Assistant District Attorney Louis O'Neill will be in charge of the indictment of a German man who worked at the desk of some of New York's top hotels and stole money through a number of schemes that netted him more than $85,000.

NEW YORK COUNTY, 8 August 2003 - Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau announced the indictment of a German man deported from Switzerland to New York yesterday afternoon, who worked at the desk of some of New York's top hotels and stole money through a number of schemes that netted him more than $85,000.

Former Hamburg, Germany police officer RALF KWASCHNIK, 43, currently of Zurich, Switzerland used his position as a front desk manager and knowledge about the hotel and travel industry to steal thousands of dollars and falsify business records to cover it up. Working at the Excelsior and the Pierre between 1997 and 2000, he accepted cash from travelers settling their bills, pocketed the cash and used his own credit cards to pay the charges. He then fabricated guest complaints about the hotel and authorized refunds based on those complaints to more than a dozen credit cards that he used.

In other cases, when customers cancelled their reservations, he arranged for the "no-show" refunds to be credited to his own credit card accounts instead of the hotels' customers. He also created two fake travel agencies allegedly working out of Hawaii - Worldwide Traveler and HNL Worldwide Traveler - and when travelers booked their own reservations he linked them with his bogus agencies and collected the 10% commission fee paid by the hotels to travel agencies. Those payments were made to a Hawaiian bank account that KWASCHNIK set up to receive the fraudulent commissions. The investigation, which is continuing, began in 2000 after the Pierre tried to solicit more business from a Hawaiian travel agency it had been dealing with only to discover that the address was a Mail Boxes Etc. in Honolulu.

Assistant District Attorney Louis O'Neill of the District Attorney's Special Prosecutions Bureau, is in charge of the case, under the supervision of Leroy Frazer Jr., Bureau Chief. Assistant District Attorney Elyse Ruzow and Detective James Gibson of the District Attorney's Detective Squad participated in the investigation.

 

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