Former Mensa Member Sentenced For Fraud

District Attorney Richard A. Brown has announced that a former member of Mensa, the high IQ society, has been sentenced to one to three years in prison for welfare fraud while engaging in a reign of terror against his ex-girlfriend.
The defendant has been identified as Steven Finkelstein, 58, of the Bronx. He was found guilty on February 3, 2006 of third-degree welfare fraud and third-degree grand larceny following a non-jury trial. His sentence is to run consecutive to the prison sentence that he is presently serving for a parole violation.
The defendant was charged in August 2003 with forcing his then-girlfriend, Estelle Margolin, to allow him to use her Rego Park co-op apartment address to receive $4,314 in welfare housing benefits from the City’s Human Resources Administration without actually living there. Evidence presented at trial showed that the defendant threatened to harm Margolin, her family, her cats and her neighbors unless she signed a fraudulent lease so that he could receive a shelter allowance.
According to the trial evidence, Margolin met the defendant in 1998 through the Mensa organization, a group which limits its membership to those in the top 2 percent of IQs, and they lived together at her Rego Park residence. However, he ultimately began threatening her and threatening to destroy her property.
Testimony at trial also showed that in early 2000, the defendant was introduced to Barbara Segretto at a Mensa-related event and they began a romantic relationship. The defendant pushed, prodded, and coerced Segretto into allowing him to move in with her. The defendant’s campaign of “phone phreaking” - such as sending victims lengthy unrequested faxes, generating persistent and annoying electronic tones and manufacturing and creating bogus collect calls in both English and Spanish - against her friends, family, and business contacts was so intense that Segretto was forced to cave into his demands. The defendant was convicted in Bronx County of grand larceny by extortion for his actions against Segretto.