And of course, the claim that the arrests are motivated by anti-semitism follows, like a bad broken record.

Anti-Semitism was behind the highly publicized arrests last week of rabbis, including three from the Aleppo-Syrian Jewish community in New York and New Jersey, according to Yitzhak Kakun, editor-in-chief of the Shas weekly Yom Le'Yom.
Shas MK Nissim Ze'ev.

Shas MK Nissim Ze'ev.
Photo: The Knesset

"There is a feeling here that the FBI purposely attempted to arrest as many rabbis as possible at once in an attempt to humiliate them," Kakun said in a telephone interview Sunday.

"Regardless of the details of the case - I am not familiar with the precise charges and the evidence - you would never see the FBI and police behaving that way with Muslim sheikhs or Christian priests. It is so obvious that the whole thing is motivated by anti-Semitism," he said.

Link.

Where Did The Kidney's Come From

Interesting stuff on the Kidney smuggling ring headed by the New Jersey Rabbi. It appears some sleuths knew about his activities well in advance.

And those activities were pretty ugly.

The Brooklyn man arrested Thursday for dealing in black-market kidneys was identified to the FBI seven years ago as a major figure in a global human organ ring.

Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum's name, address and even phone number were passed to an FBI agent in a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan by a prominent anthropologist who has been studying and documenting organ trafficking for more than a decade.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley, was and is very clear as to Rosenbaum's role in the ring.

"He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network," she said.

Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.

"He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn't even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry," Scheper-Hughes said.

The man called Rosenbaum "a thug" who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, "You're here. A deal is a deal. Now, you'll give us a kidney or you'll never go home.' "

More atnydailynews


Interestingly, the original report was met with skepticism at the state house.

She waited and waited for something to be done. The FBI may have been following the lead of the State Department, which dismissed organ trafficking as "urban legend."

"It would be impossible to conceal a clandestine organ trafficking ring," a 2004 State Department report stated.

OTHER INFO

The probe also uncovered Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, who is accused of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant. According to the complaint, Rosenbaum said he had been brokering sale of kidneys for 10 years.


"His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000," said Marra.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3751358,00.html

Rosenbaum allegedly responded by noting the hospital would rigorously screen the potential donor for diseases -- but that he could make everything work out.

"I'm doing this a long time," the document quotes Rosenbaum as saying. "It's illegal to buy or sell organs. You can't even mention it."

The parties to the deal then allegedly hammered out a price: $160,000, the first $10,000 of which was to be paid by checks drawn up by the informant's invented real estate company. The checks would be laundered through what Rosenbaum initially decided would be a "congregation," but later switched to a "charitable organization."

After stalling in November by telling Rosenbaum the supposedly sick uncle had a "mini-stroke," the FBI agent and informant met in Rosenbaum's basement during July 2009. Rosenbaum shored up his credentials, according to the criminal complaint, saying he had spent 10 years brokering deals that numbered "quite a lot," including one only two weeks earlier.

At one point, the undercover agent asked how much money the donor would receive.

Link

No Regrets

You would think someone who exposed a Kidney smuggling operation would be considered a hero. Apparently not in the Sephardic Jewish community:

Rabbi Israel Dwek, the spiritual leader of the Sephardic Jewish community in the wealthy Monmouth County suburb of Deal, took to his pulpit on Saturday to cite the Talmudic Law of Moser that prohibits a Jew from informing on another Jew to a non-Jew. Rabbi Dwek then renounced his son, Solomon Dwek, the failed real estate developer whose 2006 indictment on bank fraud charges motivated him to cooperate with federal prosecutors in a sting operation that led to the arrests of 44 individuals on Thursday. The group included three mayors, two state legislators, a multitude of local officials, and several Rabbis. As explained to PolitickerNJ.com, Rabbi Dwek will sit Shiva for Solomon Dwek, observing the Jewish custom of mourning for an immediate family member who has died.

Do other Jewish communities have the same outlook?

Link

Rabbi Brokered Black Market Kidney Trade

This is just plain horrific. It says the Rabbi got the donners from Israel. It would obviously be interesting to see if the donators were Jewish or Arab.

