The government denied the majority of Nerayoff’s claims in a filing of its own, including the assertion that Nerayoff’s colleague and former co-defendant on the extortion charges, Michael Hlady, was a government informant. Nerayoff’s lawyers maintain that Hlady, who was convicted of swindling Catholic nuns out of nearly $400,000 in 2010, was “insinuated … into [his] orbit” by the FBI, in order to help them build a case against Nerayoff.