Bed-Stuy Man Tricked Into Selling Home At Block Party: BP

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT, BROOKLYN — The Brooklyn Borough President is asking New Yorkers to rally around a Bed-Stuy man who says he may lose his home of 30 years after being targeted by predatory developers.

Eric Adams is throwing his support behind Dairus Griffiths, 65, who's been fighting for years to hold onto his home on Halsey Street near Malcolm X Boulevard, according to a recent Daily News report.

"My family is at risk of losing our home," his daughter Doris Brigg wrote in a $25,000 fundraising plea. "Please help us raise the legal fees we need to fight back against real estate speculators that have defrauded my family."

Griffiths says he was tricked into selling his house for $630,000 — less than half the $1.5 million it's worth — by Eli Mashieh of August West Development on Oct. 26, 2014, according to the Daily News report.

The Bed-Stuy man was drinking with friends when Mashieh approached him with a contract to sell the house, which Griffiths believed was a deal to help him hold onto the century-old home, the Daily News reported.

Griffiths has since been embroiled in a court battle to try and reclaim the deed to his home, he told the News.

Eric Adams will meet with the family Tuesday morning and has called for a “full-scale, forensic audit and investigation” into deed-transfer scams that he says have victimized hundreds of Brooklyn residents.

Victims are often elderly New Yorkers, as recent Patch reporting shows.

A Long Island man was charged in May with stealing a million dollar Bed-Stuy brownstone from its 80-year-old owner, an 84-year-old woman nearly lost her Flatbush home in 2017 to a neighbor who forged a new deed and the city was recently forced to return a Crown Heights home it snatched from a 74-year-old woman.