Almost as disturbing as the theft committed by an allegedly religious man stealing from his underpaid employees in a nursing home; is the “justification” used to manipulate the mercy of others, namely, a poor education. This excuse for bad behavior creates quite a conundrum.
The State of New York (and likely others to follow) has taken a laissez faire attitude about Yeshiva education, namely that parents should be permitted to choose if to educate (or deny education for) their children. If a Yeshiva educated child comes out with an extraordinary knowledge of Jewish law, little or no ability to properly speak English, little or no future prospects (except perhaps fraud – as Stern illustrates) New York deems this acceptable. Now, it would seem, that same disenfranchisement (educational neglect) is being used to justify and perhaps escape accountability for frauds committed by poorly educated but “observant” Jews.
Something is very wrong with this picture. Either Yesivah children must be educated in civics subjects (oh… and right versus wrong) or they must be held fully accountable when that inadequate education leads to a life of fraud, theft, money laundering, and the list… grows and grows. The Yeshiva community really should not be able to eat their rugalach and have it to.
A former Connecticut nursing home owner will spend the next 2 1/2 years in prison for stealing more than $4 million from staff members’ pension and health plans.
Chaim Stern, 72, of Flushing, NY, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for embezzlement and tax offenses, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut announced this week. His prison time will be followed by three years of supervised release.
Stern’s sentencing comes three months after he pleaded guilty to the crimes that hurt three Connecticut nursing homes and led to the closure of one of them.
Because of Stern, the facilities failed to pay employment taxes and pay its shares of employment taxes between January 2017 and March 2018. Stern’s crimes resulted in a total tax loss of about $4.3 million.
Philip Esformes, a nursing home operator, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in a Medicare fraud case before President Trump commuted his sentence this week.Credit…Rob Latour/Invision, via Associated Press
Dear Reader:
We applaud the decision on the part of the Department of Justice, which has announced that it intends to pursue the prosecution of the final 6 counts against Philip Esformes. The jurors failed to reach a conviction in April of 2019. The remaining counts were for “paying and receiving kickbacks, money laundering, bribery and obstruction of justice. A conviction on these counts would be a modicum of justice for the elderly and their families. While Esformes claims to be “spending most of his days studying with rabbis, working, reconnecting with his children, and taking care of his father…” In our opinion, there is no manner of decency Esformes can show that would compensate the hundreds of victims (and their families) of his crimes.
Donald Trump’s commutation of Esformes’ sentence was a deplorable act, in and of itself. The elderly and their families deserved better from their President at the time and they deserve justice now.
May 4—Concerned that a convicted healthcare mogul freed by then-President Donald Trump might flee the country, Justice Department prosecutors urged a federal judge Tuesday to confine Philip Esformes to his South Florida home with an electronic ankle monitor and impose a $10.5 million bond to ensure his appearance for a new trial.
But their request was effectively rebuffed, at least for now.
U.S. District Judge Robert Scola instead granted a request by Esformes’ defense team to postpone the government’s bond proposal until mid-August, when it will be taken up again.
Justice Department prosecutors recently said they will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019, when a federal jury deadlocked on the main conspiracy charge and five other offenses but found him guilty of 20 corruption-related counts. Scola sentenced Esformes to 20 years in prison and ordered him to pay $5.3 million in restitution to the taxpayer-funded Medicare program and a $38 million forfeiture fine.
“The trust that he broke was of epic proportions,” Allan Medina, the lead prosecutor in the $1 billion healthcare fraud case against Esformes, said at Tuesday’s hearing.
In 2014 Canadian Rabbi Mark Zirkind was caught speeding on a highway leading to Montreal. Mark had just flown into the Toronto airport and was heading back to Montreal in a rental car. Mark had picked up over a million dollars in cash from an international narco drug dealer at a shopping mall near the Toronto airport. Lesson to learn from Mark: If you have over a million dollars in narco cash you should obey the traffic laws.
Mark got busted by the Canadian Mounties and went to trial. At trial Mark claimed that he was duped by rabbis and narco dealers. Mark thought he was transporting “Shoah Gelt.” Mark told the Canadian jury that he thought he was delivering cash for safekeeping for Jews in Europe who were afraid of a second Holocaust. Mark told the jury that he was doing a mitzvah. The jury didn’t believe Mark. Mark got sentenced to four years in a Canadian prison in Saskatchewan where he learned how to smoke salmon and tan pelts.
