Metro

Meet the ‘Montauk Grifter’ and his ever-changing disguises

Dan Nadler had an impressive résumé. The Harvard-educated architect founded his own company in 2017, then built sustainable homes out of shipping containers in New York, Detroit and even Tibet, according to people who knew him. He bragged about designing high-profile pop-up shops with Cartier and Nike.

“Dan Nadler takes a minimalist and modern approach to developing state-of-the-art spaces for the public and private realm,” his LinkedIn profile said.

The only problem? Nadler doesn’t exist.

Dan Nadler is really Dan Kaufman, a serial fraudster dubbed the “Montauk Grifter” who has gone by other assumed names, including Dan Kaye, Dan Eric and Dan Katze. He was recently sentenced to 18 months behind bars for stealing property from a rehab facility and is on parole after an early release. The architectural company he claims to have started, The Box Labs, appeared to be little more than an Instagram page, and there are no architects matching his description who are registered under his real or his assumed name.





This was just the latest con in a decade full of them. From 2006 to 2016, he racked up at least nine liens and judgments against him for more than $158,000 in debts, stemming from soured business to unpaid child support, according to public records. He skimmed thousands of dollars from restaurant customers, filed phony invoices, talked his way into the C-suite of a technology company, oversaw construction sites in Manhattan and Queens despite apparently scant experience, and was accused by women of lying about his sexual history.

And every time, it didn’t take long before somebody found out.

Dan Eric Kaufman was born in Wayland, Mass., outside Boston, in 1974. Little is known about his early life. He took classes at Massachusetts Bay Community College as late as 1997, according to a representative there, but the school wouldn’t confirm that he graduated. In 1995, he filed for bankruptcy at the age of 21 in Vermont on debts to creditors like Sprint, Sears and his alma mater, according to public records.





During the next 10 years, Kaufman fathered a child and then allegedly failed to make child support payments, prompting New York to file a lien against him in 1996.

Starting in 2005, he started two Boston-based restaurant companies, but soon was sued by a landlord for $40,000 in unpaid rent, the New York Times reported. It’s unclear how that case was resolved.

Soon after that, Kaufman hooked up with Alan Young, a lawyer and businessman who, in 2009, would be disbarred for defrauding clients, and David Seatts, who was found guilty of fraud in 2014 after the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs sued him for “deceptive or unconscionable trade practice” for not doing construction work he was paid for.





In the spring of 2007, the three started a handful of restaurants along a strip of Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, including The Busy Chef, which made prepared meals, a pizza joint called Oven and an upscale drinks place called The Wine Bar.

Seatts couldn’t be reached for comment. Young is dead, according to New York state court records. Kaufman’s role was unclear — he reportedly told employees that he was a part owner but worked as a manager and called himself “Chef Dan.”

But something was up. Employees complained about bounced paychecks, The Post reported at the time.

After about a year of managing the restaurants, Kaufman was accused by the Brooklyn district attorney of stealing nearly $25,000 from 19 customers by overcharging them and attempting to steal another $46,000.





In a plea deal, he agreed to pay back $34,000 to Citigroup and American Express for the bogus transactions and another $40,000 to an advance company over a loan he reneged on, according to a Post story at the time. He got five years’ probation as part of a deal that kept him out of prison. In 2009, he was also charged and pleaded guilty in a separate incident, where he stole a friend’s credit card to buy himself McDonald’s. He served nine months in prison for the incident.

It wasn’t long after that Kaufman started to reinvent himself.

First, there was Dan Kaye, the restaurant consultant who tried to sell recipes taken off Emeril Lagasse’s website to restaurants in Hoboken, according to a 2012 story on Gawker. Another alias, Dan Katze, was used to fool restaurant owners to buy his services, according to the site.

He prowled dating sites like OkCupid, Gawker reported, telling women that he was friends with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, that he was a founding member of a seminal punk band and that he was close with AOL founder Steve Case. He purported to be a tech guru and reportedly talked his way into being the chief technology officer of two companies — CloudMob, a mobile-ad company, and ZoomThru, a parking-tech company.

In 2012, the Brooklyn Eagle reported he had been criminally charged for allegedly stealing $20,000 from CloudMob. That money reportedly went to pay for a house in Montauk, where he wined and dined the Hamptons elite. The outcome of the charges isn’t known. And in 2016, San Francisco tech company Svitla Systems filed a civil suit against Kaufman, saying he scammed it out of nearly $40,000. A judge found against Kaufman and ordered him to pay back the money.

“His name was Dan Eric (or so we thought),” Richard Malone, ZoomThru’s founder, wrote in a blog post on Medium in which he accused Kaufman of almost tanking the company by lying about the work he was doing and raiding the company bank account for an unspecified amount to pay for food deliveries, Uber rides and other costs. ZoomThru and its founders never brought legal action, and Malone declined to comment. Representatives for CloudMob weren’t available to comment.

All the while, Kaufman had been in trouble with the law. In 2011, Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. charged Kaufman with stealing property from Daytop Village Inc., a rehab facility in New York, and with two counts of falsifying business records, according to an indictment.

‘The guy was a sociopath. Very dangerous human being. Continuously lied.’

He pleaded guilty to the larceny charge and spent six months in prison starting in 2017. Kaufman was released from Lakeview Shock Incarceration Center outside Buffalo last March and has been on parole.

Since then, he has worked various construction jobs in Manhattan and Queens — including for a few months as a superintendent at a construction site at the upscale Chelsea Market in Manhattan.

“The guy was a sociopath. Very dangerous human being. Continuously lied,” Michael Strauss, the founder and president of Vanguard Construction & Development, told The Post.

