http://www.metro.us/new-york/facing-corruption-charges-new-york-assembly-speaker-sheldon-silver-says-he-will-be-vindicated/zsJoaw---K04clzs478Gc2/
Showing posts with label Brighton Neighborhood Association. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brighton Neighborhood Association. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
how to take bribes and deny it
http://www.metro.us/new-york/facing-corruption-charges-new-york-assembly-speaker-sheldon-silver-says-he-will-be-vindicated/zsJoaw---K04clzs478Gc2/
Thursday, January 22, 2015
N.Y. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver accused of $4 million bribery and kickback scheme
N.Y. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver accused of $4 million bribery and kickback scheme, Dems continue to support him
Thursday, January 15, 2015
crime report
forms
United States Attorney's Office
Southern District of New York
Attn: Civilian Crime Reports Unit (Criminal Division)
One St. Andrew's Plaza
New York, NY 10007
prisoner No. 46835-112
prisoner No. 46835-112 http://www.thejewishweek.com/spinka This week, an undisclosed federal prison will become the new address of prisoner No. 46835-112, Naftali Tzvi Weisz, known to his thousands of followers as the Grand Rabbi of Spinka of Borough Park. Last December, Weisz, 61, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to heading up a decade-long, $10 million money-laundering scheme in which donors to Spinka charitable institutions secretly received kickbacks of up to 95 percent of their donations. The rabbi’s gabbai, or assistant, Moshe Zigelman, also received a two-year sentence.
Last December, Weisz, 61, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to heading up a decade-long, $10 million money-laundering scheme in which donors to Spinka charitable institutions secretly received kickbacks of up to 95 percent of their donations. The rabbi’s gabbai, or assistant, Moshe Zigelman, also received a two-year sentence. Five others involved in the scheme received lesser sentences.
Rabbi Weisz is not the only Orthodox rabbi to recently find himself on the wrong side of the law. Last summer, three rabbis of the Syrian Orthodox community, including its chief rabbi, Saul Kassin, were arrested in New Jersey and New York on charges of money laundering. But the Spinka Rebbe of Borough Park is perhaps the first leader of a chasidic dynasty to become a jailbird. It has gone unnoticed, however, that his name carries a historic distinction invoking a singular artifact of the Holocaust known as the Auschwitz Album.
Found by chance in an abandoned German barrack by a young Auschwitz survivor in April 1945, as the Third Reich was in its death throes, the 56-page album contains the only known photos of Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau other than two photos taken secretly within a crematorium enclosure and smuggled out of the camp. Photography, except for “mug shots” of incoming non-Jewish prisoners, was normally forbidden even to the S.S., at the largest Nazi killing center. This tattered brown album, bound by a tasseled cord, was most likely ordered up as a private souvenir by a high SS camp official. In a deception that even the victims hoped to be true, it carries the hand-lettered title, “Umsiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn” (“Resettlement of Jews from Hungary”).
The album’s nearly 200 clear snapshots, organized as a pictorial narrative, first show the newly arrived victims in all their exhaustion, confusion and stoic dignity as they tumble out of the boxcars. It follows them as they line up before jack-booted SS inspectors for the infamous selection while their belongings are pillaged. Family members can be seen anxiously looking for one another as a minority is split off to be slave laborers while all others are led to the gas. No actual violence is seen, although in one photo, a group of older women and children are shown gazing calmly at the camera against a backdrop of what appears to be a red-brick administrative building. It is actually one of the four Birkenau crematoria, then working overtime. Beneath it are the undressing rooms and capacious gas chamber.
On the first page of the album is a photo of three chasidic men. The dominant figure, his gaze steady from under a soft-contoured, wide-brimmed black hat, is the 52-year-old grand rabbi of Bilke, a town nestled in a valley of the Carpathian mountains. His name is Naftali Tzvi Weisz, and he is the namesake and great-uncle of the current Spinka grand rabbi of Borough Park. Along with nearly half a million other Hungarian Jews, his community of about 1,500 Jews from Bilke was deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944.
Naftali was a son of Rabbi Isaac Weisz, whose own grandfather, Joseph Meir Weisz (1838-1909), founded the Spinka dynasty in the Romanian town of that name. His son, Isaac, moved the Spinka court to the chasidic stronghold of Mukachevo. Isaac’s piercing glance, it was said, was enough to send his dallying pupils scurrying back to study.
