Another Law Suit begins...

LIBN- Long Island Business News - by David Winzelberg
Published: March 3, 2009
A Plainview businessman caught in the alleged Agape World fraud has filed a $31 million lawsuit against the company and its owner Nicholas Cosmo.

Richard Mittasch, a licensed securities dealer, claimed he invested about $6 million of his clients’ money with Agape since March 2007, and about $100,000 of his own.

The suit, filed Feb. 26 by Manhattan attorney Marc LoPresti, accuses Cosmo and his purported bridge loan investment firm of racketeering and securities fraud, and asks the court for recovery of the lost funds as well as $25 million in punitive damages.

Cosmo was arrested on Jan. 26 for allegedly scamming investors out of $370 million in an alleged Ponzi scheme. This is not the first lawsuit filed against Cosmo, and more are expected.

Mittasch manages a small hedge fund company called Triton Capital Partners, which advertises a higher-than-usual payoff in a short amount of time. On the company’s Web site, it warns that “… investors in a hedge fund accept risk in exchange for their access to higher-than-average rates of return.”

Mittasch said he was introduced to Agape by Marty Hartmann, a sub-broker of Jason Keryc, one of Cosmo’s brokers. Mittasch said he last met with Hartmann in late December to give him more money to invest.

An investment adviser for 10 years, Mittasch said the hardest thing has been telling more than two dozen clients, some as far flung as Canada and South America, that their money might be gone with everybody else’s in Cosmo’s alleged swindle.

“Those are tough phone calls,” Mittasch said.

Note from Dom:
I'm going to try and post the "complaint" on the yahoo group site. Look for it at