“He was just doing his job—I don’t judge him,” said one 60-year-old woman, who declined to give her name. Dressed elegantly against the fall chill in a leopard-trimmed leather jacket, the woman—an Arabic speaker whose grandparents emigrated from Syria decades ago, and who splits her time between Deal and Brooklyn, where she grew up and where her children now live—said she wasn’t so much pro-Christie as against everyone else in the race, including the independent candidate, Chris Daggett. “To be honest, I don’t know if I like Christie,” she admitted. “But I hate Corzine, and you can’t waste a vote.”

Other voters emerging from Deal’s public elementary school—its sole polling place, only a short drive from the synagogues whose rabbis are currently facing criminal charges—didn’t make the link at all between Christie and the arrests, and few were willing to answer any questions about ongoing repercussions of the arrests. Instead, they offered a litany of explanations for supporting Christie: healthcare reform, the economy, the Obama administration’s apparent willingness to put pressure on Israel. Some said they considered themselves open-minded when it came to partisan issues—several recalled voting for John Kennedy—but tended to side with the Republicans when it came to state and national politics. Deal’s Syrian Jewish mayor, Harry Franco, who stopped by midmorning with his wife, offered a more straightforward explanation for Christie’s popularity in Deal. “Right now I think the main issue is property taxes,” Franco explained.

The Christie campaign—aided by the national Republican Jewish Coalition—has pushed the tax issue, targeting politically conservative Orthodox Jews, and Jewish swing voters, with pocketbook arguments, attacking Corzine for his decision to roll back property tax rebates in the face of a state budget deficit. “We’ve been getting e-mails for weeks in my crowd,” said one retired man, a McCain supporter who said he was an avid watcher of Fox News. Meanwhile, Democratic operatives spent the day focusing their efforts on turning out liberal Jewish voters in suburbs closer to New York and Philadelphia, leaving Corzine’s supporters in Deal mostly to their own devices.

One man sporting a large satin kippah described himself as a regular Democratic voter, and said he had voted for Corzine because Christie—a Bush appointee—represented “the same old business.” And over at M&A Kosher Meats, a few minutes from the school, one shopper said she planned to cast her ballot for Corzine on her way home, because she’d grown up in a Democratic household in Brooklyn and saw no reason to switch sides now. “I’ll tell you, none of them are any good,” she said, laughing. “But I always vote, because otherwise I couldn’t complain.”

Dwek, the son of a prominent Syrian rabbi, was arrested in May 2006 after he allegedly tried to kite checks worth more than $50 million, including a $25.2 million check he tried to deposit at a drive-through ATM. Court documents filed in July indicate that Dwek agreed to help prosecutors break open multimillion-dollar money-laundering rings allegedly being run through religious charities in the tight-knit Syrian communities of Brooklyn and northern New Jersey and, in one gory instance, an organ-trafficking ring between the United States and Israel. The five rabbis arrested in the case, including 87-year-old chief rabbi Saul Kassin, face an array of conspiracy and fraud charges.

Dwek, who faced up to 30 years in prison on the original bank fraud allegations, is expected to be the star witness in any cases that go to trial.

UPDATE: NJ.com reports that Dwek, who made his first appearance in federal court this morning since his initial arrest, entered guilty pleas on two counts of bank fraud. Sentencing was set for Feb. 9. Dwek is due in state court later today to enter pleas on similar charges.

Solomon Dwek, Central Witness in N.J. Corruption Probe, Expected to Plead Guilty [NJ.com]
Related: Crisis of Faith [Tablet]

As the chief rabbi of the largest Syrian Jewish synagogue in the United States—referred to during a press conference by Newark’s FBI chief as the “Syrian Jewish Church,” a slip of the tongue that conjured up images of Eastern Orthodoxy and patriarchy—Kassin is the de facto leader of the 75,000 Syrian Jews in New York. As such, his duties include not only governing the spiritual needs of his flock, but overseeing a generous network of communal services, from K-12 parochial schools to recreational facilities and care for the elderly, provided for free through synagogue-affiliated charities to keep members of the tight-knit community close.

But in court documents filed yesterday, federal investigators claimed the charities were financed at least in part with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cuts Kassin took from supplicants, both locally and in Israel, who used the charities as fronts to launder money they made from illicit business dealings. Investigators portrayed the 87-year-old rabbi, scion of a Jerusalem rabbinic dynasty, as a shrewd operator who acted as a kind of central banker to other rabbis in New York and New Jersey doing the same thing on a smaller scale. It’s an image strikingly at odds with the pictures of Kassin, bearded and somber in his black hat and coat, clutching what looks like a prayer book, captured as he entered the federal courthouse in Newark.

“Rabbi Kassin, within the community establishment, is viewed, I think it’s fair to say, as a venerated figure,” said Zev Chafets, who has written about the Syrian Jewish community. “He’s a symbol of the connection with Syria, and a symbol of continuity and authority.”

Kassin—who goes by his Hebrew name, Shaul—came to the U.S. in 1933 from Jerusalem, where his father, Rabbi Jacob Kassin, was known as a scholar of Talmud and Kabbalah, according to a family history written by Sarina Roffe, an expert in Syrian Jewry. The elder Kassin looked around at the teeming world of New York, full of Ashkenazic Jews and enticements to assimilation, and responded by issuing an Edict, in 1935, threatening the excommunication of any Syrian Jew who dared to intermarry, even—or especially—if the would-be spouse had converted.