In 1929, one of Isaac’s sons, Naftali, accepted a call from Bilke’s Jews to become their grand rabbi. In the town’s memory book, Isidore Reisman recalled how he was among a crowd of students who trooped to the edge of town to welcome the charter bus bringing the new rabbi’s entourage. As the bus approached, Reisman saw “the bearded faces at the windows who were singing from the Psalms: ‘In joy they go forth and in peace they arrive.’” The first to step out was the aged Spinka Rebbe himself. His son, Naftali, a man with dark, aquiline features and piercing eyes like his father, was escorted to Bilke’s main synagogue in a festively decorated horse-drawn carriage.
“The arrival of the new rabbi marked a turning point in the history of our small town,” wrote Reisman in a two-volume memorial book to Jewish life in Bilke. “During his first year, dozens of students from many outlying villages in Carpathia and beyond flocked to join the Bilker Rabbi’s yeshiva.” On Thursday nights, Rabbi Weisz personally conducted gas-lit oral examinations, Reisman told me in a 1980 interview in Cleveland. On other nights, except for the Sabbath, the rabbi studied alone deep into the night. A disciple remembers once coming into his study and finding the rabbi engrossed in a text, his feet in a pail of ice water to keep himself awake.
As the Nazi shadow spread over Europe, Rabbi Weisz was invited by an American congregation to become its rabbi. He refused to forsake his own flock.
On the last day of Passover in April 1944, Bilke’s Jews, excepting a few men like Reisman who had been drafted into Hungarian forced labor brigades, were ghettoized in a nearby city. From there, they were packed into boxcars with only a single pail of water for the two-day passage to Auschwitz. Near the journey’s end, one of Weisz’s congregants asked, “Rabbi, what will happen to us?”
At that moment, the train curved off the main line onto the Birkenau spur. “Listen to the sound of the wheels screaming,” was the rabbi’s only answer, Reisman remembered.
On that train was 18-year-old, Bilke-born Lilly Jacob, who would survive. The end of the war found her enslaved at Dora, a small concentration camp near Nordhausen. As the Germans fled, Lilly, emaciated and typhus-ridden, entered an abandoned barrack and fell asleep on a cot. Upon awakening, she looked into a bedside cabinet and found the Auschwitz Album.
At least a million Jews had been deported to Auschwitz, only a handful of whom were from Bilke. Yet when Lilly opened the album to its first page, she recognized her rabbi, Naftali Tzvi Weisz. He’d been murdered, probably, on the same day his photo was taken.
Amazingly, Lilly also spotted herself in a photo of women selected for work, all them shorn of hair and wearing ill-fitting dresses taken from earlier deportees. Another photo, she believed, showed two of her younger brothers as they debarked from a boxcar. Considering it a family album, Lilly would not give it up after the war, even when the Jewish Museum in Prague offered to buy it in 1946. But she did allow the photos to be copied onto glass plates for a payment of 10,000 crowns, she told me in an interview.
That was enough to pay for passage to America for Lilly, her husband, Max Zelmonovic, and their infant daughter, in 1948. They settled in Miami, where Lilly worked as a waitress. In 1964, Lilly brought her album to Germany — at the request of the prosecutor — to testify at the trial of 22 former SS men who had been Auschwitz guards, some of whom could be identified in the photographs.
Then Lilly took her album home to Miami and kept it in the bottom drawer of her bedroom dresser until a morning in July 1980, when Serge Klarsfeld, the historian of the French Holocaust, arrived unannounced at her doorstep. He convinced her to donate the Auschwitz Album to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, even though she had promised the album to her grandchildren. Before the ceremony, Lilly was received by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who looked long and hard at the photos.
The Auschwitz Album has been called the single most important document preserved in Yad Vashem’s underground vault because, while many survivors have given testimony, only its pages preserve a photographic record of Jews at Auschwitz in the days when the death factory was working at maximum capacity. The images add up to a heart-rending human panorama.
Naftali Tsvi Weisz’s dignified gaze, on the first page of the album, will be preserved long after the criminal ignominy of his great-nephew from Borough Park is forgotten.
