The Kissel story took another turn for the worse yesterday. From Bloomberg, a report that Andrew Kissel, Robert's brother, has been found stabbed to death in America:

April 4 (Bloomberg) -- Andrew Kissel, the U.S. real estate developer charged with fraud, forgery and theft, was found dead in his home with multiple stab wounds, less than three years after his brother was murdered in Hong Kong. Police in Greenwich, Connecticut, said in a statement yesterday that the body of Kissel, 46, was found by workers from a moving company.

In November 2003 his brother Robert Kissel, an investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co. in Hong Kong, was beaten to death by his wife Nancy after she fed him a drug-laced milkshake. She is now serving a life sentence. Andrew was facing a federal bank fraud charge and state grand larceny and forgery charges.

"Mr. Kissel appears to have suffered several stab wounds to the body,'' according to the statement. "The results of a medical examiner's report on the cause and manner of death are still pending.'' An autopsy will be conducted later today.

Greenwich police were called to Kissel's home at 9:42 a.m. yesterday, where they found the body, said Lieutenant Daniel Allen, a department spokesman. The police are treating the death as a homicide, the statement said.

Kissel's attorney, Philip Russell, confirmed his client's death and otherwise declined to comment. A call to a phone number listed for Kissel in Connecticut, where he lived with his wife and the couple's two children, wasn't returned.

In July, federal prosecutors charged Andrew Kissel with falsifying mortgage documents to defraud lenders of as much as $11 million in loans. At the time of his arrest, Nancy Kissel was on trial in Hong Kong. She killed Robert in their bedroom with five blows to the head with a lead statue and slept with his body for at least two nights, the court was told. She claimed self defense. She was convicted in September.

Hong Kong Prison

Nancy Kissel, now living in a 7 foot by 7 foot cell in top security Tai Lam women's prison near the Chinese border, alleged at her trial that Andrew was a drug addict.

In December 2003, Andrew and Hayley, a former Wall Street analyst with Merrill Lynch & Co., sought temporary custody of Robert's three children. The court granted it in January 2004. In October, a court awarded temporary guardianship of the children to Jane Clayton, 38, the sister of Robert and Andrew, who lives in Seattle.

In October, Andrew Kissel was indicted by a New York state grand jury in Manhattan on charges of stealing $3.9 million from a co-op where he had been treasurer. That case was adjourned until May 26, said Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

Not-Guilty Plea

Kissel faced as many as 25 years in prison had he been convicted of the state charges. He was in court on March 31 and was expected to return next month to plead guilty to a grand larceny charge and agree to serve a jail term, Thompson said.

Kissel had pleaded not guilty to both the state and federal charges. A father of two, he was free on bail at the time of his death. His next hearing in the federal case was April 6. A spokesman for the Connecticut medical examiner's office said an autopsy will be held today. The spokesman wouldn't identify the deceased or disclose other information.

Porsche, Jet

The Kissel brothers were born in Manhattan and raised in the New Jersey suburbs. Robert, who was 40 when he died, was an expatriate banker living in a $20,000-a-month, 3,270-square- foot (304-square-meter) apartment with a view of Hong Kong's skyline and the South China Sea; driving a silver Porsche Carrera; and employing two live-in Filipina maids. He amassed a $20 million fortune.

Andrew, 45, lived in a four-bedroom, four-bath house in Greenwich, Connecticut; bought a $2.85 million, 75-foot Hatteras yacht named Five Keys; and had access to a private jet. He called his company Hanrock because the first four letters stood for the initials of the brothers and their wives -- Hayley Kissel, Andrew, Nancy and Robert.

"He always wanted to be in real estate, and he made a lot of money too, but he thought he had figured out a way of being able to spend more than he made,'' Andrew's father William Kissel said in an interview in Hong Kong in September.

At the time of his death, Andrew's wife, Hayley, was seeking a divorce. Her attorney, Joseph Martini, had no comment on the reports of Andrew's death.

Federal authorities claimed that Kissel had deposited records with town clerks falsely claiming that mortgages on properties he controlled had been paid off. He allegedly filed papers falsely claiming the property was free of debt in order to take out multiple loans against the same property.

The Manhattan district attorney charged Kissel with forgery and grand larceny for siphoning money from the bank accounts of a co-op apartment building on New York's Upper East Side, where he was treasurer from 1996 to 2002.

Kissel pleaded not guilty to both sets of charges.

The federal case is U.S. v. Kissel, 06-cr-77, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, White Plains.

Here is the New York Times story: Developer on Eve of Guilty Plea is Discovered Slain at His Home (reproduced below the jump).

GREENWICH, Conn., April 3 — Andrew M. Kissel, the wealthy Greenwich real estate developer who had agreed to plead guilty this week to having swindled banks, title companies and others out of tens of millions of dollars, was found dead on Monday, his hands and feet bound, in the blood-splattered basement of his home, according to the police and employees of a moving company who discovered the body.

Greenwich police officers arrived about 9:45 a.m. at the home on Dairy Road that Mr. Kissel and his wife, Hayley, had been renting for three years. Officers and investigators from the state medical examiner's office spent the day combing through the house, which they sealed off with yellow crime-scene tape, as reporters and neighbors watched. The body was removed shortly after 7 p.m.

The police said in a statement last night that Mr. Kissel, 46, appeared to have been stabbed several times and that they were treating his death as a homicide.

