meneses.” His wife’s family is from Latin America, where people have two last names; one of hers is Meneses. Then he settled on “Robert Thomas.” THE CITY checked court records for any judicial name change applications made by the brothers in the 1980s and 1990s, in Kings County and also Suffolk County, where they moved later. No applications were found.  

By 1996, Robert was roaming Brooklyn seeking rentals — especially in corner buildings, sites that have potentially lucrative development rights. He leased storefronts in Bed Stuy, Bushwick, and Prospect Heights. Their ostensible purpose was to sell heating oil. 

In fact, according to numerous court records, he also used them as fronts to wrest property from their owners in neighborhoods that were still down and out but beginning to come up. The owners hailed from countries including the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Greece, and Haiti. Many were not fluent in English, and some could not read it. Instead of using lawyers, they often transacted directly with Thomas, signing off-the-cuff leases with him. Some of the landlords said they later misplaced their originals.  

The leases that “Robert Thomas” would later present as justification for claiming a property always contained addendums that stood out. The add-on was sometimes typed in a different font from the lease’s pre-printed paragraphs. Sometimes it was  handwritten at the top or bottom of a page, or between paragraphs. And sometimes it was a stand-alone page. Invariably, the addition gave Robert Thomas the option to buy the property, often at a price dramatically below what it could potentially sell for. 

He usually sat on the leases while paying his monthly rent for five to 10 years. By the end of that period, the surrounding neighborhoods were awash with gentrification and stunning increases in property values. At that point, each landlord received a letter from Thomas’s lawyer. It said that he was exercising his option to buy their property, and they needed to show up soon for a closing. 

Stunned owners, who would go on to become defendants in lawsuits brought by Thomas or plaintiffs against him, said they had no idea what this was about. One family said they had misunderstood what an option to purchase was when they signed the rental lease. Other people claimed that their leases had never had an option in the first place.

This Bud’s for You

One of the first properties that Thomas approached would end up belonging, a year after he showed up, to Rita Gray, a middle-aged widow and immigrant from Guyana. According to testimony she later gave in a deposition, she had never attended school, even as a child. In 1998, she became the owner of a large apartment building at the intersection of Bedford Avenue and Fulton Street in Bed Stuy after one of her brothers deeded it to her as a gift. It had seven small shops at ground level. Gray’s tenants included a halal meat market owned by an immigrant from Sudan, a Dominican hair salon, and Elaine Greene, who sold ushers’ uniforms to African American churches in the neighborhood.

Gray’s brother, the previous owner, was Lloyd Lee. Since the time Lee owned the building, another brother, Richard DeSouza, was its sometime super. He collected rents, but he admitted to often spending the money on booze as soon as he cashed the checks. According to Kings County Court records, he acknowledged suffering from alcoholism. He said that his liquor habit often left him staggeringly drunk and barely aware of his actions. 

One day in 1997, DeSouza said in the deposition, when the building still belonged to Lloyd Lee, DeSouza was drinking with several other people in one of the building’s empty storefronts. A man entered, introduced himself as Robert Thomas and asked if the space was for rent. DeSouza said yes, and he supervised the lease negotiations. He also said that he and Thomas – Bob, he called him —  got to be friends and sometimes drank together. (Thomas denied this in his own court testimony.) 

The two men then visited an attorney’s office to co-sign the lease. After it went into effect, Thomas paid DeSouza the rent with checks drawn on the bank account of A.P.R.A. The checks survive in court records, along with evidence that Thomas cashed them for DeSouza — who said in his later deposition that he then spent much of the money on alcohol. 

Weeks later, Thomas told DeSouza that he wanted to move to a corner storefront in the same building and draw up a new lease. DeSouza testified that he played no part in creating the new document. Instead, he said, Thomas took charge. One day, DeSouza said, “Mr. Bob see me in the pool room, shooting pool. Mr. Bob go over across the street and buy a six pack of beer and give it, Budweiser, and said we are — we do the lease.”