Peter Hellman wrote the text for the Random House edition (1981) of “The Auschwitz Album.”
how to bribe a police
Pinto Bribery And Money Laundering Case May Only Be The Tip Of The Iceberg
Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto eyes closedRabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto and his wife (who tried to kill herself earlier today – please see my previous post) have been arrested for bribery of a police officer and money laundering. Haredi kabbalist and miracle worker rabbis, mostly but not completely Sefardim, are feared to be at the heart of a network of shadowy figures who launder money and bribe police, helping evidence against criminals 'disappear' and allowing wanted criminals to escape. The going rate for a cop to lose evidence in a major crime? 200,000 NIS. And the kicker is that up to 1/3 of the money paid these haredi 'miracle' kabbalist rabbis allegedly goes to organized crime.
46 people arrested
Man Sentenced For Laundering Money Through Haredi Charity
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
David Goldhirsch, one of 46 people arrested in Solomon Dwek’s massive 2009 federal sting known as Operation Big Rig or the New Jersey Sting, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison last week after having pleaded guilty in June to owning and operating an illegal money transmitting business.
Goldhirsch, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, was originally charged with money laundering conspiracy in a 14 point indictment along with Rabbi Lavel Schwartz and Rabbi Mordechai Fish. Both Schwartz and Fish, who are brothers, pleaded guilty and have already been sentenced, Schwartz in December to one year and one day in prison, and Fish in May to 46 months in prison.
Goldhirsch laundered money through a hasidic charity he controlled, Boyoner Gemilas Chesed.
He took a 10 percent commission from Dwek for turning Dwek’s checks – which Goldhirsch was told were from the proceeds of Dwek’s sale of illegal counterfeit designer handbags – into cash.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Dwek told Goldhirsch the money was from the sale of counterfeit handbags.
Approximately three-quarters of all Operation Big Rig defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted, among them New Jersey politicians including a state assemblyman, the mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, and the deputy mayor and council president of Jersey City.
Also among them are five haredi rabbis from New York and New Jersey who have pleaded guilty to money-laundering-related charges, including the Chief Rabbi of the Syrian Jewish community, who was sentenced to probation. The longest sentence handed down to any of the rabbis was five years in federal prison.
According to the Associated Press, two of the 46 original defendants were acquitted at trial. Four others had the charges against them dropped.
Two more of the original 46 defendants’ cases are still reported to be pending. Another defendant is a fugitive.
if you blinka youll miss another spinka stinka finka in the clinka, waddya thinka? another drinka? (winka,winka) in comments
Spinka Hasidic Tax Fraud And Money Laundering Conspirator Sentenced To Prison Mira Zeffren was part of the Spinka Rebbe's money laundering and tax evasion scheme. She was arrested in 2011 and charged with five counts. Zeffren originally pleaded not guilty, but then reached a plea bargain with the government, pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States. Mira Zeffren was sentenced Monday to 8 months in prison, 2 years of supervised release, 500 hours of community service, a $30,000 fine, and $84,294 in restitution:
…Pursuant to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, it is the judgment of the Court that the defendant, Mira Zeffren, is hereby committed on Count 1 of the Indictment to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons to be imprisoned for a term of 8 months.
Upon release from imprisonment, the defendant shall be placed on supervised release for a term of 2 years under the following terms and conditions:
1. The defendant shall comply with the rules and regulations of the U. S. Probation Office, General Order 05- 02, and General Order 01-05, including the three special conditions delineated in General Order 01-05;
2. During the period of community supervision the defendant shall pay the special assessment, fine and restitution in accordance with this judgment's orders pertaining to such payment;
3. The defendant shall perform 500 hours of community service, as directed by the Probation Officer;
4. The defendant shall truthfully and timely file and pay taxes owed for the years of conviction; and shall truthfully and timely file and pay taxes during the period of community supervision. Further, the defendant shall show proof to the Probation Officer of compliance with this order;
5. The defendant shall cooperate in the collection of a DNA sample from the defendant; and
6. The defendant shall apply all monies received from income tax refunds, lottery winnings, inheritance, judgements and any anticipated or unexpected financial gains to the outstanding court-ordered financial obligation.