Yesterday in New Jersey, 44 people, including a rabbi, were apprehended in a large corruption investigation of arranging the private sale of kidneys from donors in Israel.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum described himself to an uncover FBI agent and a cooperating witness as a “matchmaker” who could set up to hire a donor in Israel to come to the U.S.A. to donate a kidney in exchange for a $10,000 fee, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney. Those kidneys are in turn sold for as much as $180,000 to transplant recipients who otherwise may die. The operations were done in US hospitals.

Rosenbaum, 58, is a member of the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, where he told neighbors he was in the construction business.

“The allegations about an organ trafficking ring in the United States are appalling,” said John Davis, CEO of the National Kidney Foundation. This is the first documented case of organ trafficking in the U.S.

The deficit of organs accessible for donation from dissociated donors has led to the grim black market that lives today. Gruesome underground kidney markets are nothing new. National Geographic covered a story on poor neighborhoods in India known as “kidney village”, because residents illegally sell their kidneys for approximately $800, far less than the $160,000 Rosenbaum allegedly charged. A completely new industry – transplant tourism – has emerged to meet the needs of the wealthy patients creating demand.

Group of Rabbi's involved in NJ corruption scandal

While many elasticities were involved in the corruption in NJ, the Rabbi's represent the leadership of their communities and thus are far more troubling.

It does seem that crime, while not everything, is a significant part of their method of operation, which is troubling indeed.

We also saw this with the Kosher Iowa meet plant, in which a meth lab was uncovered during an immigration bust.

Religious leaders allegedly acted like 'crime bosses' in a massive money-laundering and illegal organ trading case that broke this week, New Jersey District Attorney Ralph Marra said Saturday.

"For these defendants, corruption was a way of life," Marra said, adding "Politicians had willingly put themselves up for sale ... the existed in an ethics-free zone."

Solomon Dwek, a failed real-estate entrepreneur and an FBI informant, is the man behind the arrests week. Dwek's identity was revealed in documents submitted to the court Saturday.
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On Friday, some of the 44 suspects were released on bail.

Some New Jersey residents said they feared the investigation was motivated by another mob that wanted to "clear the ground" for its own operations. Others sought comfort in the diversity of the suspects.

"It's nice to see people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds working so closely for corruption and fraud. Syrian Jews, Italian Americans, Afro-American, Hispanics ... it's equal-opportunity corruption," one person said.

The investigation began in 1999 with two local corruption cases, but only genuinely took off in May 2006, when Dwek, a real-estate businessman from the Syrian Jewish community in Deal, New Jersey, was arrested while trying to cash a $25 million bad check.

Due to his debts and the evidence against him, he agreed to cooperate with the FBI. Armed with a microphone, an unfounded reputation as a real-estate mogul and envelopes thick with cash, Dwek was sent to scores of meetings with politicians, officials and rabbis. He tried to convince them to help him "promote his business" and launder money.

The investigation became public last Thursday, when more than 200 FBI agents stormed the suspects in their offices, arrested them and searched the premises. Twenty-nine people were arrested on charges of corruption, and 15 were held on suspicions of money laundering, including the "kidney trade middleman," Levi-Yitzhak Rosenbaum. There were so many detainees that a bus was used to transport them.

The arrest of five rabbis, whose pictures were splashed across the front pages of U.S. newspapers, led some to dub the affair "Kosher Nostra."

The rabbis, including two synagogue leaders, are suspected of organizing a money-laundering network that allegedly worked through charities in Deal, Brooklyn and Israel.

The money came from a variety of sources, from a fraudulent bankruptcy claim to profits from selling fake Gucci bags.

The FBI set up a shell company to trap one suspect, Eliyahu Ben Haim, rabbi of the Ohel Yaakov synagogue in Deal. Ben Haim allegedly accepted a $50,000 check from Dwek from the straw company's account, addressed to one of the rabbi's charities. The rabbi agreed to keep 10 percent of the money, and to return the remainder to Dwek, "cleaned up."

On another occasion, Dwek is said to have brought the rabbi a cereal box stuffed with $97,000 in cash to be laundered. Rabbi Edmond Nahum, also among the detainees, allegedly told Dwek "to spread it among as many rabbis as possible," in order to better cover his tracks.

