Lin Halfon Israeli Lin Helena
Halfon was charged with fraud against her husband, Richard Rappaport. The
fraud allegations say she tried to steal $1 million from him during their brief marriage.
Both Rappaport and Halfon refused to provide any information about their marriage, such
as how they met. What little we know about their relationship has come from records and interviews.
It's believed that Halfon met Rappaport at a benefit or social event in Tampa Bay,
Florida. Why? They were first photographed together in February 2019
at a benefit for the holocaust museum in the Vinoy Renaissance Hotel in St.
Petersburg, Florida. However, we don't know what led both of them to the event.
However, investigators do know who Rappaport is
and why a good looking younger woman might want to attend benefits with him.
Panther Medical Rappaport is the
founder and owner of Panther Medical, a company that distributes medical devices and equipment
to the Tampa Bay Area. Panther Medical is a highly successful company. At its helm,
Rapport became a millionaire. For the past couple of decades, he's supported benefits
across Florida, especially causes related to his Jewish heritage, like the holocaust museum.
Rappaport fell in love with his heritage when he visited Israel as a teenager. The nation
had just established itself a few years before Rappaport traveled there. As a young Jewish teen,
the first-ever Jewish state was something he took immense pride in.
When Rappaport started making money through Panther Medical, he donated to different Israeli
charity funds. He gave to the Jewish National Fund and supported projects like the playgrounds,
the Alexander Muss high school, and a rehabilitation center for disabled children.
His daughter, Titus, inherited his passion for Israel and also
donated to Israeli National causes. He took Titus there when she was young,
and she fell in love with the country as much as he did.
Both Titus and her father make massive donations to these charitable organizations.
Titus also sits on the board of directors for the Jewish National Fund.
And since her father's disastrous marriage to Halfon, she's been at the forefront of
media relations. Almost all of the statements on her father's history with Israel came from her.
However, she's spent most of her time going after Halfon, and not just legally. Titus
has said publicly that she believes Halfon took advantage of her father's advanced age. She took
the reins after her father failed to file charges against Halfon, who he wanted to give the benefit
of the doubt, despite there being overwhelming evidence indicating she tried to steal from him.
Titus quickly stepped in and saw the situation for what it was: a scam. Though,
it took a while for her and the police to convince him that Halfon was scamming him.
Rappaport was a man in love. He'd found a beautiful young woman from a country he'd
dedicated his life to supporting. He wasn't about to let her go so easily. In the same
legal document, he asked that Halfon not be deported back to her native Israel.
Even though she represented the nation he loves and a new life adventure,
Halfon didn't feel the same way.
The evidence of theft was overwhelming.
And Rappaport couldn't deny that his beautiful young wife was trying to rob him blind.
First Try Halfon's first attempt at stealing from
Rappaport took place inside a Tampa Amscot bank branch. Three months after their August wedding,
Halfon walked into the bank building with a million-dollar Wells Fargo cashier's check.
After identifying herself, they invited Halfon to sit down with a bank teller.
She explained that these were legitimate checks signed by her husband, who wanted to buy a
million-dollar yacht with the money. Halfon said Rappaport sent her, his wife, here on his behalf.
However, the bank tellers had a protocol: the person whose name was on the check had to be
present for them to authorize a cashout. They denied Halfon, and she went home empty-handed.
Halfon walked back into the bank a few hours later with three new checks. Each one had Rappaport's
name on them, along with a $333,000 sum of money. This time, she showed them her Israeli passport
and her visa as identification. However, the bank tellers still refused to cash her checks.
But, before Halfon left, the tellers captured photos of the suspicious woman's passport,
her visa, and the three checks. Then, after Halfon left, the tellers decided
to contact the authorities, who started investigating her.
Lin’s Truth Meanwhile,
Halfon was back at the drawing board. Her original plan, which was to write her husband's name on a
million dollars worth of checks, didn't work. She'd have to get more creative.
But before she could come up with a better plan, Halfon got a call from Rappaport, asking why she
tried to cash the checks, followed by an even more important question: where are the checks?
Halfon didn't know, but the police looked up Rappaport's contact information and
asked him if he'd signed those checks. He, of course, said that was nonsense and didn't
know what they were talking about. Then called his wife of four months.
His daughter, Titus, was there in the room with him as Halfon explained herself. Though,
as Titus recalls, Halfon spent most of the call berating Rappaport for not trusting her
enough to handle his money. When he asked for his checks back, she only got angrier.
The next day, the police interviewed Rappaport, with Titus at his side. That's when he told them
he thought Halfon was innocent and that he was giving her the benefit of the doubt.