The drug testing condition mandated by statute is suspended based on the Court's determination that the defendant poses a low risk of future substance abuse.It is ordered that the defendant shall pay to the United States a special assessment of $100, which is due immediately.
It is ordered that the defendant shall pay restitution in the total amount of $84,294 pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § to the Internal Revenue Service.
The defendant shall receive credit for any restitution paid prior to sentencing. Restitution shall be paid in full within thirty days of sentencing.
The defendant shall comply with General Order No. 01-05.
It is ordered that the defendant shall pay to the United States a total fine of $30,000, which shall bear interest as provided by law.
On the Government’s Motion, the Court orders Counts 2, 3, 4, and 5 dismissed as to this defendant.
It is further ordered that the defendant surrender herself to the institution designated by the Bureau of Prisons on or before 12 noon, on April 9, 2013. In the absence of such designation, the defendant shall report on or before the same date and time, to the United States Marshal located at Roybal Federal Building, 255 East Temple Street, Los Angeles, California 90012.
Court recommends that the defendant be placed in the camp facility at Danbury in Connecticut.
Defendant informed of right to appeal.
Bond exonerated upon self surrender.
In addition to the special conditions of supervision imposed above, it is hereby ordered that the Standard Conditions of Probation and Supervised Release within this judgment be imposed. The Court may change the conditions of supervision, reduce or extend the period of supervision, and at any time during the supervision period or within the maximum period permitted by law, may issue a warrant and revoke supervision for a violation occurring during the supervision period.…
To read more about the Spinka scam and Zeffren's role in it, read her indictment:
gangster launder billions of dollars
A reputed gangster who calls himself "a simple Jew from Kiev" has emerged as the central suspect in an international bank-fraud probe that investigators term the biggest money-laundering case in history.
The case involves an apparent scheme by Russian mobsters to launder billions of dollars in criminal proceeds through one of America's oldest and most respected banks, the Bank of New York. The FBI's yearlong investigation into the scheme was disclosed by the New York Times in a series of articles in late August.
Beyond the Times' disclosures lies a far more complex story, reported piecemeal in a variety of publications here and abroad. Together they tell a hair-raising tale of international crime and intrigue by reputed crime boss Semyon Mogilevich and his so-called "Red Mafia."
Mogilevich's mob is said to be the largest and most dangerous criminal organization to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union; it's engaged in arms dealing, drug smuggling, prostitution, contract murders and international art theft.
The gang has been described as resembling traditional Italian mafia groups in its hierarchy, brutality and reliance on family and ethnic ties. Most of its members are Jewish.
The money-laundering and related allegations, though, lift Mogilevich to a level of sophistication and influence rare in organized crime. They also hint at the magnitude of threat posed by Russian organized crime, both to Russia and the world at large.
Britain, in particular, has been investigating Mogilevich's group for more than four years, seeking to unravel a worldwide network of shell companies implicated in money-laundering, contraband sales, stock manipulation and investor fraud. It was Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service that tipped off the FBI last year to Mogilevich's apparent relationship with the Bank of New York.
Switzerland is also investigating the gang, on suspicion that it helped launder millions of dollars through Swiss banks for Russian government officials. Those cash movements began just before the August 1998 ruble devaluation that led to Russian financial chaos. Some say Kremlin officials traded on their inside knowledge of policy plans, bleeding the country.
Part of the laundered money -- at least $200 million, by some accounts -- may have come from International Monetary Fund aid. The IMF is now facing criticism in Washington for sloppy oversight. That, in turn, could hurt the presidential hopes of Vice President Al Gore, a key architect of the IMF's Russia policies. The GOP-led House Banking Committee is holding hearings on the allegations later this month.
Others whose names have surfaced in the mushrooming probe include several so-called "oligarchs," the business tycoons, many of them Jewish, who control much of post-communist Russia's privatized industry. Those mentioned include Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a leading banker and oil executive; Boris Berezovsky, formerly a ranking Yeltsin aide; and Vladimir Goussinsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress. All three headed Russian banks that have been implicated in the Mogilevich investigations.
Another "oligarch" implicated is Konstantin Kagalovsky, a close ally of Khodorkovsky. His wife, Natasha Gurfinkel, headed Bank of New York's East Europe operations until she was suspended last month.
Nobody has formally been accused of any wrongdoing.
