See more of our coverage in your search results.
A Manhattan woman accused of heartlessly stealing a dying widow’s home in a deed-theft scam is suing her alleged co-conspirator for cheating her out of her own property too.
Deepa V. Roy, 69, and Victor Quimis, 40, were indicted on deed-theft charges in August 2025 after allegedly teaming up to steal the Kew Gardens Hills, Queens home of Renuka Bherwani while she was in hospice care.
Roy now claims in a new lawsuit that Quimis concocted an “egregious deed theft scheme” to commandeer her home after her husband died. She is demanding at least $1 million in damages for stolen property, unpaid rent and deed theft.
Deed theft — an issue state officials have vowed to tackle amid a spike in incidents — involves using fake documents, forgery and lies to illegally assume ownership of someone else’s house.
After her husband, Abner Richard Siegel, died in November 2023, Roy allegedly asked Quimis to help remove squatters from a Flushing, Queens, home she and her husband owned together, according to a lawsuit filed Sept. 16 in Queens Supreme Court.
Instead, Quimis allegedly took “predatory advantage of [the] elderly, grieving widow” and created two bargain-and-sale deeds that ultimately made him the owner of the $817,000 property, according to the complaint.
The fraudulent documents were allegedly stamped by made-up notary “Shereece Rthel Clarke” with the typo-ridden imprint: “State od [sic] New York.”
Roy claimed in the court papers that Quimis dated the final fake deed Jan. 22, 2024.
In June 2025, Quimis finally ousted the squatters – but replaced them with his own family, the lawsuit claims. He, his wife Margot, his mother-in-law and two kids have been living at the investment property “rent free” since, per the complaint.
Quimis also allegedly “stripped and stole” Roy’s property, including a $12,000 boiler installed in 2015, major appliances and antique furniture — and gutted and remodeled a Golden Dodge Ram limousine that belonged to Siegel’s father.
“Ms. Roy is not a perpetrator of deed theft; she is its primary victim. Rather than remaining silent, Ms. Roy has taken aggressive, proactive legal action to hold Mr. Quimis accountable,” her attorney for the civil case, Christopher Anderson, told The Post. Quimis and his wife did not return a request for comment.
Roy and Quimis’ criminal case is ongoing, according to the New York state attorney general’s office. They are due back in court on Nov. 4.
Both have pleaded not guilty to a slew of deed theft-related charges. Their case was the first brought under the state law criminalizing deed theft, officials said.
The pair allegedly created a phony deed Oct. 13, 2024, while Bherwani was in hospice and suffering from dementia, before she died at 88 in June 2025, according to officials and her family.
Her son, Kamal Bherwani, who was an executive in the administrations for former Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, has also taken civil action against Roy and Quimis.
He believes Roy is also trying to evade blame in his mother’s case.
“It’s just ironic that she’s making that statement a few weeks before a criminal trial,” Kamal Bherwani told The Post. “The person who brought Victor [Quimis] into the situation was Deepa [Roy] . . . Victor is an expert in doing this — he may have taken on some aspects of the fraud, but there’s no doubt she’s the one who sourced my mother.”
Jeremy Saland, who is representing Roy in her criminal case, said she “continues to vigorously fight and dispute the allegations against her.
“It’s important to recognize that two unfortunate realities can be true: Renuka Bherwani may very well have been the victim of Mr. Quimis, but so was Deepa Roy,” he claimed.
Lawyers representing Quimis in the criminal case did not return requests for comment.