An accused Ponzi schemer who allegedly stole nearly $1 million from investors — by posing as an Oxford graduate who worked for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — also double-crossed his own wife right out of her Upper West Side home, a new lawsuit charges.
Mary Margaret Butler bought an apartment in a stunning Victorian brownstone at 52 W. 74th St. before marrying Steven Wessel in 2003. The Lenox Hill Hospital marketing exec turned her finances over to her husband thinking he had “extensive expertise” in investment banking, Butler says in her Manhattan Supreme Court suit.
But at the time of his arrest in June, US Attorney Preet Bharara dubbed Wessel “much less an investment banker than a serial liar.”
That was just the tip of the iceberg for Butler. She soon learned her husband had lied to her about paying off her mortgage, discovering the deceit only when she went to bail him out of a federal jail.
Butler tried to use her $1 million, prewar apartment as collateral but was shocked to learn that the lender had foreclosed on it in April — and her spouse had hidden eviction notices from her, the civil suit says.
“It’s very sad. I had no idea he would do that to her,” said a former Wessel colleague who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Butler is suing US National Bank to stop the eviction and repay her arrears. Through her attorney, she declined to comment to The Post.
She eventually refused to bail out her husband, who is broke, his court-appointed attorney, Peggy Cross-Goldenberg, told a federal judge last month.
Butler, 57, says in her suit that she learned Wessel, 56, went to great lengths to trick her — allegedly fabricating two e-mails supposedly from the bank to confirm the debt had been paid off.
Wessel regularly boasted about having an upper-crust biography, including a doctorate from Oxford University and working for the former presidents, to raise money, a former colleague said.
Even as the feds were closing in, The Wall Street Journal reported, Wessel in April chaired the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race Dinner at the University Club in Manhattan, addressing more than 200 guests, including the president of Cambridge University’s Murray Edwards College and the Oxford chancellor.
“I would proudly proclaim the evening a success,” he later wrote on Facebook. “Thank you the committee and thank you the speakers! And to the guests: see you next year! Wes.”
The Oxford alumni office and presidential libraries have said there is no evidence that Wessel ever attended the school, let alone worked for Reagan or Bush.
“He was very convincing,” the former colleague said, adding that Wessel also bragged that his father was a CIA agent. He also went by the name Wes Wessels to hide a 2006 bank-fraud conviction, the ex-colleague said.
The criminal indictment says Wessel used a “purported investment company” called Steeplechase USA, LLC, to take money from a New Jersey doctor and a New York City financial-services professional. Wessel got $200,000 from the doctor in 2013 by promising a 167 percent return, then he spent almost all of the money on “cash withdrawals and personal expenses,” including fancy dinners and trips to the Hamptons, the indictment says.
He pleaded not guilty and faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted.