Convicted Fraudster Lists $65 Million Mansion on Riverside Drive

25 Riverside Drive (Google Maps)

Dina Wein Reis, a high-class grifter and ex-con who bilked companies out of hundreds of millions of dollars, has put her mansion at 25 Riverside Drive (75th Street) on the market for $65 million.

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Reis was imprisoned from 2011 to 2014 after pleading guilty to fraud charges relating to a gray-market scheme, in which she received heavily discounted goods from major corporations, promising them she would distribute them to schools and charities and then place their products in exclusive retail outlets. Instead, she sold them to wholesalers and reaped the profits. She deceived the company executives by offering them lucrative but nonexistent jobs and by wining and dining them. She was sued by corporations including Hershey Foods, Quaker Oats, Warner Lambert, Beech Nut, Unilever and Roche in the mid-‘90s. Her crime was featured in the CNBC TV series American Greed.

Reis—who goes by more than a dozen aliases—was also ordered to pay $7 million in restitution. Last year, she paid $20,000 to lobbyist Brett Tolman, who is close to Donald Trump, to commute the sentence.

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The brazen socialite, who describes herself on her website as an “entrepreneur and “influencer,” used her ill-gotten gains to furnish her sumptuous home with French provincial furniture and buy millions of dollars worth of art, including paintings by Modigliani, Warhol and Stella. The federal agents who seized her loot were flabbergasted by the quantity of treasures she’d amassed. “It was like King Tut’s tomb,” said the agent supervising the case. Reis also funded stage and television productions, including “On the Waterfront” on Broadway and “Carpati,” a documentary about a Holocaust survivor in Ukraine. She hosted fund-raisers for prestigious institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art.

A Borough Park native, she is the daughter of an apparel maker and studied human development at Empire State College. In her 20s, she married David Ruiz, a former soccer player who came from a working-class Colombian family. When the two wed, he changed his last name to Reis.

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Dina and David bought the mansion for $2.15 million in 1996. The 12,000-square-foot Renaissance Revival manse, at Riverside Drive and 75th Street, boasts eight bedrooms, 70 windows, a rooftop conservatory, a mahogany theater, a dining room with gold-leaf ceilings, a music room, and floors imported from France. While Reis served out her time, the mansion was listed as a $75,000-per-month rental.

The townhouse was completed in 1897 and designed by C.P.H. Gilbert, who was also the architect of the imposing Ukrainian Institute on Fifth Avenue. The house was built for Henry Hobart Vail, chairman of a major textbook publisher, and other occupants included Charles Sooysmith, an engineer who helped finance the construction of the subway. In the early 1980s, the house was converted to a residence community for the mentally ill, and in 2007 was turned into luxury apartments. When the couple moved in, they did their own renovations.

The listing agents at Sotheby’s say the owners want to sell the property because they “are planning to spend more time in Florida.”