DeSouza said that Thomas invited him into his van for the signing. In court later, he recognized his signature on this second lease. But he had been inebriated to the point of not being aware of what he was signing: “I was so drunk I didn’t know nothing.” 

He said he had asked Thomas, “This is right?” and Thomas answered “Yes, you can trust me.” 

The next year, 1998, Lee deeded the building to his sister, Gray. She inherited all the tenants, including Robert Thomas and the sign he mounted above the shop window, whose sole content was the lettering: “Home Heating Oil.”

A decade later, Thomas sued Gray, demanding that she cede the entire property to him. In court, he presented a copy of the second lease, for the corner store, with a DeSouza signature. It included a cut-and-paste addendum: an option to purchase for only $300,000.

In later testimony, DeSouza said that the addendum wasn’t in the pages that Thomas gave him after the signing. But he could not prove this. He said that while drunk and passed out two days later, he’d left the lease on the subway.

A special referee handling the case ruled in Gray’s favor in 2012, due in part, she wrote, to Thomas’s role in getting DeSouza drunk during the lease signing. But Thomas appealed that decision to Kings County Supreme Court. A judge there defined building super DeSouza as an agent of previous owner Lee, and therefore legally qualified to sign a lease. Further, the judge ruled, Gray hadn’t shown evidence that Thomas and DeSouza drank together. And even if he had been drinking when he signed the lease, Gray had not proved that her brother was too inebriated to know what he was doing. 

In the end, that judge found Robert Thomas to be a more credible witness than DeSouza, or Gray, who had flung so many curses and imprecations against Thomas during the proceedings that her own lawyer admonished her. At no time during this or similar cases did Thomas’s other identity or criminal history ever come up in court. 

In 2015, Gray was court-ordered to sell her property to Thomas for $300,000. He paid her and immediately evicted her tenants. Then he shuttered his business, leaving behind the Home Heating Oil sign. In early 2020, Thomas transferred the property to a company he incorporated, and the following year that company sold the building for $1.2 million to a newly created company registered in the name of another Latora wife. Gray is still trying to reverse the ruling.

A Family Affair

Family members typically helped Thomas scoop up properties. 

With three apartments and a storefront, a corner building in Bushwick contained well over 5,000 square feet. The owners were an extended family who had immigrated years earlier from the Dominican Republic, then gotten U.S. citizenship. In a lengthy deposition she gave later, co-owner Julia Gonzalez laid out a real estate courtship built on deception and misunderstanding. 

Having purchased the building in 2002 with the help of a $306,000 a mortgage, Gonzalez said, the family felt they were living “our American dream to finally have our own home that we have worked so hard in this country for so many years.” The mortgage funded major remodeling and improvements to the whole building, and all of them lived in it. They were “never thinking about selling.” 

Then, in 2004, Robert Thomas called the phone number on a sign the family had posted on their corner building, advertising a storefront for rent.

During negotiations by phone and at the building, Thomas talked a lot about “his wife from Ecuador, his seven children,” Gonzalez remembered. “He said, ‘I am a family man, just like you people,’ so of course I thought…‘We can trust him.’” She did not get a lawyer to manage the transaction.

“Robert Thomas” also brought with him a man whom Gonzalez came to know as Robert’s brother, “Vinny.” He seemed trustworthy, too. 

Gonzalez had obtained a stock-in-trade lease from an office supply store. She added to it some personal data that Robert Thomas gave her, including a home address and Social Security number. And when Vinny asked Gonzalez to do Robert a favor by adding an option to purchase the property, Gonzalez complied. She later said she thought the term “option to purchase” meant only that her family gave Thomas preference to buy the building if they should ever want to sell it — not that they had to sell to him if he wanted to buy. 

She did not know, either, that the Social Security number on the lease rider matched Robert Latora’s Social Security number; Robert Thomas’s phone was Robert Latora’s phone; and Robert Thomas’s “home address” was the same as the Latora family’s APRA company and oil depot in Flushing. The document gave Thomas the right to assign the lease “to a corporation or LLC that he is a principle [sic] in.”

According to Gonzalez’s deposition, “Vinny” signed as a witness. But she didn’t know his last name, and on the lease it is illegible. 