Saul Kassin, who Roffe says edited the yearbook during his time at Yeshiva University, took up the defense of his father’s edict when he inherited the position of chief rabbi in 1994; according to Chafets, Kassin even excommunicated his own daughter, Anna, who married a gentile.

“We cut her off,” Kassin’s son, Jakie, told Chafets. But that was the price of holding the community together, especially as it grew fabulously wealthy, largely from cash businesses—real estate, manufacturing, import-export—that flourished over the past decade. Instead of moving away, the Syrians stayed close, turning Gravesend, in deepest Brooklyn, into a kind of millionaire’s paradise, where houses sell at Fifth Avenue prices. (At the height of the real estate boom, in 2006, one tear-down on a double lot went for $11 million.)

According to Roffe, Kassin was also known as an adept mathematician; perhaps his ease with numbers gave him an ease with the world of business his relatives and congregants inhabited that other rabbis wouldn’t necessarily have had. His prominence gave him access to far more money than neighboring synagogues, or rival ones; another accused rabbi, Edmond Nahum, of the Deal Synagogue, estimated Kassin was taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a week “at least,” through an unnamed charity affiliated with his synagogue, Shaare Zion. “Kassin is the best,” Nahum allegedly told the government’s mole in the community, identified as Solomon Dwek, the son of another community rabbi, who was arrested in 2006 on suspicion of trying to perpetrate a $50 million check-kiting scam.

Dwek has been portrayed as the Judas of the story, who apparently agreed to help the government break apart money-laundering operations in the Syrian community. According to the court documents, Dwek approached Nahum and another rabbi, Eliahu Ben Haim, head of Ohel Yaacob, a congregation in Deal, with checks he claimed came from selling counterfeit Prada and Gucci handbags. He told the rabbis he was trying to avoid getting noticed by the authorities; he wanted, he said, “an effective way to get rid of the money.” Nahum and Ben Haim provided the introduction to Kassin, undoubtedly considered the government’s “big fish”; at repeated meetings in Gravesend and Deal, the court documents describe Kassin asking why Dwek needed him at all. At one point, Kassin, who said he was trying to be careful with his accounts, asked Dwek what he was supposed to say should anyone “ever come ask me, ‘what’s this, this money that you’re taking.’” Dwek said the money couldn’t ever be traced to him, and Kassin allegedly went ahead with the deal, taking $2,500 to issue Dwek a check drawn on his charitable accounts that one of the other rabbis agreed to cash.

All told, Kassin allegedly washed $200,000 for Dwek between June 2007 and December 2008—at which point, investigators appear to have decided they had enough evidence against the rabbis, and shifted their focus to New Jersey’s political structure. So far, the community has rallied around him, insisting to television cameras that the rabbi is innocent; Kassin’s attorney, Robert Stahl, who secured the rabbi’s release on $200,000 bail, told reporters yesterday that the rabbi “remains confident that the truth will come out,” and that his name will be cleared.

The arrests, which the FBI characterized as part of a decade-long investigation into political corruption in New Jersey, grew out of what appears to be intense cooperation between investigators and one man: Solomon Dwek, a real-estate developer and scion of a prominent Syrian Jewish family in Monmouth County who was arrested in May 2006 on suspicion of trying to swindle $50 million from PNC Bank in a check-kiting scheme.

Dwek—referred to in court documents as a “cooperating witness”—first led investigators to members of his own community, including Saul Kassin, the 87-year-old head of the tight-knit Syrian community and chief rabbi of Shaare Zion, the largest Syrian congregation, and Eliahu Ben Haim, the principal rabbi of Congregation Ohel Yaacob, in Deal, New Jersey, before moving on to political figures. (A message left with an Ohel Yaacob administrator was not returned; a woman who answered at the Deal Yeshiva, which was also raided, told this reporter “never to call again.”)

According to a criminal complaint, Dwek, working with undercover agents, laundered $3 million through various synagogue-affiliated charities with help from the rabbis, who would accept checks and then would arrange for “clean checks” or cash to be made available, sometimes via wire transfers from Israel, sometimes via a Swiss bank, for cuts of five or 10 percent. At the same time, Dwek led investigators to a source in Brooklyn who allegedly agreed to broker a deal for a kidney from an Israeli, for $160,000.

At that point, with Dwek having proven so useful to investigators targeting the Syrian Jewish community, the FBI and IRS apparently decided to go for broke: rather than stopping with the money laundering claims, they co-opted Dwek into a decade-long probe against New Jersey’s legendarily corrupt political swamp. An official, speaking at today’s press conference, praised Dwek’s efficiency: “One person was able to deal with these people throughout New Jersey and Brooklyn, New York.”

Rabbis Charged with Illegally Laundering $3M [Asbury Park Press]

9 Complaints Alleging Money Laundering Released [Asbury Park Press]
Mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus, Several Rabbis Arrested [Bloomberg]
Previously: Rabbis Arrested in N.J. Corruption Probe