Former Westport Resident Sentenced For Mortgage Fraud

Former Westport resident William A. Trudeau Jr., 50, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court to 188 months in prison for mortgage fraud. His wife, Heather Bliss, 37, was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Trudeau was indicted in Nov. 2010 for his participation in a $3.5 million mortgage fraud scheme that took place in Fairfield County.

Area residents may remember Trudeau and Bliss for their involvement in the Newtown Oil fraud case. Trudeau, currently of Norwalk, and also a former resident of Seymour, was convicted in 2008 on nine felony counts of larceny for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in oil deposits, but not delivering the oil, he faced at least 20 years of jail. He got no jail time on those charges, but he was put on five years of probation.

In the mortgage fraud case, on October 9, 2012, a jury found Trudeau guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud, and one count of wire fraud.

On July 30, 2010, Bliss pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

According to the evidence and witness testimony during Trudeau’s trial, in 2004, Trudeau and Joseph Kriz, a real estate attorney in Wilton, formed Aspetuck Building & Development through which Trudeau, Kriz and others intended to purchase, develop and sell properties.

Trudeau was an unnamed principal in the business. Bliss was employed as a paralegal for Kriz and, in that capacity, had responsibility for preparing and maintaining all legal and bank documents related to real estate transactions handled by Kriz.

From approximately February 2004 to April 2010, Trudeau conspired with Bliss, Kriz, Fred Stevens, Thomas Preston and others to defraud federally insured financial institutions and mortgage lenders, investigators said.

As part of the scheme, Trudeau and his co-conspirators submitted false mortgage loan applications to financial institutions to obtain mortgages on various properties in Fairfield County.

Trudeau and Bliss also made headlines last year when they were after they enrolled their daughter in a town school while living in Norwalk.