WAWARSING – Drive in or out of Ellenville and you can't miss the sight of the big, dilapidated factory building east of 209. You may have wondered to yourself, who owns all that land now? Who owns the factory? It turns out to be something of a mystery.

Once, all those television antennas that people referred to as rabbit ears were made there by a company called Channel Master. But then Channel Master was sold to Avnet, and moved to North Carolina. The Imperial Schrade knife company moved into the vacant factory after that, but then went broke in 2004, undone by cheap imports.

In 2006, the 73 acre property was sold at auction for $1,000. And we might also recall that 2006 was before the bubble burst, when the economy and real estate was in "go-go" mode.

There are some odd aspects to the ownership of the town's biggest manufacturing property. The named owner is Ellenville Development Partners LLC, a company with no officers or agents listed by name in any public forum. The address given is 250 Broadway, New York City. Not coincidentally, that address is also home to AmTrust Realty, which is also named on the deed from 2006. Operating then and now for AmTrust in this area is Senior Vice President Anne Holker. Calls to her were not returned in time for this article.

Now things get confusing. Ellenville Development Partners LLC has a New York State Corporate Code Number... 3336215. However, that number is shared with another corporation, Myra Trigueno LLC. And Myra Trigueno LLC also lists 250 Broadway, New York City as its address. Indeed, Ellenville Development Partners LLC is listed as an alternative name for Myra Trigueno LLC.

250 Broadway, close to city hall, is a plain looking office building in the mid-size range. The New York City Council, the NYC Housing Authority, and the State Senate and Assembly all rent space there and the named owner of the building is 250 Broadway Associates Corporation, a domestic business corporation. However, it too appears to be managed by AmTrust Realty.

So who is Myra Trigueno, of the company of that name? She appears to be 36 years old and resides in the Bronx. A second person of that name operates a Wedding Planning company. also in the Bronx. What the connection might be, between Myra Trigueno and the former Schrade property, is simple mysterious... at least at this point.

Local political leaders Lenny Distel, supervisor of the Town of Wawarsing, Jeff Kaplan, mayor of Ellenville, and Elliott Auerbach, county comptroller and a former mayor of the village, say they have no idea who Ellenville Development Partners LLC might be. Auerbach does mention American Stock Transfer & Trust... but more about that later.

AmTrust Realty dates from 1993 and is an outgrowth of AmTrust Financial Services, a company owned by the fabulously wealthy and publicity shy Karfunkel brothers, Michael and George, whose father immigrated from Hungary in the 1950s and opened a deli and fish purveyors in Borough Park in Brooklyn. The brothers moved to Wall Street by the late 1960s where they were employed by Economic Planning Corporation, a "boiler room" operation for mutual funds and stocks. The two got caught up in a "pump and dump" scam that collapsed in 1971, but then moved on quickly and founded American Stock Transfer & Trust, one of the first firms to track changes in publicly recorded stock holdings and options for publicly traded companies. This became a roaring success and when they sold it in 2008 they received $1 billion.

During the 1990s, the Karfunkels built up AmTrust Financial Services by piecing together various niche components of the insurance industry. They took the new company public in 2006 as a publicly traded portfolio of insurance risks, including things like California workers' compensation, and Italian medical malpractice options. Along the way the brothers began a pair of private foundations, the Hod Foundation, and Chesed Foundation of America, into which they moved large blocks of AmTrust stock, with their charitable efforts going almost exclusively to Hasidic yeshivas and synagogues, especially those of the Belz sect.

Meanwhile, AmTrust Realty has grown into a mid-sized giant in the competitive arena of commercial real estate, purchasing large buildings in Chicago, New York and other cities.

There's another odd and interesting aspect to the deals involving what most now know as as the Schrade property.

In April 2001, General Electric Capital Business Asset Funding Corporation agreed to fund a mortgage on 7 Schrade Court worth $8,225,000. This mortgage generated $61,000 in mortgage tax and "special ADD NTG" tax, totaling $63,697.

Five years later, after Schrade's bankruptcy, the property went for $1,000 at auction.

There we have it, for now at least: a valuable piece of real estate that's currently assessed at $2.4 million, that was mortgaged for $8 million, and which sold for $1,000. Its ownership is a mystery that may involve either Myra Trigueno of the Bronx, or more likely the Karfunkel brothers (formerly of Hungary and Brooklyn). Or just possibly another player, hiding behind further veils of secrecy.