Russian Jewry experts fear the allegations may help fuel Russia's already rampant anti-Semitism, by seeming to confirm extremist myths about Jewish "rape" of Mother Russia. All told, Mogilevich's mob may have looted as much as $15 billion from the Russian economy in the last few years. "It can't help but have an impact," said Isabella Ginor, a leading Israeli analyst of post-Soviet affairs.
Semyon Yukovich Mogilevich, 53, was born in Kiev and graduated from the University of Lvov with a degree in economics. An Israeli citizen since the early 1990s, he currently operates from Hungary, where he is married to a local woman.
He has been known to law enforcement authorities for decades, and is a familiar figure in the Russian media. In the West, though, he was virtually unknown until May 1998, when he was profiled in a lengthy article in the Village Voice by investigative reporter Robert Friedman.
Friedman went into hiding shortly afterward, at the urging of the FBI, which told him Mogilevich had taken out a $100,000 contract on his life. He is currently writing a book about Russian organized crime.
As described by Friedman, Mogilevich first became involved in petty crime in Moscow in the 1970s. He made millions in the 1980s by bilking Jews leaving for Israel, promising to sell their valuables for them after they left, then pocketing the proceeds.
He spent the 1990s allegedly building his Red Mafia from his new base in Budapest, sending lieutenants to acquire legitimate companies in England, Canada, Australia, the United States, the Caribbean and elsewhere, then using them as covers for his illegal activities.
Activities cited by Friedman include a sale of $20 million in stolen East Bloc weaponry to Iran, the theft and resale of Torah scrolls, a scheme to dump American toxic waste in Chernobyl -- in cooperation with the Genovese crime family -- and a phony antique restoration shop that took in Russian art treasures and sent fakes back to the owners, while the originals were secretly sold at Sotheby's in London.
Britain appears to have been a favorite base for Mogilevich's financial schemes. In 1995, British authorities shut down a firm he had created there to launder funds from his worldwide criminal activities. In 1997, authorities began investigating a far more complex scheme, in which he acquired a Hungarian magnet factory, incorporated it in Philadelphia, then took it public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1994. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock was sold, yet few magnets were produced. Federal authorities, tipped by Britain, shut the firm down for securities fraud last spring.
The magnet probe led British investigators to Benex, a London-based firm allegedly controlled by Mogilevich. It was set up in March 1998 for the sole apparent purpose of transferring funds out of Russia.
Benex's only officer, reputed Mogilevich lieutenant Peter Berlin, is married to Lucy Edwards, the Bank of New York officer who was fired last week for her apparent role in the money-laundering scheme.
Edwards, born Ludmilla Pritzker in Leningrad, has declined to comment so far. Berlin has disappeared, and knowledgeable observers suggest he may turn up floating in the Thames.
As for Mogilevich, he granted an interview to a Moscow newspaper this week and insisted that the only money he ever laundered was $5 left in a shirt on wash day. The whole affair, he claimed, is "the raving of the FBI."
J.J. Goldberg writes a weekly column for The Jewish Journal.
organ trafficking money laundering
Does it matter that so many of the men arrested today in New Jersey and New York on charges that include money laundering and organ trafficking are Jewish? And not just Jewish but rabbis and community leaders? Of course it matters to Jews. This is big news from New York to LA, with all the attendant hand-wringing and oy-gvalting that goes along with the revelation of a prominent crook who, as my mother would say, happens to be Jewish (see Madoff, Bernard).
But you’ll notice a lot of those arrested have Italian surnames. Is the Italian press full of oy veys (in Italian, of course)? No. But Jews see a Goldstein in handcuffs, and feel viscerally the shame, the guilt, the fear of backlash…
Some resent it. Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of CLAL, who made his resentment at the press’s emphasis on the “Jewish” angle clear in this email:
When New Jersey Mayors, politicians and rabbis get arrested for money laundering, it’s news that should be reported. It’s especially important for Jews to hear this news and address the discomfort created by religious leaders behaving badly. Isn’t that what we ask of other groups when their leaders do the same?
But the coverage, which initially began in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, suggests that the motivation for the coverage may be less than appropriate. In fact, it may be nothing less than an excuse to vent deep resentment at a particular portion of the Jewish community.
