If a Mexico City businessman faked his death in 2016 to steal $26 million from two U.S. life-insurance giants, he’s done a remarkable job of lying low since, the lawyer for the businessman’s wife suggested Thursday.
Mikal C. Watts of Watts Guerra in San Antonio drove that point home repeatedly in cross-examining a private investigator called as a witness by the insurance companies, Transamerica Corp. and Pruco Life Insurance Co., in a civil trial before Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal in Houston. Pruco is a subsidiary of Prudential Financial.
Watts’s client, Blanca Monica Villarreal, is fighting the insurance companies over the $26 million she says she’s owed as the beneficiary of term life-insurance policies they sold to her husband, Eduardo Rosendi.
The companies have refused to pay. They contend Rosendi submitted fraudulent financial statements when he applied for the policies in 2014 and Villarreal lied when she said Rosendi died of a heart attack in Mexico City on Dec. 29, 2016. His remains, Villarreal claims, were quickly cremated.
Villarreal is expected to take the stand Friday.
The investigator, Oscar Abraham of San Antonio, testified on direct examination that on March 5, 2018 – 14 months after Rosendi’s supposed death – he talked to a receptionist at an office building in Mexico City who identified Rosendi as a tenant of the building and said he been there that very morning.
His testimony is the strongest evidence to date to support the insurers’ assertion that Rosendi didn’t die in 2016, as his wife claimed. Abraham also cited what he said were inconsistencies in statements by Villarreal and others regarding the circumstances of Rosendi’s death, embalming and cremation.
Asked by Jason Bernhardt of Winstead, one of Transamerica’s lawyers, what he concluded from his investigation, Abraham replied, “That Mr. Rosendi was alive.”
Watts, in more than 90 minutes of cross-examination, chipped away at that certitude. He stressed that when Abraham showed the receptionist a photograph of Rosendi and asked if he was there, she repeatedly responded that “the accountant” wasn’t in. Abraham said it was clear to him that in context – he says he’s looking for Rosendi, he shows her a photo of Rosendi, and she says, “the accountant has stepped out” – she was talking about Rosendi.
Watts noted, however, that Rosendi was not an accountant, and that another man who was an accountant also officed there.
Other than the receptionist’s ambiguous identification, Abraham acknowledged, he had not located anyone who claimed to have seen Rosendi after the reported date of his death. Nor, the investigator said, did he know of anyone else who’d found such a witness.
Abraham agreed with Watts that the office building where he went in search of Rosendi, at 527 Homero, was in a neighborhood where security concerns were high and video surveillance cameras were plentiful. Yet, the investigator conceded, he hadn’t found a single video image of Rosendi, and didn’t know of anyone who had.
“Do you think someone trying to hide out would do it by walking in and out of a building that’s got security cameras everywhere?” the lawyer asked.
Abraham did not answer.
He said he never told Villarreal that he’d talked to someone who claimed to have seen her departed husband, even though he met with Villarreal the day after his last visit to 527 Homero.
Asked why, he said he didn’t want to divulge his findings to “the other side.”
At the time, however, Villarreal wasn’t “the other side.” She hired Abraham, through her attorney, in 2018 to re-trace the steps of investigators working for the insurers who conducted their inquiry the previous year.
Abraham testified that he was fired by Villarreal’s lawyers – twice – apparently as a result of a dispute over his billings. He said he delivered a copy of his report to his own attorney last year, who, in turn, conveyed it to lawyers for the insurance companies.