A 69-year-old Manhattan woman already indicted for allegedly helping steal a dying widow's Queens home has now filed her own lawsuit claiming that her accused co-conspirator turned around and stole her property too. Deepa V. Roy says Victor Quimis devised a scheme to seize her Flushing house after her husband died, according to the complaint she filed in Queens Supreme Court.
From Co-Defendants to Accusers
Roy and Quimis were indicted together in August 2025 on deed-theft charges tied to the home of Renuka Bherwani, an 88-year-old Kew Gardens Hills woman who was homebound in hospice care with advanced dementia when the alleged theft occurred, according to The New York Times. Prosecutors say the pair forged Bherwani's signature on documents in 2024, transferring ownership of her home to themselves, as reported by CBS News New York. The scheme allegedly routed the property through an LLC and a mortgage — reported as $552,000 by CBS News New York and as $552,500 by the Times — after which Quimis allegedly kept more than $300,000 of the proceeds.
Now, in a lawsuit filed in Queens Supreme Court on September 16, Roy claims that her onetime partner in that alleged scheme later did the same thing to her, according to the New York Post, which first reported the filing. Roy is seeking at least $1 million in damages for stolen property, unpaid rent and deed theft, per the Post.
Squatters, a Notary and a Dated Deed
According to the lawsuit, the trouble began in November 2023, after the death of Abner Richard Siegel, when Roy asked Quimis to help remove squatters from a home she jointly owned with her late husband in Flushing, Queens. The Post's report on the complaint states that Quimis went on to create two bargain-and-sale deeds that made him the owner of the property, which the complaint values at $817,000.
Roy's complaint alleges Quimis used a purported notary named Shereece Rthel Clarke on the documents, and that one fraudulent deed imprint read “State od [sic] New York” — a typo Roy points to as evidence of forgery. The complaint claims Quimis dated the final allegedly fake deed January 22, 2024. By June 2025, the complaint alleges, Quimis had ousted the squatters from the home and moved in his wife Margot, his mother-in-law and two children, where the family has lived rent-free ever since, per the same account.
Boiler, Furniture and a Gold Limousine
Beyond the house itself, Roy's complaint alleges Quimis took a $12,000 boiler installed in 2015, along with major appliances and antique furniture from her property. The complaint also claims Quimis gutted and remodeled a golden Dodge Ram limousine that had belonged to Siegel's father, according to the Post's review of the filing.
Kamal Bherwani, Renuka Bherwani's son and a former executive in the administrations of Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, has taken his own civil action against both Roy and Quimis. He believes Roy is trying to evade blame in his mother's case, telling the Post that Roy brought Quimis into the situation and sourced his mother. Renuka Bherwani died in June 2025 at age 88.
Roy's criminal- and civil-case attorneys have staked out starkly different positions on her culpability. Jeremy Saland, her criminal-case attorney, said Roy continues to fight and dispute the allegations against her, while also claiming that both Renuka Bherwani and Roy may have been victims of Quimis. Separately, her civil-case attorney Christopher Anderson said Roy was the primary victim of deed theft and had taken legal action against Quimis. Victor Quimis and his wife did not return a request for comment, and Quimis's criminal-case lawyers did not return requests for comment, per the Post.
A Landmark Case Under New State Law
Roy and Quimis have pleaded not guilty to the deed-theft-related charges and are due back in court on November 4, with the criminal case still ongoing, according to the New York Attorney General's Office. Their prosecution marked the first indictment brought under New York's new law criminalizing deed theft as a form of grand larceny, a milestone confirmed by the Times. Under New York Penal Law, deed theft covers intentionally altering, falsifying, forging or misrepresenting a written instrument used to convey or finance real property with intent to deceive or defraud.
The New York State Attorney General's Office has described Roy and Quimis as having allegedly worked together to steal Bherwani's home while she was receiving end-of-life hospice care. State officials have vowed to tackle deed theft more broadly, and the numbers suggest why: complaints to the Attorney General's Office jumped from 149 in 2023 to 222 in 2024 and then to 517 in 2025, a 240% increase, according to data obtained by CBS News New York. Attorney General Letitia James has said deed theft is a growing crime, particularly in neighborhoods undergoing gentrification, as reported by ABC7 New York.
Deed theft, broadly, involves using fake documents, forgery and lies to illegally assume ownership of another person's house. Queens prosecutors have made it a priority: the Queens District Attorney's Housing and Worker Protection Bureau, launched in 2020, has helped return 23 homes to their rightful owners, per CBS News New York's reporting. In one comparable case cited by the station, a defendant who used someone else's identity to commit deed fraud on three homes was sentenced to four to nine years in prison after pleading guilty.
