Assemblyman Bill Nojay faced federal fraud charge
Assemblyman Bill Nojay, who died by suicide Friday morning, had been scheduled to appear Friday in U.S. District Court to face fraud-related charges connected to a trust fund he handled as an attorney, according to sources familiar with the case.
Before the scheduled court appearance, Nojay contacted his lawyer via text message and said he planned to take his life, the sources say.
The attorney contacted police, who went to Riverside Cemetery, where Nojay fatally shot himself at his family burial plot before police could intervene.
Nojay has been at the middle of various controversies recently. He was a silent partner in a company that won a tentative contract to oversee the second phase of the $1.3 billion Rochester schools modernization project. And he was one of four defendants in a fraud trial in Cambodia, where Nojay and three other men formed a company to process and export rice. The four were accused of obtaining a $1 million investment from a wealthy Cambodian, then shutting the company down.
While multiple media outlets Friday linked Nojay's criminal charge to either the school modernization or the Cambodia project, the Cambodian case had nothing to do with it. And while agents reportedly found the alleged fraud as an offshoot of an investigation into the modernization program, the criminal charge had nothing to do with that matter either.
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Instead, Nojay was to be criminally charged in connection with the alleged disappearance of funds from an account he managed for a longtime client and friend, architect Carlton "Bud" DeWolff, sources said.
DeWolff said Friday afternoon that the FBI had informed him several weeks ago that $1.8 million from the escrow account had been traced to Nojay, who had access to the money as DeWolff's lawyer. At first the FBI thought DeWolff was involved in diverting the funds but DeWolff said he convinced them that he had not been.
It's unclear how much of the money Nojay was accused of embezzling.
The funds originated from a major project for which DeWolff provided architectural services — the King Hussein Center for Biotechnology and Cancer, a large medical complex near Amman, Jordan. The funds in the escrow account were intended to pay for DeWolff's services.
DeWolff said Friday that in recent weeks Nojay had returned much of the money that had been taken from the escrow account.
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A Democrat and Chronicle investigation published in May laid out another link between Nojay and DeWolff — mutual involvement in a company that sought and won a multimillion-dollar program-management contract for the Rochester school modernization effort.
Nojay helped conceive and create the company, which was known as DeWolff EPIC, though he took steps to keep his involvement a secret. Largely on the strength of support from Mayor Lovely Warren, DeWolff EPIC was chosen for the program manager job.
But the deal fell apart when another principal in the company abruptly quit, saying she was "uneasy" with Nojay's degree of involvement and uncomfortable with his plan to start a separate company that would have been paid to provide services to DeWolff EPIC.
DeWolff said he believed Nojay was involved in the company only to do good for Rochester's students and he wasn't out to profiteer. But DeWolff said he was contacted by the FBI shortly after the Democrat and Chronicle's investigation was published and said he was surprised by things the agents told him about Nojay's supposed plans for DeWolff EPIC. The Democrat and Chronicle confirmed from a law-enforcement source that federal investigators were looking into the school modernization matter.
In interviews conducted this spring, the two said they'd known each other for 30 years. Nojay had acted as legal counsel to DeWolff from time to time, and DeWolff had done architectural work for several organizations on whose board Nojay sat.
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DeWolff said he was devastated by Nojay's death. "I’m still in shock," he said Friday afternoon. "He was always an upstanding person. He always treated me good up until this Jordan thing."
The federal fraud charge was sealed Friday morning, and has yet to be unsealed.
Criminal complaints and indictments are sometimes sealed and not released publicly with an agreement that the accused will appear in court. Then, in court, the criminal charge is unsealed and becomes public.
However, with Nojay never formally charged in court, it is unclear whether the complaint will be unsealed.