Investigators for the Manhattan DA’s office today are searching the home of a lawyer who last month sued a Bronx judge for not paying $500,000 in loans he took from her to feed his alleged gambling addiction.
The woman, Janet Cohen, called The Post early this morning and left a message saying that that six investigators were rifling through her belongings and taking computers belonging to her and her son from her Queens home.
“They’re gonna tear my house apart,” Cohen said on her message.
A neighbor of Cohen’s later said she had seen law enforcement at the Forest Hills residence this morning.
At about 2 p.m. today, four officers, one of whom was displaying a badge indicating he worked for the Manhattan DA, showed up at Cohen’s house and tried to gain entry.
“We’re executing a search warrant,” one of the officers told reporters. “If you can just stand back.”
A Manhattan District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman, “I can’t comment on anything,” when asked about Cohen’s claim.
Cohen herself refused to answer any questions when she walked outside her home this afternoon. She went back in the house after a photographer took her picture.
Cohen, 57, is a former law school classmate of Bronx Supreme Court Judge George Villegas, whom she sued last month.
In that Queens Supreme Court lawsuit, Cohen claimed that between January 1988 and December 2006 – in a “vicious cycle of gambling and borrowing money” — Villegas periodically called her to say that “loan sharks would soon ‘break my legs’ and ‘hurt my children’ if she did not give him money.”
Villegas “borrowed over $500,000 from [Cohen] to pay for and subsidize his chronic gambling.”
The suit also says that in December 2006, Villegas gave Cohen a promissory note for the $500,000, vowing to pay off the debt in 30 years.