A man who tried to con his way into a share of the Facebook empire is on the run from the law after removing his court-ordered ankle monitor, a Manhattan judge said Tuesday as he revoked bail and questioned whether the escape had been planned for months.
Paul Ceglia dropped out of touch with his pretrial services officer and did not respond to attempts to reach him, according to Assistant US Attorney Janis Echenberg.
US District Judge Vernon S. Broderick in Manhattan revoked Ceglia’s $250,000 bail two days after it was discovered that the businessman was no longer at his Wellsville home. Ceglia’s lawyers said he failed to respond to messages sent by phone and e-mail instructing him to appear at Tuesday’s hearing.
The judge noted how difficult it is to tamper with a monitoring bracelet. He also questioned whether Ceglia had been planning to run for months, since the defendant had successfully requested in September that his bail be modified so that he could access some of his real-estate equity to hire lawyers.
Broderick said he now wonders whether Ceglia may be using some of the money “in connection with his flight.” The judge added that freeing himself of the electronic bracelet and making a run for it “probably took a fair amount of planning.”
“It appears he has fled,” Broderick said at a hearing Tuesday, before revoking Ceglia’s bail.
Ceglia, 41, is believed to be with his wife and two sons, according to Charles Salina, the federal marshal for the Western District of New York, told Bloomberg news. Salina said he doesn’t know whether Ceglia is now in the United States.
“Our responsibility is to locate him,” he said.
Defense attorney Robert Fogg told Broderick that he believed that properties supporting the bail could not be sold because of the economic climate and because of the criminal charges.
“I can’t say what his state of mind was. I don’t know,” Fogg said. “And was it a plan from the beginning? I don’t know.”
Prosecutors say Ceglia doctored a contract he signed with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2003 to make it seem he was part owner of the Menlo Park, Calif., company. Ceglia had pleaded not guilty to fraud charges.
In 2010, Ceglia filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit claiming that the 2003 software-development contract included a provision entitling Ceglia to half ownership of Facebook in exchange for startup money.
A federal judge in Buffalo threw out the lawsuit after a magistrate judge concluded that the contract was altered. Facebook lawyers have said the two had a contract but that references to Facebook were added for purposes of the lawsuit. Ceglia was criminally charged in 2012.
With Post Wires