Rabbis: bribery, corruption, money laundering human organ trafficking!!!

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[url= [url=http://www.this islon]http://www.thi sislondon.co.uk/stan dard/article-2372367 7-details/WORLD:+Rab bis+who+ran+'Soprano '+synd icate+are+held+by+FB I/article.do]Source[ /url]

Dozens of New Jersey politicians, officials and prominent rabbis have been arrested in an FBI swoop on a Sopranos-style syndicate accused of bribery, corruption, money laundering and human organ trafficking.

 

Three city mayors, two state politicians and a grand rabbi were among the 44 suspects arrested in one of the biggest crackdowns on organised white-collar crime.

 

The 10-year investigation, Operation Bid Rig, uncovered corruption and an international multi-million-dollar money-laundering ring stretching from New York to Israel and run through charities operated by rabbis.

 

State assembleyman Daniel Van PeltThe mayor of Hoboken, Peter Cammarano, who only took office three weeks ago, was taken into custody yesterday by federal agents with the mayors of Secaucus and Ridgefield. State assembleyman Daniel Van Pelt was among politicians and officials held.

 

 

Ed Kahrer, an FBI special agent leading the inquiry, said the high-level arrests showed corruption was a "cancer" in the state, which is synonymous with organised crime and the Mafia as depicted in the hit television series.

 

He said: "New Jersey's corruption problem is one of the worst, if not the worst, in the nation. It has become ingrained in its political culture."

 

Investigators used an informant within the close-knit Syrian Jewish community to infiltrate political and religious circles.

 

The man, who had a previous conviction for bank fraud, posed as a property developer in a sting which saw him agree bribes with officials in return for public building contracts and permits. They met in restaurants, car parks and even lavatories, officials said.

 

Acting state attorney Ralph Marra said: "The politicians put themselves up for sale. The victims are the average citizens and the honest business people in this state. They don't have a chance in this culture of corruption."

 

The complex web of corruption and back-handers led the informant to a separate money-laundering network run by rabbis who operated between Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Israel. They laundered around $3 million for the undercover witness between June 2007 and this month, according to investigators.

 

Allegedly involved are Saul Kassin, chief rabbi of a large Syrian Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn, and three other leading rabbis. The investigation also uncovered Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, who is accused of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant.

 

Mr Marra said: "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."

 

[Ibtisam]

 

A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.

 

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Peter J. Cammarano III, leaving the courthouse in Newark, was elected Hoboken mayor in June. He is accused of agreeing to help a supposed developer with his projects in exchange for cash.

 

The case began with bank fraud charges against a member of an insular Syrian Jewish enclave centered in a seaside town. But when that man became a federal informant and posed as a crooked real estate developer offering cash bribes to obtain government approvals, it mushroomed into a political scandal that could rival any of the most explosive and sleazy episodes in New Jersey’s recent past.

 

It was replete with tales of the illegal sales of body parts; of furtive negotiations in diners, parking lots and boiler rooms; of nervous jokes about “patting down” a man who turned out to indeed be an informant; and, again and again, of the passing of cash — once in a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000.

 

“For these defendants, corruption was a way of life,” Ralph J. Marra Jr., the acting United States attorney in New Jersey, said at a news conference. “They existed in an ethics-free zone.”

 

Mr. Marra said that average citizens “don’t have a chance” against the culture of influence peddling the investigation had unearthed.

 

Even veteran political observers were taken aback by the scope of the investigation. The mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield were among those arrested.

 

“This is so massive,” said Joseph Marbach, a political scientist at Seton Hall University. “It’s going to just reinforce the stereotype of New Jersey politics and corruption.”

 

The arrests had immediate reverberations in the governor’s race, and a member of Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s administration was forced to resign after federal agents raided his home.

 

The authorities laid out two separate schemes, one involving money laundering that led to rabbis and members of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and in the Jersey Shore town of Deal, where many of them have summer homes. The other dealt with political corruption and bribery and involved public officials mostly in Jersey City and Hoboken, where the pace of development has been particularly intense in recent years.

 

Linking the two schemes was the federal informant who was not named in court papers but whom people involved with the investigation identified as Solomon Dwek, a failed real estate developer and philanthropist who was arrested in May 2006 on charges of passing a bad $25 million check at a bank in Monmouth County, N.J.

 

Early on, Mr. Dwek helped investigators penetrate an extensive network of money laundering that involved rabbis in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the Syrian Jewish community is based, and in Deal and Elberon, towns on the Jersey Shore.

