A top opera singer was jailed for three years today for fleecing a wealthy widow out of more than £100,000.
Andrew Amdur, 48, befriended 67-year-old Elizabeth Shaheen and convinced her to transfer £80,000 into his account, by pretending the money would pay for underprivileged children to go to Disneyland Paris.
In fact he spent the money on his classic car collection and to fund his gambling habit.
Amdur also received £25,000 from Mrs Shaheen to buy a professional quality harp — but only spent a third of the sum on the instrument and kept the rest himself.
He denied two fraud charges and one of theft, but was convicted following a trial at Southwark crown court.
After he was sentenced today, Amdur responded from the dock: “Three years for a crime I didn’t do. You cannot take my soul.”
A classically-trained tenor, he was once a rising star of the British opera scene and has sung in front of 40,000 England rugby fans at Twickenham.
The court heard that Amdur met Ms Shaheen in July 2017 while both were out dog-walking. She was described in court as “very kind, very generous, very scatty and very vulnerable”.
The singer would visit her every day at her home in west London, and at his trial last month described himself as being her “chaperone”.
Jonathan Caplan QC, mitigating, argued that Amdur’s actions were a “singular lapse” in his previously good character.
Mr Caplan said his client was the carer for his elderly mother, had a gambling habit and that a doctor’s note suggested a heart problem means “he might not survive prison”.
Sentencing Amdur, of Golders Green, today, Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith told him: “Within no time at all you had placed yourself… at the centre of this fragile woman’s life.
“I have no doubt that having befriended her, you were then waiting for an opportunity to steal from her.”
MORE ABOUT