The terms scrawled at the bottom of the boilerplate lease included an unusual directive: “Tenant is given an option to buy building at 1145 Bushwick Ave…[at] the same price as the corner building across the street, 1146 Bushwick Ave…plus 40%.”

One more thing Gonzalez did not know: Thomas’ brother John Latora had just signed a contract to buy that very building. 

Its owner, Victor Ferreira, from the Dominican Republic, stated in a later affidavit that he did not speak or read English. He said he didn’t know what he was signing, and that John had slipped a Power of Attorney paper into the sales contract. It was made out to Robert Thomas. Ferreira said he had never met Robert Thomas.  

After the signing, Thomas erected a business sign on the Gonzalez building’s storefront, in nondescript lettering: “Home Heating Oil.” 

A decade later, in 2014, Thomas notified Gonzalez that he was exercising the purchase option. The family was shocked and confused. When Gonzalez communicated with the lawyer her family had used to buy the building in 2002, the attorney warned her that they were “in big trouble.” 

By then, John Latora had sued and secured a court order demanding that Ferreira sell the property across the street to Latora. The bargain price at a sheriff’s sale: just $460,000. 

The lease rider tied to Ferreira’s building meant that Julia Gonzalez’ family was on the hook to sell their property to their tenant, Robert Thomas, for just $644,000, far less than it was worth. And they did not want to sell.

A lawsuit ensued, with plaintiff Robert Thomas. In his deposition, he called Vinny his occasional helper – whose last name the legal stenographer transcribed as “Bovick” — with no mention he is his brother. And he claimed that it was Julia Gonzalez who proposed tying the sales price to the building across the street.

Gonzalez and her family in 2018 ended up with an out-of-court settlement.

Real estate records show that they sold to a company called Bushwick Realty Development Corp. LLC, care of Robert Thomas, which paid $950,000 for the property after the family and their attorney negotiated the price upward. 

Public records show that the LLC was created the same day the sale closed. It was incorporated in the name of a member of the next generation of Latoras, in his 20s. 

Records of building sales around that time in Bushwick show that at $183 per square foot, the sale of the Gonzalez  family’s home was among the very lowest prices paid in the area among dozens of other properties. A building half its size sold for $1.3 million. 

In need of a new home, the family paid almost $800,000 for a residence in East New York whose total square footage is less than a third of their former building’s. They still live in the much smaller place. Meanwhile, the Latora-incorporated LLC still owns the Bushwick property. Robert Thomas’s storefront business closed just after the LLC took the building. It still hosts the washed-out remains of a Home Heating Oil sign.

When contacted by THE CITY for this story, Gonzalez said she is still so emotionally drained by the incident that she feels unable to talk about it. She did not know Robert Thomas’ original name until THE CITY told her. 

The family’s attorney for the settlement, real estate lawyer Henry Graham, told THE CITY that what Robert Thomas did to his clients was “disgusting and atrocious.” He said he did the best he could for them by negotiating significantly more money than what the option to purchase specified. He did not know, either, that Robert Thomas was Robert Latora.

The Courts Step In

Robert Thomas did not always end up owning the buildings where he’d installed his stores. In 2004, the same year that he started renting from Julia Gonzalez’ family, he gained another storefront tenancy, on Vanderbilt Avenue, in Brooklyn’s up-and-coming Prospect Heights neighborhood. The block of apartment buildings was lined with storefronts still offering humble goods and services, including a pizzeria, a dry cleaner, and another dry cleaner. 

A neighborhood blogger sneered when an eagerly anticipated new mystery business turned out not to be something cool, like an art gallery or wine bar, but instead an outpost of fossil-fuel backwardness, exemplified by its boring new sign: “Home Heating Oil. (“I am going to party my fucking ass off there,” one commenter wrote. “All night. Every night. Williamsbarf has NOTHING on us.”) 

