Louis Vuitton handbags are neatly arranged on shelves inside a luxury boutique in Bari, Italy on July 2, 2025. (Photo: Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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A New York woman who worked as a personal assistant pleaded guilty Wednesday to wire fraud for stealing $10 million from her elderly employer. One of them was a retired Salomon Brothers investment banker who died two years before the fraud was thwarted.
Prosecutors said the woman, Catalina Corona, poured some of the stolen money into luxury goods from Gucci, Cartier and Louis Vuitton to pay off credit card debt.
Corona, 62, could be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison in the case, according to the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Corona is accused of using fraudulent checks and impersonating his employer to defraud Richard Schmelk and his wife, Priscilla, out of millions of dollars from 2017, when they started working there, to 2024.
Richard Schmelk died in May 2022 at age 97, but Corona continued to plunder his widow’s accounts, according to court records.
The Schmelks were identified by prosecutors as victims of the coronavirus during a judicial hearing on Wednesday.
Richard Schmelk, a World War II veteran, worked for Salomon Brothers for 40 years and was a member of the bank’s executive committee. After leaving investment banking, he co-founded CAI Managers, a merchant banking company.
“In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI knighted Dick in the Order of St. Gregory the Great for his services on behalf of the Catholic Church,” his obituary said.
Richard Schmelk, a member of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, had previously been the victim of a similar scam by the then-president’s secretary, according to court records.
In that case, a New York federal appeals court found in 1999 that the executive director diverted “numerous checks he signed to pay expenses for himself and his family…for (the secretary’s) personal use.”
The secretary, Bebe Fazia Largy, was convicted in Manhattan federal court in 1998 of numerous counts of mail and bank fraud after a jury trial presided over by now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and sentenced to 46 months in prison and pay $505,532 in restitution.
The lawsuit alleges that Corona cashed hundreds of checks from Schmelk’s bank account and paid himself, as well as transferring funds directly from the victim’s account to his own, according to court filings.
The fraud was first discovered in April 2024, when a bank representative contacted Priscilla Schmelk about a suspicious $1,500 check, prosecutors said.
According to the criminal complaint, Corona spent more than $1 million of the stolen funds on Louis Vuitton, hundreds of thousands of dollars on both Cartier and Gucci, and $305,000 on Apple products.
“Today’s guilty plea means that the defendant is now held accountable for a calculating scheme that siphoned nearly $10 million from the very employers who trusted her,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocera Jr. said in a statement.
“Our office will continue to pursue those who abuse positions of trust for personal gain and work to ensure that they face the consequences of their deceit and fraud,” Nocera said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that in 2024, more than 147,000 complaints resulted in nearly $5 billion in losses due to elder fraud.
The actual number of victims and losses is likely much higher because many victims may not have reported the crime or may not have known they were scammed, authorities said.
