Reality star Apollo Nida has asked a federal judge for an early termination of his supervised release sentence. His request night be denied, as prosecutors say he owes millions to the victims he hurt in his multi-million-dollar wire fraud scheme.
According to the Justice Department, in 2014, Nida pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit mail, wire, and bank fraud in a complex scheme from 2009 to 2013, when the U.S. Secret Service arrested him in 2013. For the crime, he was sentenced to eight years in federal prison and five years of supervised release.
The Case Against Nida
The government was able to prove that over the four years, he and his co-conspirators stole United States Treasury Checks, checks from the Delta Air Lines pension fund, filed fraudulent tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service, and made fraudulent claims against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, impacting 50 victims in eleven states.
The DOJ says his fraud caused over $2.3 million in losses to those individuals.
In addition to the 13 years on incarceration and probation, he was also ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Charles A. Pannell, Jr. to pay restitution to the victims of his offenses.
Prosecutors assert though he has been released from prison for over four years, he still owes “the vast majority of the $1.9 million in restitution” to the victims he defrauded, Radar Online reports.
Nida allegedly paid $120,000 in cash to some of the victims.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alana R. Black filed an opposition to Nida’s early release on June 14, 2023.
“In light of how difficult to detect the style of complex fraud he has practiced in the past is, it is very important to protect the public by maintaining the full deterrent effect of supervised release for as long as originally ordered,” she wrote.
Court documents also suggest that the $120,000 payments that the 44-year-old did make to victims might also need to be scrutinized.
“Interestingly, all of the money orders were paid for in cash, even though the (U.S.) Postal Service allows the purchase of money orders with debit cards and people with bank accounts typically find that option more convenient,” Black wrote.
Adding, “Nida’s choice to use cash to buy the restitution money orders is not illegal and does not mean that he is engaging in fraud. However, that choice does effectively cut off the evidentiary chain that would otherwise allow the government to make further inquiries into the source of funds from which he is making the restitution payments.”
Real Housewives Husband
Nida broke on the national scene as the husband of popular former “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Phaedra Parks. Parks and Nida split after he pleaded guilty to the fraud charges and were divorced in July 2017, according to Page Six. From their union, the couple had two sons, Ayden, 12, and Dylan, 9.
Two years later, while in federal prison, Nida became engaged to another woman, a Jordania- American named Sherien Almufti, 42, in 2016 and married her in a secret ceremony on Oct. 14, 2022.