Busted: The Orthodox Criminal Network

Posted on July 27, 2009

by Christopher Bollyn

Some of the members of the international Orthodox Jewish criminal network arrested on July 23, 2009. This network is deeply involved in illegal narcotics and financial crimes.

The FBI’s mass arrest on July 23 of Orthodox rabbis, their partners-in-crime, and the venal and corrupt politicians who accepted bribes from a Jewish gangster-turned-witness provides essential insight into the extensive Othodox Jewish criminal network that dominates Israel, New York, New Jersey, and to a great extent the United States of America. Having written a great deal about this subject, particularly in relation to the false flag terror attacks of 9-11, there are a few important things that need to be pointed out about this developing story.

“TERRIBLE BLASPHEMY”

This is a very important story, not only for the insular and segregated Orthodox Jewish community in which this criminal network operates but for the larger intercommunal relationship between Jews and the U.S. general public, which is incensed and indignant about being ripped off for hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars by notorious Jews like Bernard Madoff, Maurice Greenberg of A.I.G., and Ben Shalom Bernanke of the Federal Reserve. “If the charges against the rabbis are proved to have been correct,” one veteran Brooklyn rabbi told the Israeli press, “it’ll be the worst and most terrible blasphemy that will ever be remembered about the New York Jews.”

While the controlled media wrongly puts the focus on the corrupt minor politicians who allegedly took bribes, the real crooks are those who paid the bribes and used dirty money to corrupt politicians. The main players in this criminal network are among the leading members of the Sephardic Jewish community of Brooklyn, New York City, and Deal, New Jersey. The key players, such as the FBI’s cooperating witness Solomon “Shlomo” Dwek and the 87-year-old “chief rabbi” Shaul J. Kassin, are both high-ranking members of this closed community, which is actually Israeli (or Palestinian prior to 1948). A member of the Dwek clan, Rafi Dwek, for example, is director-general of the Likud party, the extreme right-wing party of Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Shlomo Dwek, the Talmud teacher and Jewish gangster-turned-witness who helped expose a small part of the international Orthodox criminal network

Israeli members of this Syrian Orthodox Jewish community are discussed in my articles about the secret visit of Ehud Olmert to New York City on the very eve of 9-11. During this top-secret visit on September 10, 2001, Ehud Olmert, then the Likud mayor of Jerusalem, met with two other Likudniks from the Syrian Jewish community, namely Shaul and Meir Levy, founders and owners of the “Wings” beach store chain. Having visited one of these massive “Wings” stores in North Miami Beach, I am convinced that the Levy brothers deal in more than beach towels and suntan lotion.

The tiny Syrian Jewish enclave of Deal, New Jersey (population 1,000), has been mentioned in my 9-11 research, for example in the chapter on the Architecture of Terror. When the FBI busted 5 prominent rabbis from this secretive group of Syrian/Israeli Orthodox Jews, I was very interested and watched to see how the media covered this story, which is far more important than many realize. This story reveals the fundamental Jewish method of corruption and political control, which is the subject of my earlier 9-11 article about Italian Gangsters and their Jewish Bosses. While the rabbis and the Jewish “charities” were laundering tens of millions of dollars, venal politicians were being bought off by the rabbi’s son for a few thousand dollars, literally for pennies on the dollar. Two things are striking about this latest story: the depth and extent of the Jewish criminal network and the cheapness and degree of corruption of our political leaders. The Jewish criminal network is just as entrenched in Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles as it is in New York and New Jersey.

The Dwek and Kassin families are very close and have been since at least the early years of the 1900s when they studied Talmud and Kabbalah together in the yeshiva in Jerusalem (then part of the district of Syria in the Turkish Ottoman Empire). The Kassin family came to America from Palestine in August 1933. Rabbi Jacob and his wife Mazal arrived in New York with their first four children, the eldest being Shaul, the now indicted rabbi. Mazal, the rabbi’s 30-year-old wife was unable to read or write, according to immigration documents, which is not unusual for this segregated and backwards community. Orthodox Jewish women are known to be treated as untouchable second-class humans and are made to ride in the back of the bus even today in Israel. Non-Jews, “Goyim” or Gentiles, are considered to be even lower and are despised by Orthodox Jews yet they choose to live and carry out their criminal schemes in America, which has a population which is overwhelmingly non-Jewish.

“WE DON’T WANT GENTILE CHARACTERISTICS”

The Syrian Jewish community is known for its strict racial Edict that acts like “an invisible fence” and bans members of the community from marrying anyone outside of the community. “Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” the son of rabbi Kassin told Zev Chavets of the New York Times in 2007, summarizing the message of the Edict. “Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.”

To understand the ties between the key families in this story, I recommend Sarina Roffé’s articles on the Kassin and Labaton rabbinic dynasties. Sarina is an expert on Syrian Jewry and a member of Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community and the Jewish Genealogical Society, Inc. of New York.

The “Syrian” Jewish community is well known for its notorious criminals. One of the most infamous is Eddie Antar, a.k.a. Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he created an empire in the home electronics business. When he was caught defrauding investors of nearly $100 million dollars, he fled to Israel, was extradited, prosecuted (by then U.S. Attorney Michael Chertoff), and sent to prison. Antar, who still lives in the community “enclave”, told the Jewish Week that the recent mass arrest of rabbis doesn’t surprise him at all. “Most people in this community are law-abiding hard-working Americans and the alleged actions of a few people are no reflection on the entire community. But I’m not surprised when I see this kind of thing happen.”