Earlier, the police told the medical examiner's office that Mr. Kissel's hands and legs had been bound behind him and that he appeared to have been shot in the head.

Workers from a company hired to move the Kissels out of the house discovered the body in the basement on Monday morning. They described a bloody scene and said Mr. Kissel's hands and feet had been bound and a T-shirt had been pulled over his head.

Before moving to Greenwich, Andrew Kissel and his wife, Hayley Wolff Kissel, lived in a richly appointed duplex in a co-op building on 74th Street near Third Avenue. He was an investor and a real estate developer who owned classic cars and a $3 million yacht; his wife, a former world mogul-skiing champion, was a widely quoted stock analyst.

His death was the latest tragedy to befall the Kissel family after years of apparent success.

In 2003, Mr. Kissel's brother, Robert, a successful investment banker with Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong, was bludgeoned to death by his wife, Nancy, who had one of her children give him a milkshake laced with sedatives. The killing was called the "milkshake murder" in the Hong Kong press.

At the time, questions had already been raised about Andrew Kissel's management of his co-op building's finances. He ended up paying $4.7 million in restitution, making the final payment about a week before his brother was murdered.

There was a lengthy custody battle over Robert's three children after the murder, with Andrew and Hayley Kissel initially winning temporary custody pending the resolution of the mother's trial.

After Nancy Kissel was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for her husband's murder, the custody fight resumed as Andrew Kissel's business empire crumbled amid allegations from state and federal prosecutors that it was built on fraud.

Hayley Kissel offered to retain custody of the children, even though she initiated divorce proceedings against her husband early in 2005. But in December, family members agreed that Robert's three children should live with Jane Kissel Clayton, Andrew and Robert's only other sibling, and her husband, Richard, at their home in Mercer Island, Wash.

Andrew Kissel was scheduled to appear in federal court in White Plains on Wednesday to plead guilty to fraud charges in various real estate deals, according to his criminal lawyer, Philip Russell. Mr. Kissel also faced fraud charges in a separate case brought by the Manhattan district attorney's office stemming from the millions of dollars he had admitted taking and then repaid with interest to his Manhattan neighbors in the years he served as treasurer of his co-op.

"I haven't read the book of Job yet, but I'm about to," Mr. Kissel's father, William, said on Monday after learning of his other son's death. He said the Greenwich police had told his daughter that "there was trauma. That's all they said."

According to officials of the moving company that was hired by Mr. Kissel's wife on Friday to move the family's belongings out of the home over the weekend, movers discovered Mr. Kissel's body on Monday when they went to retrieve the last of the Kissels' belongings.

Mr. Kissel's hands and feet were bound, his T-shirt was pulled over his head and "there was blood everywhere," according to Doug Roina, the manager of the company, J. B. Moving of Stamford. "It almost sounds like a mob hit, the way it was set up," he said. "If his hands and feet were bound, it would be a tough suicide."

The Kissel family had sought to keep a low profile in Greenwich while laboring under the shadow of the divorce, the looming criminal case against Mr. Kissel, and several civil lawsuits seeking to seize assets that Mr. Kissel obtained in the years he was living the millionaire's life.

Mrs. Kissel found work as an equities analyst in Stamford while caring for the couple's two daughters Ruth, 8, and Dara, 6. Mr. Kissel had been helping his lawyer liquidate assets and raise cash in an effort to placate creditors in hopes that it would reduce the punishment he faced, his lawyer said.

According to legal papers filed in State Superior Court in Stamford by Mrs. Kissel on Feb. 28 as part of the divorce case, Mr. Kissel had also been in and out of rehabilitation programs for alcohol abuse and "has resumed drinking alcohol, consumes alcohol on the property" and has been "belligerent and argumentative especially when intoxicated including in the company of the minor children."

On Friday, Mrs. Kissel called J. B. Moving, and said that she wanted the company to send movers to her house the following day to empty its contents and store them for at least a week to give her time to figure out where everything ought to be shipped, according to Mr. Roina. He said the company's owner, who did an estimate, "thought it was a strange situation. It was not our normal move scenario," having someone call one day to order a move large enough to require three trucks for the following day.

He said that the couple were arguing or "going at it pretty good" while his movers were on the premises on Saturday and that at one point, Mrs. Kissel turned to one of the movers and said, "He's going to jail anyway," by way of explanation for the heated volley of words.

Having to watch "was uncomfortable for my guys," said Mr. Roina.

At least one part of the couple's argument, Mr. Roina said, revolved around Mr. Kissel's desire to stay in the house over the weekend, and the two ultimately agreed to leave a few items, including the bedroom set, until Monday morning so that Mr. Kissel could remain, Mr. Roina said.

His wife and the children then left, according to the movers. On Monday about 8 or 8:30 a.m., when the movers returned to finish the job, they had trouble getting into the house and called Mrs. Kissel, Mr. Roina said. He said she gave them a code number that opened the gate and they began to gather the last of the couple's belongings. When they got to the basement, he said, they found Mr. Kissel, notified their boss and called the police.

At that point, Mr. Roina said he called Mrs. Kissel and notified her that "you need to get to your house; there's a situation there."

"She said, 'oh, O.K.,' no reaction. Not even a question," he said.

Mrs. Kissel did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.

William Kissel said a relative of his from Boston did reach Mrs. Kissel on Monday and was told simply, "Andrew died."