The District Attorney's office stressed that the suspects' religion was irrelevant, and that all the suspects knew the money they were laundering came from illegal sources.

"These rings, led by clergymen, cloaked their extensive criminal activities behind a facade of rectitude," Marra said, describing a disgraceful picture of religious leaders leading money-laundering crews and acting as crime bosses.

Senior politicians, mostly Democrats, were also no strangers to Dwek's envelopes, especially when campaigning. The mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield; a New Jersey City deputy mayor; and others all allegedly took money from Dwek for their campaigns, while promising to help him.

Hoboken Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III, who took office on July 1, two weeks before his arrest, allegedly promised Dwek that he would be be "treated like a friend."

Dwek, while allegedly giving a bribe to New Jersey assemblyman Daniel Van-Pelt, made sure no one could suspect him of political bias.

"I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican," he is said to have told Van-Pelt. "I'm a member of the Green party. Green is cash."

Most of the suspects have been released on bail and tagged with electronic tracking devices. Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that these arrests were only the beginning.

Cammarano's spokesman said the mayor was "totally innocent" and intended to fight the charges. And pundits and commentators already began guessing what repercussions the affair will have for the upcoming gubernatorial campaign of the incumbent, Jon Corzine, who took office four years ago on a corruption fighting platform.

Costly favor indeed.

Hasidic leader’s costly favor

Haredi man asks Rabbi Simcha Ashlag, his personal assistant to bring clothes to US for needy family. Both arrested in France after customs officials find drugs in luggage

Hasidic leader Rabbi Simcha Ashlag will return this weekend to the partial detention he and his personal assistant received in February, in which the two are forbidden to leave Paris. The reason: 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of drugs found in their suitcases.

...

The man claimed that he heard that prior to his trip to the United States the rabbi was expected to fly to Turkey and therefore requested that he take four suitcases packed with clothing with him to his needy family in the United States.


The Hassidic leader agreed but when the local customs official at the Paris airport asked him and his assistant to open their luggage, it turned out that aside from clothing, there were 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of drugs hidden and folded at the bottom.

The rabbi is the grandson of the famous Yehuda Leib Ha-Levi Ashlag, otherwise known as Baal Ha-Sulam (Author of the Ladder) and the only interpreter of the Zohar (the mystical commentary on the Torah).


In February, before leaving Israel, an ultra-Orthodox man who presented himself as a clothing manufacturer from Turkey approached Ashlag.





Their attorneys, Yitzhak Osbicher and Moti Zivin, who is know for assisting Israelis arrested abroad, filed a request through their representatives in Paris to allow the rabbi and his assistant to visit Israel over the holidays.


'He took advantage of their kind-heartedness'
Surprisingly, the judge allowed the two to leave Paris for a limited period of time so that they can celebrate the holidays with Ashlag’s thousands of Hassidic followers at his hatzer (court) in Bnei Brak.


Attorney Osbicher confirmed the details and said in response that “this is a rare case in which a drug smuggling suspect who is not a French citizen, is released under no conditions but rather only based on his personal liability.


“I am happy that Attorney Zivin and I managed to persuade the French judge to release the honorable Hassidic leader for the holidays without entrusting any guarantee that he will return to France," he said.

“This apparently proves that the judge is starting to believe that the Hassidic leader and his assistant were led astray and that someone took advantage of their kind-heartedness.


“We would like to emphasize that the public needs to know that a small favor they ask from someone may cause them to pay the price of a heavy and unnecessary legal case,” said Osbicher.

Link

Primative Religion

There is a lot of discussion about Islam being a primative religion with many practices that are not acceptable to out modern days sensitibilities.

Seems there are other religions with primative practices that don't receive as much scrutiny.

Rabbi Alleges Threat Over Chicken Ritual

New York City police are investigating a rabbi's complaint that threatening e-mails were sent in connection with the slaughter of chickens to atone for sins before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

Rabbi Shea Hecht of the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education says the e-mails were sent by supporters of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals campaign opposing the ritual, known as kapparot. He says some people added threatening and anti-Semitic comments to an online PETA form letter.

The Brooklyn-based Jewish organization slaughters about 4,000 chickens.

A PETA spokesman says the ritual is abusive and unnecessary.