Small, tight-knit communities such as the Syrian Jewish enclave in New Jersey and Brooklyn are particularly prone to financial crime, he said. “It happens all the time in all kinds of closed, insular communities, and these crimes are the toughest to crack,” he said. “The people are bound not just by economic incentives, but cultural, religious, ethnic and family ties. They tend to be highly coordinated, and they can take years to investigate.” When the dust settles “hundreds” of people could be implicated, Antar predicted. Antar’s prediction that many more people are involved comes from a person who knows the Orthodox criminal network from the inside.

ORTHODOX RABBIS = CRIME BOSSES

The most obvious question that a person would ask after hearing the report of the mass arrest of Orthodox rabbis: What kind of religious community is this Orthodox Jewish community in which its leaders are venal crooks who engage in serious criminal activity as easily as one drinks a glass of water?

“These rings, led by clergymen, cloaked their extensive criminal activities behind a facade of rectitude,” New Jersey District Attorney Ralph Marra said, describing a disgraceful picture of religious leaders heading money-laundering crews and acting as crime bosses. They moved “at least tens of millions of dollars through charitable, nonprofit entities controlled by rabbis in New York and New Jersey,” Marra said. Exactly where the “tens of millions of dollars” came from has not been explained, but connections to the illegal drug trade and the Madoff scam are both very likely.

“Crime Boss” Shaul J. Kassin, 87, chief rabbi of the Syrian Jewish community

“Religious leaders allegedly acted like ‘crime bosses'”, was the Marra quote that became the title of a July 26 article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. “For these defendants, corruption was a way of life.”

Israelis, however, are well aware of the gangster methods and tactics of the Orthodox Jewish community, something most Americans are only becoming aware of as a result of this mass arrest. Small Orthodox Jewish parties, such as Israel’s theocratic Shas Party, have long wielded enormous clout in Israel’s coalition governments and used political extortion to obtain special privileges for the Orthodox community. Orthodox religious practices and conversions, for example, are the only ones recognized in the “Jewish state.” The Shas party’s seed money was raised in rabbi Kassin’s living room in Deal, N.J., in the early ’80s.

In most cases the indicted rabbis used Jewish and Zionist “charitable organizations” to launder money that they believed came from bank fraud and selling counterfeit goods. Dwek told the rabbis he was trying to hide large amounts of cash. In some instances, he said, the money came from the sale of fake Gucci bags. It should be noted, however, that the Orthodox Jewish community has a long and documented history of involvement in the sale of narcotics and illegal drugs, such as Ecstasy. The Syrian Jewish community is very powerful in Latin America. Another Kassin family member, a Miami resident from Colombia named “Victor Tesone Kassin,” for example, was indicted in a $100 million money laundering operation to wash drug profits from Colombian narcotics with drug financier Isaac Kattan in 1982 following a similar investigation called Operation Greenback. This operation involved a bank in Miami and Switzerland. Switzerland and Israel played roles in the recently busted Jewish money-laundering operation and are also thought to be involved in the disappearance of tens of billions of dollars from the Madoff scam as well.

A Brooklyn Jewish man, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, is charged with enticing poor people in Israel to give up a kidney for $10,000 so he could sell their organs for $160,000 each, according to Marra. Some, if not all, of the kidney removal operations were reportedly carried out at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital.

The arrest of the Orthodox rabbis 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, Ha’aretz reported. The 15 people arrested on money laundering charges were all Orthodox Jews and/or Israelis, including the “kidney trade middleman,” a.k.a. Levi-Yitzhak Rosenbaum. There were so many detainees that a bus was used to transport them. This massive arrest, however, is seen by many as only the tip of the iceberg.

Officials say investigations originally focused on an international Orthodox Jewish network that laundered tens of millions of dollars through charities controlled by rabbis in New Jersey and New York. This money-laundering network is most likely connected to the $50 billion Bernie Madoff scam. Madoff, as I pointed out in my articles about his scam, managed the Sy Syms school of business at the Orthodox Jewish community’s Yeshiva University. Another Sephardic family, the Recanati family, has a great deal of influence in the shipping and selling of crude oil and at the Israel Discount Bank, the corrupt private bank where Sy Syms was a director for many years. Like the 9-11 crime and cover-up, at every key nodal point of this vast criminal financial network — one finds an Orthodox Jew.

Levy Itzhak Rosenbaum used his gun to threaten poor kidney donors who got cold feet. He made more than $150,000 for each kidney he traded.

Sources and Recommended Reading:

Bollyn, Christopher, “The Architecture of Terror: Mapping the Israeli Network Behind 9-11“

Bollyn, Christopher, “Ehud Olmert Was in New York on 9-11,” December 2, 2007

Bollyn, Christopher, “9-11: The Israeli Network in Florida,” May 21, 2008

Bollyn, Christopher, “The Italian Gangsters and Their Jewish Bosses,” October 1, 2007

Chavets, Zev, “The Sy Empire,” New York Times Magazine, October 14, 2007

Roffé, Sarina, “Kassin Rabbinic Dynasty” and “Labaton Rabbinic Dynasty“

Source: Christopher Bollyn

The Bollyn 9/11 archives are Here.