When a headline reads, “NJ officials, NY rabbis caught in federal money laundering, corruption sweep”, one expects a story which describes that event. In this case however, no mention is made of any rabbis actually getting arrested. Despite plenty of details about various politicos being taken into custody, there is nothing about rabbis.
This may be a big deal, but the headline and the story don’t match - where is the info on the rabbis? This kind of coverage actually borders on Jew-baiting, and it potentially says something at least as ugly about the author/editors as it does about those who committed any crime. Consider the following quote found on the paper’s website and carried on CNN: The arrests…“began with an investigation of money transfers by members of the Syrian enclaves in New York and New Jersey,” the newspaper said on its Web site, NJ.com. Those arrested Thursday “include key religious leaders in the tight-knit, wealthy communities,” the report said.
“Enclaves”? “Tight-knit, wealthy communities”? Could it be that the paper harbors deep resentment against Jews who they see as over-privileged, stand-offish people who operate as a law unto themselves? Is this the moment to celebrate how “those people” will now get their comeuppance? If not, why describe the community in classically anti-Semitic ways instead of calling out the specific leaders who broke the law, violated the religious rules of their own community and should be punished to the full extent of the law for any wrongdoing they committed?
This story needs to be told, but it needs to be told better than this. It needs to be about justice, not just desserts. By the way, when all this calms down, the Syrian-Jewish community should also take a good look at itself to see what they do which contributes to their being perceived of this way by their neighbors.
While victims of bias should never be blamed for the bias against them, in most cases for a stereotype to take hold it must be rooted in some partial truth. Ironically, coverage like that in the Star Ledger will make that ever less likely to happen, confirming the kind of hostility which is used by any community looking for a reason to turn inward.
But J.J. Goldberg, the editorial director of The Forward, had perhaps the most insightful take on the Jewish reaction in a post Madoff interview with New Voices magazine. He said our reaction is shock not because we’re afraid of anti-semitism but because we naively hold our religion inviolate:
It’s because we hold Judaism so dear, we don’t want to think it’s capable of creating problems. In 1993, there was a wave of Pell Grant fraud cases where people were setting up phony schools to apply for Pell Grants and then keeping the money. [The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations] had two days of hearings. [Anti-Defamation League National Director] Abe Foxman wrote a letter [to John McCain] complaining that all of the witnesses that had been called up represented yeshivas. He said, the way this has been set up it could create the unfortunate impression that this is some particularly Jewish pattern of crime. And McCain wrote back and said, it is. Yeshivas were this huge network of institutions where people study full time. They had been mainly supported by the billionaire Reichman family from Toronto. [The Reichman family] went bust, and all of a sudden there are all of these cases of fraud and money laundering. Anything to support this impossible system. But you can’t talk about Judaism leading to wrongdoing. It can’t be. Judaism is only good.
The less involved you are in daily Jewish life, the more inviolate it has to be. Think of Superman and [the city of Kandor] in the little bottle in his Fortress of Solitude. It has to be preserved because there’s nothing you can do with it. Flowers that you press into a Bible. The less you can do with it the more you need it to be perfect.
Goldberg traces the problem of corruption in the Jewish community to the rise in wealth (well, one could argue, it is kind of hard to be tempted to money-launder when you have no money). He says:
Before the modern age, Jews lived in ghettoes. They could tax themselves. Tzedakah was not voluntary. Shabbes wasn’t voluntary. The first synagogue in America, Shearith Israel in New York, adopted a rule saying that if you violated Shabbes you got fined. It didn’t work. People just resigned from the synagogue. [The community] had lost enforcement power. And once you’ve lost enforcement power, you’ve got to ask for it. And once you’ve got to ask for money, you become dependent on the wealthy. Rabbis now depend on the goodwill of a few rich people. And so the balance of power between the moralists and the hedonists shifts. There used to be a check. The moral authority of the Jewish community had enforcement power. Now it’s around for entertainment. Instead of scolding Jews, now they scold goyim. They have no authority to scold the Jews. None. Rabbis lose their jobs for being moral scolds. So there is no more moral authority.
I don’t know if the people arrested are guilty, but if they are, Goldberg’s harsh last statement—“There is no more moral authority”—will be just a bit harder to disprove.