Rabbi Mark enlisted his American brother Rabbi Zalman Zirkind to help him launder money for international drug dealers. Rabbi Zalman in turn enlisted his nephew Rabbi Benzion Zirkind to join him in the family business. The Rabbis laundered tens of millions in cash through New York, Hong Kong, Israel, Columbia, Canada and Mexico. Zalman and Benzion both got busted by the Feds. Zalman pleaded guilty. Zalman is getting sentenced tomorrow in Federal Court before Judge Denise Cote in New York City. Zalman was facing 14 years of incarceration based on the Federal sentencing guidelines. The Justice Department agreed to lower their recommendation to five years based on Zalman’s health and family issues. Zalman has many children and has some personal medical issues, as well as medical issues related to his children.
Zalman’s nephew Benzion pleaded not guilty. Benzion will be facing trial with his co-conspirators Emiliano Bomba, Brian Para Machado, Jose Baez, and Andy Garibaldi Lopez. I don’t believe that you can count Benzion’s co-conspirators for a minyan.
Zalman’s attorney has made the following arguments for leniency in court filings: “In contrast to many men in Zirkinds’ Orthodox Jewish community, including his own father, who relinquished all child rearing responsibilities, ie., never change diapers, grocery shop, or take their children to community outings, Zirkind proudly and fully shared home and child rearing responsibilities with his wife…. he would also fill the family car with gas, take out the garbage, pay the bills, deal with the bank, take the children to school and doctors’ appointments, and for the Sabbath, would make the cholent a special meal prepared on Friday to be enjoyed on Saturday… The reactions from people in Zalman’s community upon learning of his crime include scorn, ridicule and ostracism. Even some family members no longer want to have anything to do with him… Though now of marriage age, Zalman’s son appears to be ostracized by the matchmakers and mothers in his community. Before Zalman’s arrest, mothers and matchmakers were promoting others to marry his oldest son. Before his arrest, a marriage was on the short horizon. The Zirkind family, now shamed in the community by Zalman’s sins, and plea of guilt, the heretofore imminent marriage appears as a black hole in that young man’s future.”
The Feds will argue at sentencing that Zalman continued to launder millions of dollars of narco dollars after his brother Mark got busted in Canada in 2014. Didn’t Zalman see the writing on the wall? Zalman’s attorneys argued in response: “In the exercise of its informed discretion, the Government continued to allow Mr. Zirkind to deal with others after he was identified as a money transmitter. Had the Government chosen to arrest Mr. Zirkind in 2018 Zalman could have cooperated and might be facing a lower sentence or guideline range.”
Zalman received numerous character letters of support from prominent Rabbis in the United States and Canada. Zalman also received a character letter signed by renowned Canadian Professor of Mathematics, and author of many inspirational books, Rabbi Doctor Abraham Boyarsky. Dr. Boyarsky wrote the following: “I believe Zalman is a victim of an educational system that I battled fiercely for years… in 1990 I founded TAV College with a mission of training young men like Zalman to acquire a profession such as computer training and earn an honest living. For attempting to do the unthinkable, I was called a traitor by the rabbinical leaders in the community and threatened with cheirim, excommunication. My novel, The Chassidic Trauma Unit, portrays life in this educationally impoverished community. It is my good fortune that most people in my community can’t read English, otherwise I would have been lynched a long time ago.”Zirkind Letters
Elliott Broidy at an event in New York on Feb. 27, 2008.AP Photo/David Karp
In October, Elliott Broidy, once a top fundraiser for Donald Trump and the Republican Party, pleadedguilty to charges that he conspired to illegally lobby the Trump administration for a fugitive financier and the president of Malaysia. The plea continued the descent of a controversial businessman and political operative who stepped down from a top Republican National Committee job in 2018 after the news broke that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million in hush money to a Playboy model whom he had impregnated during an extramarital affair.
Now there’s a new wrinkle to the Broidy case. He faces up to five years in prison in part because of what in retrospect seems to have been a dumb mistake. Broidy voluntarily gave the FBI emails from his and his wife’s accounts while seeking the bureau’s assistance in pursuing hackers who he claimed had stolen this material and leaked damaging details about his business dealings to the press. According to a just-unsealed ruling issued in June 2018 by Beryl Howell, the chief US District Judge in Washington, DC, nearly 1,400 pages of emails that Broidy provided to the FBI were subsequently used by the bureau in the investigation that led to Broidy’s guilty plea. Following a secretive legal process, Howell ruled that Broidy had surrendered the material to the FBI and after doing that—when the bureau wanted to exploit the documents for an investigation of Broidy himself—could no longer claim the information was covered by attorney-client privilege or spousal privilege.