4000 Chickens??? This is a description of the process:

First, selections from Isaiah 11:9, Psalms 107:10, 14, and 17-21, and Job 33:23-24 are recited; then a rooster (for a male) or a hen (for a female) is held above the person's head and swung in a circle three times...

Kapparot is not mentioned in the Torah or in the Talmud. The custom is first discussed by Jewish scholars in the ninth century. They explain that since the Hebrew word gever means both "man" and "rooster", punishment of the bird can be substituted for that of a person.

Wow. That is very ... childish?!? Yes, childish is the word that comes to mind.

It is something I could see coming from the mind of an 8 year old.

Lots of religions have strange practices, although some are more strange than others. But none should be above criticism (or mockery).

War Profiteer Indicted

Link

David Brooks, the founder of a manufacturer of bulletproof vests for U.S. troops in Iraq, has been called a "war profiteer" by critics, was recently charged by the U.S. government with defrauding shareholders and, according to that indictment, allegedly spent $10 million in company funds on his daughter's Bat Mitzvah. And now he has been given the toughest bail terms the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York has issued in recent memory, according to multiple sources.

Brooks, the founder and former CEO of DHB Industries, has secured a $400 million bond with $48 million in assets and agreed to home confinement terms that include paying for an armed security guard to search each visitor who enters or leaves his home and a firm to monitor each telephone call and any use of the Internet.

The terms agreed to by Brooks and approved by a federal court judge Thursday are stricter than those given to mobsters, including John Gotti Jr., and other celebrity and white-collar defendants, such as Martha Stewart and Dr. Dre.
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In large part, the terms, dubbed "bulletproof," by one senior law enforcement official, are so severe because Brooks' wealth and alleged blatant flaunting of the law make him a far larger flight risk than these and many other defendants, two federal officials said.

Other bail terms include:

-An armed escort during a permitted monthly doctor visit.

-The monitoring of all calls, conversations and Internet use (with the exception of when they are governed by attorney-client privilege).

-Agreement that his security guards could use force to restrain him if it appeared he was attempting to violate the terms of his agreement.

"Junior Gotti was running the Gambino crime family, those terms are extensive, to say the least," said security consultant Gerald Kane. The minimum charge per day for quality security would be about $3,500, Kane said, not including the monitoring of Internet usage, which could cost significantly more.

Gotti might have been running a crime family, but he couldn’t afford the security guards and computer monitoring so he was sent back to jail. There is no danger of that for Brooks, whose terms limit the government to restraining less than $190 million in alleged proceeds of the alleged crimes under the terms of the indictment.

"John Gotti Jr. couldn't afford this kind of security. So I had to turn the contract down, and he wound up going back to jail," said Paddy Barry, president of Alliance Investigative Group.

The $10 million in company funds Brooks allegedly paid for his daughter Liza's bat mitzvah included $2 million so she and her guests could be serenaded by Aerosmith. Other celebs and rock and rap stars, including Fifty Cent, Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks, were also flown in on a company jet.

Brooks was charged with committing $200 million in fraud in an indictment that includes the allegation that he inflated the profit margins of the Interceptor vest, which is the top selling vest to the United States Marine Corp, according to the Marine Corp Times.

Authorities allege that the scheme propelled the company's stock from $2 a share in early 2003 to nearly $20 a share in late 2004, according to the indictment. When Brooks and his codefendant COO Sandra Hatfield sold several million DHB shares at that time, Brooks made more than $185 million and Hatfield more than $5 million, according to the U.S. attorney. Shortly afterward, the value of the stock plunged when reports began to surface that the body armor was defective.

At least 6,000 of his company's vests were recalled by the New York City Police Department as part of an investigation into whether they were defective.

At Brooks' arraignment in October, assistant U.S. attorney John Martin said that in the past year Brooks had purchased a single diamond worth $10 million, unspecified millions in gold and "had surreptitiously moved $22 million to banks in Switzerland and Senegal," according to Newsday.

"David Brooks grew up in Brooklyn, and that means he doesn't run away from a fight," his attorney Paul Schectman responded after the hearing. "It's a lot easier [for the government] to make allegations than to prove them."

Complaints Against Agriprocessors

Agriprocessors is the Orthodox run Kosher meat processing company which ICE raided for having illegal workers. It was the largest raid to date with some 400 illegal employees being taken in.

