Is Graceland’s Foreclosure for Real?

Earlier this week, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough sued to dam a foreclosures sale of Graceland, CNN has reported. In line with Keough’s swimsuit, paperwork that purport to point out the Memphis house was collateral for a mortgage taken out by Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s sole inheritor and Keough’s mom, are fraudulent: “Lisa Marie Presley by no means borrowed cash from Naussany Investments and by no means gave a deed of belief encumbering Graceland as safety.” The foreclosures sale, which has been quickly halted, was scheduled for later this week and seems to be a case of deed theft, with an LLC named Naussany Investments & Non-public Lending trying to reap the benefits of Lisa Marie’s loss of life early final 12 months.

Older owners are sometimes the targets of deed theft however typically not celeb owners with attorneys on retainer. The swindle continuously includes somebody promising to repay the mortgage in change for the proprietor signing over the home at a fire-sale value. (The folks behind the sort of fraud are inclined to go after older owners of coloration, typically in quickly gentrifying neighborhoods, who could also be home wealthy however money poor.) As quickly as paperwork are signed and the deed is filed with town, the “purchaser” disappears and the proprietor is left with their debt however no home. Some scammers take a extra direct route, submitting cast paperwork straight with town and banking on the truth that nobody will discover till it’s too late.

As CNN reported, final 12 months an LLC (Naussany Investments & Non-public Lending) introduced paperwork “purporting to point out that Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed $3.8 million from Naussany Investments” utilizing Graceland as safety. However Keough’s attorneys declare the paperwork are fraudulent, that Lisa Marie by no means borrowed the cash or put the well-known house up as collateral. There’s much more at stake than $3.8 million: Graceland is the second-most-visited house within the U.S. after the White Home and makes up a giant chunk of Elvis’s property, which is alleged to be price tons of of tens of millions. Lisa Marie’s 2022 divorce filings present she earned seven figures from it yearly.

A Florida notary whose title is on the mortgage paperwork stated she “by no means met Lisa Marie Presley nor notarized any doc for her,” in accordance with court docket paperwork cited by the information web site, which was not capable of contact the corporate. An e mail message to the LLC acquired an auto-reply that nobody can be within the workplace for the following week, the telephone quantity was out of service, and the state of Missouri, the place Nassany is allegedly situated, has no report of such a enterprise. Keough’s attorneys declare the corporate doesn’t exist.

Elvis Presley Enterprises, which manages the Presley property, additionally referred to as the foreclosures a con. “Elvis Presley Enterprises can affirm that these claims are fraudulent,” the corporate stated in an announcement to CNN. “There isn’t a foreclosures sale. Merely put, the counter lawsuit that has been filed is to cease the fraud.”

Deed theft is reportedly on the rise, with its practitioners, typically LLCs which might be troublesome to prosecute, rising more and more brazen. A number of years in the past, The New York Occasions reported on a landlord who had constructed a real-estate empire by allegedly stealing at the least 17 properties, in accordance with prosecutors and owners (he even collected lease cash from metropolis businesses at a number of of them, via housing-subsidy applications). Extra lately, a grifter managed to briefly take possession of the New Yorker Lodge in midtown. After staying an evening within the lodge, he used an obscure housing legislation and a court docket judgment in his favor to persuade town’s finance division to switch the deed to his title. However the try and seize Graceland often is the ballsiest, highest-profile try to this point. If solely everybody had the Elvis property’s attorneys on their aspect.