A Broidy spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Here’s what happened. Broidy owns a company, Circinus, that sells what it calls “open-source” intelligence services to foreign governments. In 2017, while the firm pursued a contract with the United Arab Emirates, which it later landed, Broidy emerged as an outspoken critic of Qatar, a regional rival of the UAE. Broidy helped to finance conferences and opinion pieces attacking Qatar as a sponsor of terrorism. That criticism dovetailed with attacks on Qatar by the UAE and its close ally, Saudi Arabia, which resulted in those and other Gulf nations imposing a blockade on Qatar in June 2017.
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Money Laundering Allegations, No Intent to Go To Trial, Nothing from Chabad, and Accountability?
We find it harrowing that in the face of allegations of one of their own, a Rabbi who is well-respected, well versed and generally accomplished as a leader, Chabad has said nothing.
There have been no words of condemnation.
There has been no measure of apologies (for the victims).
There has been dead silence.
And, with Rabbi Zirkind having stated through counsel that he has no intention of taking this to trial, are we to assume that perhaps he is going to offer a plea? And, will that plea include implicating his family members, at least one of which was actively involved in allegations of drug trafficking several years ago?
Is it not about time that a committed Jew share a commitment to civil law and practice? Is it not so much to ask that the leaders of respectable Jewish communities actually act respectably?
If one is to wear the title “Rabbi” with the level of grace of that of Rabbi Zirkind, should he not be an exemplar for a community which is so lacking in respect for civil laws?
We hope, Rabbi Zalman Zirkind, that it is your intention to do the right and honorable thing even if it means reporting on those within your community, whether in New York or in Canada. Complacence is complicity.
THE REQUEST WAS ASTOUNDING, THE RESPONSE REASONABLE – ACCUSATIONS OF MONEY LAUNDERING AND CHABAD AND STILL… CRICKETS
On August 13, 2020 Rabbi Zalman Zirkind was granted his request for Friday night and Saturday prayer at a single synagogue in Brooklyn. He was denied the remainder of the request which included prayer and mikvah in multiple locations. The very fact that he was remanded to the custody of family should have been viewed as blessing enough, but no further comment on that is needed.
To the extent the initial request commented in depth on Rabbi Zirkind’s religious commitment, we cannot emphasize enough the hypocrisy. When one claims to be a righteous and pious religious leader, that person should be leading not only by words and rituals but by example. A pillar of one’s society should be setting an example that others aspire to follow.
If the congregants in Canada are following the Zirkind example, we suggest the Canadian authorities begin a vast investigation. And where is Chabad in all of this? Will Chabad not step in and say something about the shenanigans of its disciples?
The Ukranian Oligarchs, the Ties to the US Government, Power and Money
Dear Reader,
LM began investigating the story of the Ukranian Oligarchs deeply embedded in US political affairs in 2019 as part of the investigation into the arrest of other Ukranian nationals tied to the government. Actually, the investigation started earlier when LM began looking into the Dan Gertler stories in 2016.
More recently, our inquiries have included Rudolph Giuliani’s pursuit of business in the Ukraine. The Magnitsky Act sanctions against Gertler which were toppled by executive order (more on that in a later story) and now a recent investigation into Ukranian oligarchs heavily leveraged in a number of US states who allegedly laundered and stole billions of dollars.
The story about these men and their somewhat intricate ties to high level US Government officials included a number of significant news articles about Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s Interior Minister and Marie Yovanovitch (who, if you will recall was ousted from her position as the US ambassador to the Ukraine). We posit that Yovanovitch knew what was going on, wanted to put an end to the wholesale purchase of parts of the US to powers that be in the Ukraine and got tossed aside for that reason. Her testimony during the impeachment hearings likely missed far too much about what she knew than it brought to light.
The information we uncovered along the way, we believe, should have been part of the US impeachment inquiry, which itself was unsuccessful; but only because of the political climate. The mistakes of that inquiry were far more about what was ignored during hearings than anything else, namely that likely all the President’s men were playing both sides of the Ukranian double-edged sword to establish relationships and with Ukranian power-brokers thereby yielding themselves significant political power and financial benefits. No politician worth his weight in corrupt political salt would have been immune to the money and power these connections could help wield.
LOSTMESSIAH 