Some people don’t mind if Sholom Rubashkin gets life in prison and rots behind bars until he dies. Others are outraged at the harsh treatment being meted out to Rubashkin and ask in disbelief, “What’s going on?”
Rubashkin is at the center of the torrid scandal swirling around the massively-investigated Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa. Last November, a federal jury in South Dakota found Rubashkin guilty of 86 federal charges including bank, mail and wire fraud, and money laundering, as well as failing to pay livestock providers in the time required by law. Rubashkin, now 50 years old, is facing a tough Department of Justice sentencing request demanding that he be given the prison sentence that the Probation Department calculates, under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, as life in prison. His sentencing by U.S. District Chief Judge Linda Reade is scheduled for April 28-29, 2010.
Those who want Rubashkin locked away for the rest of his days list his crimes as numerous and odious. Charges by bloggers, Jewish media reporters, and prosecutors include a heinous track record of mistreating illegal alien workers; tolerating drug dealing and gun smuggling in the plant; money laundering; obstruction of justice; perjury; and the painful ritual slaughter of cattle, all in the process of creating arguably the most successful kosher meat business in America.
Those who call for leniency for Rubashkin have plausible answers, explanations, and denials for every accusation. Upon review, many of those accusations are unproven, unprosecuted, and some are just rumors. His defenders claim he is a charitable man who did not personally benefit financially from his business mistakes. He went awry of the law, they say, for the sake of providing abundantly and readily available kosher beef to the Orthodox. In this, he was successful, serving not just the larger Jewish communities such as those in Brooklyn and Miami, but those located throughout the distant corners of the nation. More importantly, his defenders say, Rubashkin went awry of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), the meatpacking unions, overzealous federal prosecutors in Iowa, and certain social dynamics within the Jewish community. His advocates assert that he has been overcharged, over-prosecuted and is now being over-sentenced for some very ordinary transgressions that would land a similar defendant in jail for just a few years. Yet Rubashkin is facing a life sentence. Why?
It would be impossible to reinvestigate the details of this complex, years-long case. But this much is clear: Rubashkin and Agriprocessors have found themselves on the receiving end of extraordinary enforcement measures and prosecution that for many are hard to fathom.
Now, he is facing life imprisonment for financial crimes that have nothing to do with the illegal immigrant worker scandal that made headlines. In many ways, those financial crimes were caused by the government itself, apparently as the sole means by which federal sentencing guidelines could be dynamically goosed up.
Some of the details yield a stunning indictment of prosecutorial zeal. His attorney, Nathan Lewin, of the Washington D.C. firm of Lewin & Lewin, argues, “In the almost 50 years that I have been practicing federal criminal law — first as a prosecutor and then as a defense attorney — I have never heard of, or witnessed, as vindictive, excessive, and mean-spirited a criminal prosecution as the one conducted in the Northern District of Iowa against Mr. Rubashkin.”
Lewin goes on to accuse Iowa prosectors of “false representation to the court,” in opposing pre-sentencing bail for the Rubashkin during Passover. Specifically, avers Lewin, prosecutors told the judge that after the May 2008 Agriprocessors raid, Rubashkin arranged to send a key employee, Ben Chaim, and his family, to Israel and take over their property in Iowa, this to obstruct justice and make a witness disappear. Evidence in the record shows that the arrangement for Ben Chaim to return to Israel was finalized months before the May 2008 raid and was therefore unconnected to the raid or obstruction. Based on this falsity, he claims, bail was denied to Rubashkin. Lewin has now called for a Department of Justice Criminal Division investigation of the Iowa prosecutors for misconduct.
In an exclusive interview with this reporter, Rubashkin’s wife, Leah, says, “My husband definitely made mistakes. He is now paying for those dearly. If the clock were turned back, I’m sure he would not do those mistakes. But his good intentions were never for personal gain, only done with the feeling they would help the business [Agriprocessors] survive” and in so doing help fulfill a religious mandate to provide kosher beef to the Orthodox community.
Ironically, Rubashkin was not tried for hiring or mistreating illegal aliens. Instead, he was charged with financial crimes, including violating the obscure 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, section 409 of which requires payment to cattle suppliers within 24 hours. In many cases, Rubashkin paid his vendors several days late. In a detailed sentencing memorandum, the prosecution points to 31 cattle suppliers who were not paid within 24 hours—but were indeed paid. Specifically, on page 25 of the memo, prosecutors assert, “The actual loss to each Packer’s Act victim is attributable to the fact that they all lost the time value of their money while they were waiting for payment.” As an example, the government sentencing memo declares, “Waverly Sales, Inc. has quantified the amount of their actual loss to be $3,800.51. This is based upon the amount of interest Waverly paid on a mortgage loan it took out on its property in order to cover the cost of the cattle sold to Agriprocessors while it was waiting for payment through the Packer’s trust.” As such, Rubashkin is to get a life sentence in part because his supplier lost interest waiting for full payment, which was actually made, but made days late. Indeed, this is the first criminal prosecution under the 90-year-old Packers and Stockyards Act any legal expert contacted could remember.
In a written explanation, assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Deegan Jr. defended, “The fact that they [cattle suppliers] were ultimately paid is completely beside the point when the essence of the criminal offense is the failure to timely pay providers of livestock.” The emphasis on the word “timely” is Deegan’s.
Prosecutors also discovered that Rubashkin inflated his original receivables to secure a bank loan; even though no losses were incurred, the exaggeration constituted federal bank fraud. Moreover, when Rubashkin routinely checked off a box on the original application, he swore his firm was not involved in illegal activities. That statement was deemed false by virtue of the illegal aliens working at the plant.