Nevertheless, investigators still found Halfon and interrogated her. They presented
the Israeli National with photocopies of her passport, visa, and the checks
collected by the bank as evidence. So, Halfon told them the truth—her version of the truth.
Halfon explained to the investigators that she had to forge the checks. Rappaport's
family pressured him to withhold money from her because they thought she was a gold digger. So,
to protect herself financially, she tried cashing a few checks. Halfon told police
she shipped the checks to her sister in Israel when cashing them didn't work.
The police explained that what she did was a crime,
and Halfon agreed to ask her sister to send the checks back to Florida.
The police decided Halfon's promise was good enough and left. However, it was far from over.
Halfon had indeed sent the checks out of Florida,
but not to her sister in Israel. In reality, the $333,000 checks were mailed to Orlando.
Middleman Halfon knew trying to
cash the checks herself wouldn't work. She'd have to hire a middleman who knew how to cash forged
checks. The mystery person she hired was from Orlando. After Halfon mailed them the checks,
they traveled to New Jersey and cashed the first check at a company
called CheckPros. Then, five days later, they cashed a second check at the same company.
However, they never got to cash the third check. Investigators had already been alerted
of the first two and ordered Wells Fargo to freeze the third. When the news broke out,
no one knew who the mystery person from Orlando was. Since they hadn’t
technically been charged with a crime, no one was at liberty to release their name.
A name that remains a mystery to this day.
No Escape The authorities gathered
more evidence and met with Rappaport in December. Even if Rappaport wasn't willing to give her up,
they wanted Halfon. They asked him if he'd heard anything from her lately about the checks.
Rappaport told police that Halfon was meeting her sister in Boston to pick up the checks. Halfon
told him that she had booked a flight to New York on December 15th. And once she returned to Tampa
with the checks, everything would be resolved. The police, however, didn't believe the story.
They kept questioning Rappaport, asking him if he believed the story. When the investigators
poked him some more, Rappaport finally gave in. He admitted Halfon was probably conning him,
a truth his daughter tried to convince him of on their wedding day and every day after.
The investigators went looking for Halfon. As they dug, they discovered Halfon actually rescheduled
her flight for December 16th, most likely hoping to throw off authorities trying to catch her.
On the 16th, police investigators sent a squad down to the Tampa Bay International Airport
and arrested Halfon just before she got on the plane. They brought her into the station for
questioning like normal, though there was one tiny problem, Halfon wasn't American.
She was staying in the United States on a Visa, but wasn't a citizen. So,
the police detained Halfon for 13 long months while they further investigated her scam,
then offered her a plea deal. Halfon accepted the
deal and was deported back to Israel as a condition of the plea agreement.
You're probably wondering how Halfon got off so easily. She escaped prison time using one
of the most bizarre defenses in court history. She blamed her criminal actions on her psychic.
Psychic Excuse Throughout her time in Tampa, Halfon met with a
young psychic named Jaycee Wasso. In front of the judge, the court, and Rappaport, Halfon claimed
Wasso put a "spell" on her. This spell, Halfon says, caused her to scam Rappaport, not greed.
She says Wasso convinced her that stealing from Rappaport was the only option. Wasso also asked
Halfon to give her the money and anything else she stole, including some of Rappaport's jewelry.
The Florida state prosecutors recorded Halfon's testimony and went after Wasso.
They arrested the self-proclaimed psychic and charged her with several crimes.
The prosecutors charged Wasso with 7 different counts of grand theft,
several counts of fraud, and one count of money laundering.
They also compiled and submitted 800 pages of evidence to the court.
Her attorney, Glen Lansky, who's known for defending white-collar criminals,
says the state refused to offer his client any plea bargains. He said they were "throwing the
whole deck at her." Whether or not that was a Tarot card pun, we can't know for sure.
Still, Florida prosecutors went after Wasso,
intending to send her to prison for as long as possible.
Aftermath Since they had
already deported Halfon, extraditing her to the US wasn't easy. Lansky believes the prosecutors
were scapegoating his client because they lost the actual perpetrator. He says that
Halfon committed the crimes and admitted to lying over 50 times during a deposition.
Nevertheless, Wasso will appear before a judge in the Summer of 2022. She's up against a team
of prosecutors on a mission to avenge one of Florida's wealthiest and most generous residents.
The psychic's future isn't looking too bright, but she probably saw that coming, right?
Click to watch one of these next videos!
And let us know in the comment section whether or not you think the
psychic was in on it, or was Lin Halfon lying?