GoodFellas—at shul

The words “money laundering rabbis” in any book subtitle seems guaranteed to arouse the curiosity of at least some Jewish Journal readers. Add into the equation that the “informant” of the subtitle is a rabbi’s son; that fact might fairly be termed the clincher.

This truth-is-stranger-than-fiction crime narrative is told by Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin, reporters for the Newark (New Jersey) Star-Ledger, in “The Jersey Sting: A True Story of Crooked Pols, Money Laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys, and the Informant Who Brought It All Down” (St. Martin’s Press, 386 pages, $26.99).

A human organ trafficking crime even shows up amidst the real estate scams and money laundering schemes. The crimes are interrelated and convoluted, making it difficult at times to tell the players without a scorecard—or, to abandon that cliché, to understand the criminals without an Old Testament. The list of characters helpfully included by the authors tops 100, and a significant percentage are Jewish, at least six rabbis in the mix.

The protagonist who emerges from the thicket of characters is Solomon Dwek, a risk-taking real estate developer in New Jersey and beyond whose enthusiasm frequently outstripped his business acumen. Dwek’s father is Rabbi Isaac Dwek of the Deal Synagogue. (The Jewish characters involved tend to be of Syrian ancestry.)

The web of crime that Dwek began to expose while cooperating with law enforcement authorities, under duress, transcended Jewish collaborators and victims. But the Jewish angle alone could fill multiple volumes because of Dwek’s volubility and brash deal making. As the interrelated crimes became public during 2009, with arrest after arrest (44 during the same day) rocking New Jersey and New York (mostly Brooklyn)politicians, business owners and religious figures, reporters Sherman and Margolin felt comfortable writing passages like this:

“Rabbinical scholars acting more like crime bosses than religious leaders were being accused of laundering millions through synagogues, charities and yeshivas. Some had money-counting machines in their offices. It was like GoodFellas—at shul. Indeed, the brazenness of the intertwined schemes played out in stark terms and in languages that included English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic and yeshivish slang, captured by hundreds of hours of surveillance tapes recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation…”
The detailed account of how Dwek ended up in trouble with law enforcement agencies is not particularly compelling, partly because of his naivete—no master criminal, he—and partly because the convoluted dealing might rightly confuse anybody but a sophisticated forensic accountant.

More compelling are the interactions between informant Dwek and his law enforcement masters. Legal and ethic dilemmas crop up on page after page. From a current politics standpoint, the book is significant today because the U.S. attorney directing the show was Christopher Christie. He is currently governor of New Jersey and frequently mentioned as a Republican candidate for the White House.
As an informant, Dwek realized he would be shunned by his Jewish cohorts, bring shame on his synagogue, and separated from his wife and children. The family narrative offers something to readers who care little or nothing about East Coast political and corporate corruption.

In the aftermath of the arrests and guilty pleas and jury trials, Dwek’s five children were no longer welcome in their religious schools. As the authors explain, the children “reappeared some time later in Pikeville, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood just outside Baltimore, far from the Syrian community. Their reemergence into public view led to public controversy after Dwek was seen in a kosher pizzeria and the owner captured a picture of him with a cell phone camera. Then he posted it online. There was an angry outcry from many that Dwek was living among them, and some in the neighborhood criticized the local rabbinical council for giving safe passage to an enemy of the Jews. Dwek’s father, the rabbi, was forced out of the synagogue he had built and led…”

Because certain threads of the scandals have yet to be unraveled, Dwek continues to function as a cooperating witness for law enforcement agencies. When he will receive a prison sentence, and how many years that prison sentence will last, is uncertain. He is pretty much without friends, praying alone on weekdays, the Sabbath, and holidays.

The authors close what is obviously an ongoing story like this, setting the scene as Dwek testifies at one of the corruption trials: “…After all the millions of dollars, all the lies, all the families destroyed, all the phony profits, all the elaborate stories, all the FedEx envelopes stuffed with cash, Solomon took off his glasses in silence and wiped the tears that suddenly welled from his eyes. Finally, Solomon Dwek cried.”

Steve Weinberg is an investigative reporter based in Columbia, Missouri. He reviews books regularly for the Jewish Journal and numerous other publications.