Sokhara Kim is an immigrant from Cambodia and a longtime Philipstown resident who owns Nice ’N Neat Dry Cleaning. She said that Derek Keith Williams convinced her he had bought her building at 3154 Route 9, which she had owned since 2017, for $1.2 million.
During an interview Tuesday in the parking lot of Philipstown Plaza, with her car stuffed with belongings, Kim said that Williams — the boyfriend of a woman who worked for her — offered in 2019 to buy her business and building. She consulted with her children, who told her to take the offer, pay off the $600,000 mortgage at M&T Bank and retire.
Kim said that Williams then launched an elaborate ruse that played on her fear of losing the property. She said he showed her a check for $1.2 million but said he would need access to her M&T Bank account to deposit it. She said they visited the bank, where his name was added.
She said he then told her that it would be better, for tax purposes, to deposit the check with an entity he had created, DKW Trust.
Kim made 21 mortgage payments to M&T. “I was never late,” she said. But once Williams convinced her that DKW Trust owned the property — Kim says he showed her a receipt from M&T indicating the mortgage had been paid off — he told Kim she didn’t need to make payments. According to Kim, Williams said she could live and work at 3154 Route 9 at no charge as its “attendant.”
Carmen Chuchuca, a native of Ecuador who owned Bella’s Salon, which occupied one of three storefronts in the building, said Williams began collecting $2,500 per month in “rent” from her, saying he owned the property, which Kim confirmed to her. (Chuchuca moved out on Dec. 6 ahead of being evicted by the Putnam County sheriff and plans to reopen elsewhere.) Kim said she also provided Williams with regular payments for “expenses” totaling thousands of dollars per month.
In September 2023, Williams moved into the storefront between the two businesses that had been an art studio for Kim’s husband, Chakra Oeur, saying he needed a place for a few weeks to complete the paperwork for the sale, Kim said. He brought his seven dogs, she said.
Those few weeks became more than two years.
Kim said Williams kept the subterfuge going by controlling the rural mailbox outside the dry-cleaning business. He would always retrieve the mail. If any document needed to be signed, she said he would tell her, “If you don’t sign, you’re going to lose your property.”
“That’s what controlled me,” she said. “I was afraid to lose my property. He said everything was under his name.”
Williams has been in the Putnam County jail since last month. According to Robert Tendy, the district attorney, a Philipstown jury convicted him of aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, a misdemeanor. When he did not return to court for sentencing, or a later court date, a warrant was issued, resulting in his arrest on Nov. 1 by sheriff’s deputies. [Update: On Friday (Dec. 12), Williams was sentenced to six months in the county jail.]
Three days later, a deputy visited 3154 Route 9 and handed Kim an eviction notice. She said she learned from the Sheriff’s Office that M&T Bank had foreclosed on the property more than a year earlier.
Kim said she had received an eviction notice in April, but Williams told her it was a mistake by the bank. When she heard nothing more over the summer, she said Williams cited this as evidence that he had resolved the matter.
Williams, meanwhile, was filing spurious motions to fight the foreclosure and eviction. In July, he attempted twice to add his name to the deed at the Putnam County Clerk’s Office, according to receipts submitted in court. A complaint Williams filed in August in federal court asked a judge to award $150 million in damages to himself and Kim from M&T Bank, the county, the state and the Federal Reserve Board.
Most recently, in a handwritten motion on a jailhouse form, Williams asked a judge to prevent his own eviction from the property, naming Kim as the defendant.
In a phone interview on Thursday (Dec. 11) from the Putnam County jail, Williams said he acted to “protect” Kim, and “helped her get rid of all of her debt.” He and Kim “both sat down and designed what we were doing together. She was never afraid, never scared,” he said.
Williams claimed that M&T “never loaned the money” to Kim, but served as an intermediary for funds issued by the U.S. Treasury. The money she paid to the bank before the foreclosure represented a “double payment,” and the bank owed her 21 payments of $5,400 each, he claimed. “When she borrowed the money, it was actually paid for at the same time,” said Williams.
He added that he and Kim established DKW Trust to transfer the property “under a proper land patent” and accused Chesapeake Holdings, the M&T subsidiary that now owns 3154 Route 9, of having a “fraudulent deed.” The money paid by the nail salon went toward taxes, Williams said, adding that he plans to move, once released, to an apartment his girlfriend secured for him in Middletown.
“My intention was that me and Sokhara were going to try to buy another property somewhere and continue what we were doing,” he said.
Tendy declined comment when asked if his office was investigating Williams for financial crimes.
For Kim, “I’ve been through the fire, so I stand up fighting,” Oeur, sitting next to his wife in the car, interjected. “I went through the killing fields during the Vietnam War and lost everything and came here to establish everything from zero. I feel like we got scammed and we got cheated, even by law enforcement. They knew that he was a criminal, and they didn’t do anything to save Sokhara.
“I’m not a legal person, but I’m not dumb,” he added. “I knew this was abuse. But Sokhara stopped me.”
“Yes, I kept stopping him,” Kim said. “I said, ‘Don’t talk.’” She said she was afraid Williams would get upset and stop working on the sale.
Kim and Oeur met in the U.S. After the war, Oeur came to Washington, D.C., as a sponsored immigrant. “I asked them to take me somewhere there are museums and galleries,” he said in a 2016 interview with The Current.
Diagnosed with kidney failure, Oeur was placed on a waiting list for a transplant because his family and close friends weren’t matches. “My doctor told me to check with all the Cambodians I knew.”
He had met Sokhara in Cambodia 10 years earlier — “I was a freedom fighter, she was a refugee,” he said. “They tested her blood, and she cried, happily, because it matched.” The couple fell in love and, after the transplant, Oeur moved to Philipstown.
On Tuesday, the couple was headed to live with their daughter. Kim said she hoped she could find a place in Cold Spring to rebuild her business. “I love Cold Spring,” she said. A customer who stopped to help said she would care for Kim’s plants until she was ready to pick them up.
Read the original article on highlandscurrent.org
