SCAM ARTIST HOLOMAN-FRANKLIN’S JUNE, 2009 RETURN TO SALEM STREET

In 2008, after scamming Essex Street property owner Clifford Truesdell out of thousands of dollars, Raphael Holoman-Franklin rented a house on Salem Street in Cambridge, owned by Tom Queisser, who was living in Europe at the time. Holoman-Franklin (as with Truesdell) sublet the place without the owner's knowledge and pocketed the money. (See statement 3 in the "Victim's of Raphael Holoman-Franklin" post at: WWW.HOLOMAN-FRANKLIN.BLOGSPOT.COM, which contains statements made by numerous scamming victims of Raphael Holoman-Franklin) He later fled Cambridge and went to St. Bede Abbey, in Peru, Illinois. The following detailed account of what happened when he returned to Cambridge in June of 2009 was written by Clifford Truesdell.

In early June of 2009, Holoman-Franklin was asked to leave Saint Bede Abbey in Peru, Ill., after the abbot received about a dozen complaints from past scamming victims who had tracked him there. He told people upon leaving the abbey that he would be going to visit his (quite mythical) mother in London, and then would return to the US to work on “the Obama 2012 campaign.” (There is no Obama 2012 campaign, and won’t be until late 2010 at the earliest.) Instead, he returned to Cambridge, with the intention of moving back into Tom Queisser’s house at 16 Salem Street.

On June 13, H-F telephoned one Jillian, a Salem Street neighbor and one of the two people who (on the endorsement of Father Trottier, rector of Saint Peter’s Episcopal church in Cambridge) had recommended him to Queisser. He would be arriving by train on the 14th; could she pick him up at South Station? She asked Father Trottier for advice; he recommended she have nothing to do with H-F.

(There was a preliminary warning that H-F might be returning: Cleaning people had showed up again at 16 Salem, and they had not been arranged for by Queisser or his two local surrogates. Actually, it turned out that this was this eighth time they had cleaned since November, 2008. It was a team of four, “hired” by H-F. They were never paid, so the four ladies are bilked of some hundreds of dollars each. Yet further H-F victims, and these among the poorest.)

What H-F did not know was that Queisser, whom he had never met and whom he thought to be in Germany, was in fact in Cambridge –an emergency trip to clear up the huge financial mess H-F had created --$12,000 unpaid rent, $1,500 unpaid utility bills. (Not all of that had gone into H-F’s pockets, but most had.)

Queisser had of course changed the locks.

Sure enough, around 9:30 PM, H-F arrived at Salem Street in a taxi-cab, with two suitcases. When his key did not work, he went to Jillian’s home for help getting in. She had the pleasure of introducing him to Queisser. Dumbfounded, H-F departed --after threatening to sue Queisser for changing the locks!.

We presume that had he been able to get back in, he would have rented the place out to new subtenants, and bilked them too.

Clifford Truesdell

catr4@yahoo.com
jaegerstatter@hotmail.com

(NOTE: this isn't really the "whole story". Holoman-Franklin will attempt to swindle other property owners, if he hasn't already done so. A recent edition of the Cambridge-based Small Property Owners of America Newsletter mentions a woman in East Cambridge who was scammed. She rented an apartment to a man who then sublet it (without her knowledge) to several students, charging them more than the actual rent amount. We would appreciate any information regarding this from the property owner or student-tenants involved. If the con-artist is Holoman-Franklin, as we suspect, we'd like to put their story on our ever growing victim's blog.)