Vanguard hired Kaufman in part because of a résumé that included work as a project manager and superintendent — although he had never represented himself as an architect, Strauss said. While Strauss didn’t provide a copy of Kaufman’s résumé, Kaufman’s LinkedIn page — under Nad­ler’s name — lists numerous jobs The Post couldn’t independently confirm.

For instance, he claimed to have worked for Blake Construction around San Diego in 1998 and 1999, but a representative told The Post she’d never heard of Kaufman or Nadler. Don Andrews, the founder of another construction company Kaufman listed on his LinkedIn, said he never employed anybody by either name.

And Kaufman listed a nearly 11-year stint as vice president of design and construction through 2017 for Carillion, a giant British construction company, when he would have been running Brooklyn restaurants and spent some time in prison. That company filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and representatives weren’t available for comment.

Ken Stewart, assistant dean at Harvard School of Design, also confirmed that nobody by either name graduated from the school that year with a master’s in architecture.

Strauss said he did due diligence on Kaufman, but it was only after searching online for him — joined by a Post reporter over the phone — that he realized his ex-employee was an ex-con. “That’s him!” he said, after seeing Kaufman’s picture online. “Holy s–t! That’s him.”

“He implied he had relationships with architects and that he was able to bring in some work,” Strauss said. “He brought us an opportunity to bid on something. It was a very, very small, very down-and-dirty project.”

Vanguard didn’t bid on the project, which was in Brooklyn, and passed on another one, in Vermont, that Strauss has brought in, he added.

But during the three and a half months that Kaufman worked for Vanguard, Kaufman would say he had completed work that he didn’t, Strauss said. “He would say he’d be off-site and nobody would be there,” Strauss said.

That lack of oversight could have made for dangerous conditions, he added.

Now Strauss is concerned that having hired Kaufman will damage his standing with Google, which owns the Chelsea Market building and is a major New York City landlord.

“It would hurt my reputation dramatically,” he said.

While Kaufman never told Strauss he was an architect, that didn’t stop him from saying he had the job to get dates.

Kaufman found women on Tinder and LinkedIn and often tried to mix business with romantic interests, targeting women in the industry and offering them jobs at his fictitious company. He would gloss over his time in prison by saying he was building homes in Tibet, seven women told The Post.

“I ended up matching with him [on Tinder] because he was listed as an architect and I’m an architect,” one woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.

Kaufman, posing as Nadler, was so confident and charismatic that he convinced the woman architect that he was the real deal.

“He knew his stuff on a superficial level,” she said. “He’s good. He was convincing when I met him. He’s innocent and looks honest.”

At one point, Kaufman took the woman to a construction site on Orchard Street in Queens, where he told her he was the architect and introduced her to the workers there.

The construction company working there didn’t return multiple requests for comment.

But Kaufman didn’t stop there.

He sent another woman pictures from his job site at Chelsea Market, including photos of construction plans, according to a text obtained by The Post.

In November, he sent the woman a picture of a construction worker guiding a crane on the site of a rust-red modular home, according to the texts.

“Yours? Where?” she asked.

“Detroit,” he texted back.

In fact, Kaufman had stolen the picture from an August article in Designlines magazine of a home in Canada.

“I thought it was a business thing,” a third woman, whom he approached for consulting, told The Post. “We met, it quickly turned into a date — which I would literally never do.”

‘I ended up matching with him [on Tinder] because he was listed as an architect and I’m an architect’

During the few weeks they talked, he bragged about working with companies like Cartier and Nike, she said.

He asked her for sensitive personal information, like her address and date of birth, but she turned him down, she said.

It was only after she became suspicious — and hired a private investigator — that she figured out he wasn’t who he said he was, she told The Post.

The woman later texted a Post reporter selfies that Kaufman had taken of himself when he was claiming to be Nad­ler to show it was the same person.

The women who have dated or been in contact with “Nadler” during the last nine months have since formed a Facebook group where they warn others about his behavior — and have uncovered a bizarre love triangle in the meantime.

Alisa, a photographer who met him in December on Tinder, said she had unprotected sex with him after he said he didn’t have any sexually transmitted diseases.

Little did Alisa know, Kaufman had also been sleeping with another woman nearby. That woman, who asked to go by Evelyn, has HPV, the virus that can cause cervical cancer, she said — and she, too, had unprotected sex with him.

It was only after that Evelyn found Alisa on Kaufman’s social media profile that they realized he had been two-timing. “And you slept with me after f–king her with no protection,” Alisa texted him last month.

“You don’t have an std,” he replied. Alisa said a recent HPV test came up negative.

To add insult to injury, Kaufman took a vintage Millennium Falcon toy from Alisa, which she valued at around $2,700, but never paid her for it, she said.

In January texts, he offered to pay for about half of the toy, $1,400, and repeatedly asked for her Venmo account to send the money.

Although she repeatedly sent her information over multiple days, he still hasn’t paid her, Alisa told The Post.

Kaufman hasn’t answered multiple follow-up emails from The Post about his jobs, his relationships, his STD status or the Star Wars toy.

An official at the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision confirmed that it was “actively investigating” allegations made against Kaufman but didn’t provide any further detail.

When The Post approached him at his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant in January, he answered the door in his underwear and a white T-shirt.

“I am being harassed,” he told The Post.

Kaufman denied that he had represented himself as Nadler or that he ever said he was an architect.

“You’re talking with fake people,” he said.





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Filed under architecture , brooklyn , cons , fraud , restaurants , 2/26/19