Many additional complaints are being filed against Agriprocessors including the following:

Agriprocessors, a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, has a long and troubling history of health and safety violations. In recent weeks, the heart-wrenching stories of worker mistreatment took an even darker and more disturbing turn as incidents of child labor, sexual exploitation, and physical abuse have been made public.

Yet, for all of these examples of exploitation, discrimination and abuse, the Federal Government has not charged the plant management with a single crime — and certain retailers continue to put money in the owners' pockets by purchasing Agriprocessors' products.

Link

EyeonAgriprocessors

Efraim Diveroli Indicted

Link

MIAMI, June 20, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ ----AEY Inc. (AEY: 3.14, +0.07, +2.28%), Efraim Diveroli, David Packouz, Alexander Podrizki and Ralph Merrill were indicted today by a federal grand jury in Miami on wide-ranging fraud charges in connection with their provision of ammunition to Afghanistan, announced R. Alexander Acosta, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida; Sharon Woods, Director, U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Criminal Investigative Service; Anthony V. Mangione, Special Agent-in-Charge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE: 128.62, -1.06, -0.81%), Office of Investigations in Miami; Brigadier General Rodney Johnson, Commanding General, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command; and Paul Phillips, Regional Director, Defense Contract Audit Agency.

Count one of the indictment charged all defendants with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. by making false representations to the government and by conspiring to commit procurement fraud. Counts 2 through 36 charge defendants AEY and Efraim Diveroli with making false statements to the U.S. Army regarding the country of origin of the ammunition. Lastly, all defendants are charged with procurement fraud.

As alleged in the indictment, AEY is a munitions supplier, with offices in Miami Beach, Fla. Defendant Efraim Diveroli is the president of AEY and manages and directs the business operations of the company. Defendant David Packouz was a director and vice president of AEY; defendant Alexander Podrizki was an agent of AEY stationed in Tirana, Albania; and defendant Ralph Merrill was a business associate of Diveroli who provided financial and managerial assistance to AEY.

Violence

Couple of cases of violence that are highly suspect.

First, Paletinian charity organizer Riad Hamad is found floating in a lake.

' A friend of mine, Austin middle-school teacher and pro-Palestinian activist Riad (also spelled Riadh) Hamad, was found gagged & bound in a lake. His death was declared by the local police to be a "suicide".

The story reeks of being either a hate crime or worse, an assassination by an interested party. Hamad's charity was under attack by various parties which volunteered to find links between his organization and terrorist organizations. FWIW, no such link has led to law suits against him, to the best of my knowledge.

And this brutal killing is the occupied territories.

At 3pm on Wednesday, 16th April, the mutilated body of 15 year old Hammad Nidar Khadatbh was found in lands of the illegal Israeli settlement of Al-Hamra by his father, who was out searching for his missing son.

Hammad had left the house at 9am on Tuesday, 15th April to work on the family’s land, located near the stolen agricultural lands of the settlement. As the second eldest son, he was picking cucumbers for the family rather than going to school, to help with the income of his struggling family. At evening he failed to return home, and so his father and other family members immediately went searching for him. They found nothing. They set out again the next day, Wednesday, and found his body in a place they had searched the day before - clearly dumped overnight.

Link

Secular Society?

he Great Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem rendered a rare ruling Thursday, forcing a woman to agree to a divorce because she was diagnosed with epilepsy.


According to a report in Yedioth Ahronoth, the court further ruled the woman will not be eligible for alimony. The husband was, however, obligated to pay her the full amount mentioned in her ketubah – NIS 18,000 (approx $5,000).

Link

And even in the face of decisions like this the state is upgrading the rabbinacal courts power.

The Ministerial Committee on Legislation decided Monday to support a bill extending the authorities of rabbinical courts over all matters regarding marriage and divorce.

Should the bill pass its Knesset readings, it would serve to upgrade the rabbinical courts' judicial authority over seemingly civil matters, such as property settlements; and would allow them to issue subpoenas and warrants – just like the civil courts.

Link

Public Relations and Russia

Comment from the english spekaing Russian newspaper "The Exile" on the Oligarchs.

Exile.ru