 

Mr. Dwek, a well-known member of the Syrian Jewish community whose parents founded the Deal Yeshiva, never concealed that he was facing bank fraud charges, instead telling targets, who included three rabbis in Brooklyn and two in New Jersey, that he was bankrupt and trying to conceal his assets, according to people involved in the case. The targets, in turn, accepted bank checks Mr. Dwek made out to charities that they oversaw, deducted a fee, and returned the rest to him in cash.

 

Much of the cash they provided him came from Israel, and some of that in turn came from a Swiss banker, prosecutors said. All told, some $3 million was laundered for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, prosecutors said.

 

The case shifted to focus on public corruption, prosecutors say, after one of the men accused of money laundering, Moshe Altman of Monsey, N.Y., a Hudson County developer, introduced Mr. Zwek to a politically connected building inspector in Jersey City, who then steered him to another city official, Maher Khalil.

 

Mr. Khalil, who is accused of accepting $30,000 in bribes from Mr. Dwek, made a series of referrals to what he called “players,” helping Mr. Dwek to branch out to a web of public officials, mayoral and council candidates, and their confidants.

 

Mr. Dwek — now operating under an assumed identity, according to people involved in the case — honed an approach: introduced to a local influence-peddler, he would say he was looking to build high-rises or other projects in their city or county.

 

http://www.nytimes. com/2009/ 07/24/nyregion/ 24jersey. html

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Jewish charities linked to money laundering

 

NEWARK, N.J.–An investigation into the sale of black-market kidneys and fake Gucci handbags evolved into a probe of New Jersey political corruption that produced mass arrests yesterday, including three mayors, two state legislators and several rabbis.

 

Even for a state with a rich history of graft, the scale of alleged wrongdoing was breathtaking. An FBI official said corruption "is destroying the core values of this state."

 

Federal prosecutors said the investigation initially focused on a money-laundering network tied to Brooklyn, N.Y., Deal, N.J., and Israel that allegedly processed tens of millions of dollars through Jewish charities controlled by local rabbis.

 

Prosecutors used an informant in that investigation – a real estate developer trying to mitigate earlier bank fraud charges – to pose as a crooked businessman and pay bribes to public officials to get approvals for New Jersey building projects.

 

Among the 44 arrests were the mayors of Hoboken, Ridgefield and Secaucus, Jersey City's deputy mayor, and two state assemblymen. A member of the governor's cabinet resigned after agents searched his home. All but one of the office-holders are Democrats.

 

Also, five rabbis from New York and New Jersey were accused of laundering millions of dollars, some of it from the sale of counterfeit goods and bankruptcy fraud.

 

Yesterday morning FBI and IRS agents raided a synagogue in Deal, a wealthy oceanfront city of Mediterranean-style mansions, with a large population of Syrian Jews.

 

Those arrested included Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, who was charged with conspiring to arrange the sale of an Israeli citizen's kidney for $160,000 for a transplant for the informant's fictitious uncle. Rosenbaum was quoted as saying he had been arranging the sale of kidneys for 10 years.

 

More than 130 public officials in New Jersey have been convicted of corruption since 2001.

 

http://www.thestar.c om/news/world/articl e/671068

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Three New Jersey mayors and several rabbis were arrested on Thursday in a sweeping federal investigation into political corruption that also uncovered human kidney sales and money laundering from Brooklyn to Israel, authorities said.

 

Among the 44 people arrested were Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, who took office 23 days ago.

 

Cammarano, at 31 the city's youngest-ever mayor, was charged with taking $25,000 in bribes, including e10,000 last Thursday, said the U.S. Attorney's office in Newark, New Jersey.

The case exposed "a corrupt network of public officials who were all too willing to take cash in exchange for promised official action," Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra said in a statement. "It seemed that everyone wanted a piece of the action. The corruption was widespread and pervasive."

 

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. The undercover witness also helped infiltrate the huge public corruption scheme, authorities said.

 

A slew of public officials, council and mayoral candidates and associates took bribes for pledging their help in getting projects prioritized and approved or steering contracts to the witness, authorities said.

 

Accused were Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, state Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt and Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

 

Also named were state assemblymen L. Harvey Smith, and Daniel Van Pelt, who were charged with accepting bribes.

 

Elwell was charged with taking a $10,000 cash bribe, and Anthony Suarez, mayor of Ridgefield, was charged with agreeing to accept a e10,000 corrupt cash payment.

Beldini, Jersey City deputy mayor, was charged with taking $20,000 in illegal contributions

 

Source: Haaretz