The government has claimed that the bank lost $26 million when Agriprocessors defaulted on its loan. Such a high loss forces the federal sentencing guidelines up. The more money lost in a fraud, the more years the guidelines suggest. But further inquiry shows that the bank in question actually made $21 million in interest since Rubashkin paid down his $35 million line of credit—on time every time for years.
Agriprocessors, says Lewin, only went bankrupt after the government’s massive raid, compounded by threats to prosecute prospective purchasers if they employed family members who offered to continue running the business, and an original indictment on 3 counts that was amended by six major superseding indictments. New indictments were filed every few weeks for about seven months until the seventh indictment recorded a staggering 163 counts. When the thriving business with a built-in captive kosher market was forced into bankruptcy, all sorts of multi-million-dollar purchase offers were rejected by the bank until the business failed completely. At that point, the bank indeed lost $26 million in what Lewin and other defenders see as an artificial self-created loss that served to intensely escalate the sentencing guidelines.
Undocumented aliens are an untidy fact in American manufacturing, but prosecutions for similar illegal worker raids have garnered sentences of only a few years for their executives. For example, in 2007, the Michael Bianco Company, a New Bedford, Massachusetts leather goods manufacturer, was raided. Some 326 illegal workers were discovered. Owner Francesco Insolia, found guilty of deplorable working conditions, received, in January 2009, a sentence of a year and one day plus stiff fines.
About a month after the May 2008 Agriprocessors raid, a Houston rag exporter called Action Rags USA was raided, resulting in the arrest of 150 immigrants. Owner Mubarik Kahlon was sentenced to two years’ probation and a $6,000 fine. The list of comparably light sentence cases goes on virtually without variation.
With such light-sentence precedents, prosecutors chose not to proceed on immigration violations but instead went after Rubashkin’s paperwork violations of a bank loan which had previously been paid on time and in full.
By some appearances, it seems as though many in the Jewish community have maintained a stance either of silence or stern condemnation. That very quiet abandonment may have tacitly greenlighted prosecutors that co-religionists would not speak up in face of excessive action. Here there are many subtle Jewish community undercurrents at play, some critics and defenders assert. Rubashkin is a Lubavitch Hassidic Jew, and a leading member of Chabad. Some Jews reportedly revile the group because some Chabad followers hail their deceased spiritual leader, Menachem Schneerson, as the “Jewish Messiah,” said a well-known Jewish activist in New York who asked not to be quoted by name.
Pinchos Lipschutz, publisher of the Orthodox Jewish publication Yated Ne’eman, known in the past for its disagreement with Chabad, has aggressively defended Rubashkin. He added, “Some liberal secular Jews look at the Orthodox like they are dirty. I think this was the secular Jews against the religious. Killing is never pretty and a slaughterhouse is not a pretty site.” Religious media did point out the inequities, but Lipschutz adds, “No one takes the religious Jewish media seriously. Our papers are not picked up like the secular Jewish media.” Lipschutz was referring to mainstream secular Jewish newspapers that have aggressively covered the Agriprocessors scandal and editorialized against Rubashkin, and garnered most of the wider media attention.
In spite of appearances that Rubashkin has been abandoned, large numbers of Jewish organizations and individuals have written recently to the Justice Department, created “Justice for Rubashkin” Facebook pages, recorded online support videos, and signed petitions seeking sentencing moderation. These include the Simon Wiesenthal Institute, The Orthodox Union, and scores of individuals. Indeed, according to Lipschutz, who heads up a legal defense fund, “We get checks every day—hundreds of checks. So far, we have raised more than $400,000. Just last week, I received a check for $7,283.76 from a man who said ‘please don’t give anyone my name.’”
Virtually all of the petitioners make clear that they do not excuse any wrong-doing or criminal action. Many of the letters express a sentiment similar to Simon Wiesenthal Institute’s April 14, 2010 letter to the Department of Justice. Decrying “a grotesque and inordinate life sentence,” the Simon Wiesenthal Institute asked for “a fair and equitable sentence.” But what would that be?
Rubashkin’s attorneys have asked for no more than six years. Former federal judge Paul Cassell called the government’s sentencing demand “irrational and unjust.”
Cassell, who wrote a 70-page opinion on another inordinate sentence stated, “The six-year number is in the ballpark. Life is what you get for first degree murder. This is a longer sentence than for second degree murder or rape of child.”
Perhaps no critic of Rubashkin has been more vituperative than Scott Rosenberg, a former Chabad Jew in Minneapolis, who operates the blog known as FailedMessiah.org. This blog has covered every development in the case in depth, and is credited by some with “keeping the case alive.” Rosenberg is a former family friend of the Rubashkins who often ate at their dinner table on Sabbath until a disillusioned Rosenberg withdrew from the Chabad religious group. Rosenberg scorned Rubashkin as a “sociopath,” yet added, “I don’t hate him, I actually like him. I don’t want his wife and kids to suffer for 20 years, God forbid, while he sits in jail. But how to protect society?” Asked what sentence he would assess if it were in his power, Rosenberg replied, “If I had the power, I would sentence him to 3 years at a medical facility and a long term of close supervision after that.”
Leah Rubashkin said she has spoken to her husband and if he received a single digit sentence, upon release he would not return to the business world but to community outreach, and tending to his ten children. One of those ten children is autistic.
Whatever sentence Rubashkin receives, it will almost certainly be appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the U. S. Supreme Court by Lewin, an experienced appellate attorney. Rubashkin, denied bail, now sits in an Iowa jail awaiting sentencing at the end of the month. Under recent court decisions, federal sentencing guidelines are no longer mandatory. Rubashkin’s term is fully within the discretion of federal Judge Reade.
Edwin Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust and previously investigated the life sentence given to Jonathan Pollard.
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