Thomas had snagged the rental from landlord Dionysios Zougras, an immigrant from Greece who, by his own admission in his later deposition, was illiterate in English. Nine years later, in 2013, Thomas sent a legal letter demanding that Zougras sell him the whole building for $300,000, as specified by an option-to-purchase rider in the lease.

Unlike Gray and Julia Gonzalez’ family, Zougras quickly sued Thomas. It was not hard to convince a judge to disqualify the lease, even though Zougras said during a deposition that he had lost his own copy and thought that Thomas made off with it immediately after the signing. It helped that the copy which Thomas presented to the court was notarized with his signature but not that of Zougras. 

In addition, Zougras produced evidence that before Thomas ever showed up to rent the storefront, someone else had already offered $500,000 for the building — so why would Zougras sell for $200,000 less? The judge noted that the lease seemed to have a forged signature. He considered all these facts but ended up ruling on a legal technicality: the lease had given Thomas the option “in perpetuity” to buy:   i.e., forever. In real estate law, that is impermissible. Zougras won. 

Thomas quickly abandoned the storefront — and its sign. Today the property is an organic bodega.

THE CITY found two other occasions when Thomas tried to take buildings but came up short, and one more connected to his wife, Sara Gomez. Contract documents in all three were signed and stamped by a bona fide notary public named Zenaida Johnson. But Johnson swore in a later deposition that she had never seen Thomas or done any notarizing for him.

Gomez also denied she’d had anything to do with a 2007 agreement, signed on her behalf by attorney Daniel Sully, that pledged a Boerum Hill brownstone to her after the deaths of the owners. Sully at the time was representing Robert Thomas and his brothers in several real estate lawsuits.

A deed transfer, filed that same day, transferred the Boerum Hill property to a Queens company registered to Vincent Bove — the alias of Vincent Latora.

By phone and email, THE CITY contacted Sully with several questions about his work for Thomas and others in the Latora family, including Sara Gomez. We also contacted Joshua Kimerling, the family’s attorney who also represented Gomez and has handled most of the other controversial cases THE CITY identified as involving the Latoras. Kimerling did not respond, either.  

Various judges terminated all three of the contracts that contained notary Johnson’s signature and stamp. 

The fourth case that the Latoras lost did not involve Johnson, but an attorney for the building owner discovered that Thomas had submitted seven leases to the court, all of them different. 

Of the nine contested buildings we found, five displayed unremarkable Home Heating Oil signs. No one missed them after Robert Thomas abandoned the storefronts in buildings he’d both won and lost. Unkempt, the signs faded into oblivion. 

The Battle of Sherita

That left the spectacular Sherita, and the man who owned the property she crowned until Robert Thomas took it.  

He was Roger Leveille Sr., an immigrant from rural Haiti with a second-grade education who had gone to work at age 15. He first came to the United States in the 1960s. By the 1980s he owned a business that fixed wrecked cars. 

Leveille’s Bed Stuy shop on Atlantic Avenue nested at a corner of Classon Avenue, amid a stretch of mom-and-pop repair and tire enterprises. The one-story building he had bought there was cavernous, with over 8,000 square feet. Formerly a business that sold bolts, screws, and other hardware, by the late 1990s it was cut into little automotive shops battened at night with roll-up shutters. 

It also had a corner storefront with a show window, and in 1997, a large man in his 30s asked if he could rent it for a heating-oil store. He said his name was Robert Thomas. Each of the men signed a copy of the lease formalizing the arrangement.

Thomas received his new landlord’s permission to erect a big billboard advertising his product. Someone then painted Sherita. But whoever it was did not sign the work. Despite forays through the neighborhood and conversations with old-school Brooklyn sign painters, THE CITY was not able to identify the artist. Not even the Leveille family could help. 

Interviewed recently, Roger Jr., remembered that though he and other brothers worked for years with their dad in the repair shop, no one in the family paid attention to the sign. “I didn’t know who Sherita was — I just thought she was a cartoon,” he said. “I don’t remember how the sign got painted, either, or who the artist was.” 

