Richard Weintraub is the head of Weintraub Real Estate Group and a longtime fixture in Los Angeles luxury development circles. He was a former business partner of disgraced financier Ezri Namvar, who was known as the “Bernie Madoff of Beverly Hills” for defrauding investors in multimillion-dollar real estate schemes. Weintraub has been connected to some of the city’s most controversial high-end projects, catering to wealthy buyers while driving gentrification and displacement. His record highlights how speculative real estate and financial misconduct often go hand in hand in Los Angeles’s property market.