Israel and Organized Crime Again in the Spotlight
http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN2340189320090723
Mayors, rabbis arrested in NJ corruption probe
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Central to the investigation was an informant who was charged with bank fraud in 2006 and posed undercover as a real estate developer and owner of a tile business hoping to build projects and win public contracts in northern New Jersey, according to documents in the case.
The undercover witness helped infiltrate a money-laundering network by rabbis who operated between Brooklyn, Deal, New Jersey, and Israel and laundered millions of dollars through charitable nonprofit entities controlled by rabbis in New York and New Jersey, authorities said.
They laundered some $3 million for the undercover witness between June 2007 and July 2009, authorities said.
Julio La Rosa, acting special agent in charge of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, said while traditional money laundering was once confined to narcotics traffickers and organized crime, "based on the allegations contained in today's complaints, money laundering has no boundaries and impacts every segment of our society."
HUMAN KIDNEY SALES
Rabbis accused of money-laundering were Eliahu Ben Haim, the principal rabbi of a synagogue in Deal; Saul Kassin, chief rabbi of a synagogue in Brooklyn; Edmund Nahum, the principal rabbi of another synagogue in Deal; and Mordchai Fish, a rabbi at a synagogue in Brooklyn.
Most of the defendants were arrested early on Thursday by federal agents.
One of the many criminal complaints filed in the case also accused a Brooklyn man, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, with conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant, at a cost of $160,000 to the transplant recipient.
According to the complaint, Rosenbaum said he had been brokering the sale of kidneys for 10 years.
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According to the U.S.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the investigation initially focused, with the help of the cooperating witness, on the money laundering network that operated between Brooklyn, Deal, N.J. and Israel. The network is alleged to have laundered tens of millions of dollars through charities controlled by rabbis in New York and New Jersey.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said he has heard of the story but knows nothing of kidneys being sold by Israelis.
The investigation widened to include official corruption in July 2007 when the cooperating witness approached public officials in Hudson County posing as a developer seeking to build in the Jersey City area.
http://www.newsday.com/3-nj-mayors-lawmakers-arrested-in-corruption-case...
remember this?
Jeez, poor guy got Acute KenLayitis...
"In addition to the strippers, Tuito also made use of young ultra-Orthodox Jews, whom he recruited by word of mouth in New York yeshivas. He believed - and rightly so, as it turned out - that the U.S. authorities would not suspect yeshiva students dressed in the traditional black garb and therefore would not check their luggage at the airport in New York. Hundreds of thousands of Ecstasy pills reached the U.S. this way. Later he also started to recruit elderly ultra-Orthodox, again in return for thousands of dollars per delivery."
"Oded Tuito died on June 20 at Lutheran Hospital in New York, a few days after suffering a heart attack in his cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York. Tuito, 44, was thought to be one of the major drug dealers in the United States - although he was never convicted - and to be the person responsible for smuggling millions of Ecstasy (MDMA) tablets into that country in the late 1990s. He was the first Israeli to be included on the White House list of "drug kingpins," which consists of 30 foreigners whom the U.S. administration views as bearing central responsibility for distributing drugs originating abroad in the U.S. The "kingpin" category is reserved for drug traffickers whose scope of activity makes them a threat to the national security of the U.S., so that a special effort is required to apprehend them, freeze their assets and stop their activity. Oded Tuito died innocent, at least according to American law. He was facing legal proceedings in Brooklyn, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, but none of them had been completed."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=477978