Roger Jr. remembered that in 2004, when his dad got the lawyer letter announcing that Thomas was buying the property, Leveille Sr. was in shock. At the time, he would later claim in court testimony, he was in contract to sell to another buyer for $830,000. During the period of the lawsuit, Leveille saw Thomas’ copy of the 1997 lease, with its $300,000 option-to-purchase rider on a separate page. According to court documents, Leveille counterclaimed that he hadn’t previously seen this addendum and his purported signature on it was a forgery. He presented a witness who had worked in the legal office that drew up the lease. That witness testified that the office had never produced documents in italic fonts, yet the rider used mostly italics.  

But presiding Judge Michael Ambrosio took a jaundiced view of the defendant. He found Leveille’s testimony often vague and contradictory. And Thomas’ handwriting experts opined that the signature on the addendum really was Leveille’s. Meanwhile, Leveille’s own expert said he couldn’t tell if the signature was Leveille’s or not.

Thomas won a court order in 2010 transferring the property to him, records show. Two years later, he sold it to a company registered at the Brighton Beach building that he owns and that is used by many Latora family businesses.

Real estate attorney Subhana Rahim is now working with Roger, Jr. to try to revert the property to the family. Records show that after Thomas received it, he proceeded to sell it to a company he created, which has held it ever since and is now poised to make serious money in the Atlantic Avenue rezoning.

THE CITY found Rahim while we were investigating several Robert Thomas cases, including six that she had already been looking into for years. The first one she discovered was Rita Gray’s. When Gray told her how Thomas ended up with the property, Rahim was incredulous. “Who does this?” she remembered thinking. “The gall! It’s a made-for-TV series!” Through the Bed Stuy grapevine, Gray had learned of the Leveille case and referred Rahim to the family. She took on both cases pro bono and found more, as did THE CITY. In all, we located nine controversial cases involving the Latora family.

Rahim allows that Leveille’s case is murky. But whether or not he signed the option to purchase, she believes that Robert Thomas’ modus operandi, of targeting vulnerable and naive immigrants, constitutes criminal fraud against the civil justice system. In a filing she wrote to open Rita Gray’s case, she equates Thomas to “a thief who has been using the New York Supreme Court instead of a 9mm Glock as his weapon of choice.” Two years later, she is still waiting for a court date.

Rahim does not fault property owners’ attorneys and judges for failing to discern patterns in the Thomas cases before she did. In the early aughts, she noted, the Internet had far less data and was much harder to access than now. Courts back then felt that “You entered into a bad deal and you’re complaining. But you really did sign this lease,” Rahim said. She thinks that judges in the past five years have become more aware of real estate scams, especially in Brooklyn involving deed theft.  

Rahim has co-authored “Fight Home Fraud!”, a self-help book for small-property owners. She has contacted state legislators and local City Council members, suggesting measures such as adding the right to counsel to already existing real estate law. She believes that criminally prosecuting an old Thomas case could encourage more victims to come forward. She made that argument in 2016, in a letter to then Kings County DA Kenneth Thompson. She didn’t hear back. She tried again in 2023, when Eric Gonzalez headed the office and she spoke with Assistant DA Richard Kevin Farrell. He said the statute of limitations for creating fraudulent documents had expired.

At the time she made these complaints, Rahim did not know that Robert Thomas was actually Robert Latora. She therefore was unable to allege that he had defrauded the courts for years, well after the option-to-purchase and related documents were signed with the pseudonyms. 

Roger Leveille, Sr., owner of the Sherita building, was 76 years old when he lost his case in 2008 to Robert Thomas. Roger Jr. said his father was deeply traumatized: “He ended up in the hospital for the first time in his life. He didn’t want to live in the United States anymore. He went back to Haiti.” He died there in 2011.

Sherita’s demise was slow but painfully noticeable. Thomas still owns the building, but he closed his heating oil business years ago and rented the storefront to a used tire operation. As an advertisement, Sherita was rendered worthless.  

Lacking touch ups, her once neon pink was steadily bleached by the elements into a sickly pastel. Lettering hived off of her background. Nonsensical graffiti sullied her body. 

Until the end she smiled fetchingly, but her removal was a euthanasia.  

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