How To Bribe
Brooklyn men admit funding money-laundering in N.J. corruption sting
Former Jerusalem mayor arrested in Holyland affair
Uri Lupolianski suspected of taking some NIS 3 million in bribes in return for advancing Holyland real estate project; implies his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, was responsible for affair. Court extends his remand by five days Former Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of taking a bribe and money laundering as part of the Holyland affair.
Lupolianski is the most senior public figure to be questioned in the affair so far.
Upon entering the courtroom he told reporters, "I feel good, thank God. I find it strange."
Lupolianski said Ehud Olmert, who served as Jerusalem mayor before him, was responsible for the affair. "The mayor is the one who decides; he is the navigator," he told Channel 10.
Lupolianski, who served as Olmert's deputy at the time, said that "the deputy mayor has no responsibility. This means good things and bad things. There is no responsibility. It's nothing. It's just a title to take care of it, to make it nice. The mayor is the one who decides, and that's the truth."
The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court accepted the police's request to extend Lupolianski's remand by five days. He is suspected of taking a bribe, money laundering, conspiring to commit a crime, fraud, breach of trust and tax offenses.
Lupolianski served as chairman of the local planning and construction committee in Jerusalem when the Holyland project was approved.
According to the police, during his term in different roles at the Jerusalem Municipality, Lupolianski demanded and received bribes and money from the Holyland project's entrepreneurs through a third party.
The sums were allegedly received as donations to the Yad Sarah association. By 1999 he had taken some NIS 1.5 million (about $405,000) and from 2000 to 2006 he took an additional NIS 1.4 ($378,000) million.
In addition, Lupolianski is suspected of receiving $30,000 for his personal use and in order to pay political activists during the Jerusalem mayoral elections in 2003, as well as $100,000 in 2005 as a donation to an advanced Judaic studies program run by his son.In exchange for the bribe, Lupolianski allegedly worked to advance the Holyland project in accordance with the entrepreneurs' demands.
During his tenure as deputy mayor from 1993 to 2003, and later as mayor from 2003 to 2008, Lupolianski allegedly worked to speed up the discussion and approval of the city construction plan in the local planning and construction committee, to postpone the hearing of nearly 1,000 objections, to prevent lowering the buildings by two floors, to lower the land betterment taxes and to support the project's city construction plans.
The police suspect that thanks to Lupolianski's activities, Holyland's entrepreneurs saved millions of shekels. He also helped boost the project and increase the entrepreneurs' income significantly.
'He did not disrupt investigation'
Judge Abraham Heiman explained that he decided to extend Lupolianski's remand for fear of a disruption of the investigation.
"The initial suspicions have become stronger. The investigation material contains more and beyond a reasonable doubt. The case I am dealing with is extremely serious," he said.
The police representative, Superintendent Lior Rice, said that "the suspect betrayed the public's trust while taking a bribe. We suspected him from the start of the investigation."
Rice added that apart from the donations, Lupolianski had received additional funds and that receipt had been issued for the donations.
Lupolianski's lawyer, Attorney Yair Golan, claimed that his client "never took a brine or even one penny and cooperated fully with his investigators." According to the lawyer, "There is not one piece of evidence that Lupolianski tried to disrupt the investigation since it became public."
Golan added that "the family of entrepreneur Hilel Cherny donated to Yad Sarah for 20 years, and not only in the past few years. All the donations were legal. Nothing went into his pocket. Indeed, he founded and volunteered in Yad Sarah, but this is his only connection to the association. He is completely clean."
Yad Sarah said in a statement that the association "has nothing to do with the Holyland affair and never received bribes. If required, Yad Sarah will cooperate with the law enforcement authorities as needed." Earlier Wednesday, Olmert's media advisor said the former prime minister has decided to cut short his stay in Europe and will land in Israel on Wednesday night on the backdrop of the Holyland corruption scandal he has been implicated in, even though he denies any connection or involvement with the affair.
The remand of six of the suspects detained in the Holyland case was extended by five days. Jerusalem Municipality's legal advisor received a request to halt construction on the Holyland real estate project. He promised to give the case priority.
Eli Senyor and Shmulik Grossman contributed to this report
illegally transferred up to $1.4 million
Pleads Guilty To Money Laundering - a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in prison
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