A man charged with an elaborate real estate scheme in New York City is not who he claims to be.
Initially, investigators at the Queens district attorney’s office charged him as Carl Avinger. But in March, they got a call from a man who had seen the case in the news saying he was the real Carl Avinger, and that the man they arrested had stolen his identity.
The investigation into the prisoner’s past that followed produced a lengthy list of names in a storied criminal career spanning nearly three decades, The New York Times reports.
According to court, jail, and prison records obtained by the newspaper, these are the names that prosecutors know so far: Carl E. Avinger, John Stamp, Bobby Jackson, Craig Taylor, Graig Taylor, Anthony S. Williams, Kevin C. Windley, Kevin Windleg, Corey Blake Duncan, Marco Ferrari, Marco Ferrare, Elvis Taylor or Elvis Teller.
But incredibly, authorities still don’t know the man’s actual name. In an age of mass digital and physical surveillance, which is now being supercharged by all-powerful AI models, he is an utter anomaly.
Per the Times, the man began his criminal career under the name Elvis Teller in 1992, when he was just 16 years old, he told police. He was arrested six times that year, including for a burglary in Manhattan. Over the next decade, he would be arrested another 29 times.
In 1995, the man was convicted for assault and weapons possession and served two years in prison, and was later thrown back in jail for violating the terms of his release.
When he was in prison at Queensboro Correctional Facility in February 2002, he met Dwayne Avinger, Carl Avinger’s older half brother. Dwayne let the man stay at their family house, much to the chagrin of Carl, who wasn’t happy about letting a stranger crash in the home of their mother who had recently passed away. But the mysterious stranger stayed anyway, at one point stealing Carl’s wallet with his driver’s license and Social Security card, and before disappearing with Carl’s identity.
Thus, the man became Carl Avinger.
The stolen identity was put to the test when the man was pulled over in Oklahoma by cops in 2006, who found over fifty pounds of weed in his minivan. He later was charged with drug trafficking, which is when prosecutors discovered he wasn’t who he said he was. This man was not Carl Avinger, prosecutors averred, but 33-year-old John Stamp.
This, of course, was another false identity. But “Stamp” served three years in prison, got released on parole, eventually made his way back to New York, where he would soon make a name for himself, at least in the figurative sense. Between 2011 and 2022, he was arrested fifteen times for crimes ranging from drunk driving to intimidating a witness.
His most elaborate ploy was also his undoing.
Prosecutors allege that starting in 2023, the man worked with a woman named Autumn Valeri, who became pregnant with his child, to forge deeds and steal homes in wealthy neighborhoods in Queens. Per the NYT, the man, Valeri, and two other accomplices would hunt for vacant homes and file faked deeds with the city claiming to be the homeowners. Those deeds were transferred to shell companies they controlled, and to ensure the transfers went through, they even impersonated notaries. Then the conspirators resold the homes for profit.
It was apparently a lucrative enough scheme that our mystery man was able to move into a home in St Albans in Queens, and re-do the entire exterior in black, down to the curtains. The pair were eventually caught after one duped homeowner reported the fraud.
Investigators have a strong lead on his true identity: his attorney told a judge that the man said he was Craig Taylor, and that his mother was Margaret Forbes, who after being tracked down, “confirmed” that the man was her son, Angelo Alexander Forbes. But investigators are apparently so rattled by the man’s history of shape-shifting that they’re not confident that this isn’t yet another red herring.
The man, whoever he is, pleaded guilty to stealing Carl Avinger’s identity, and is expected to be sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty to one count of first-degree grand larceny and two counts of second-degree grand larceny, per the NYT.
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