Philip Green, Jewish Criminality, and the Cost of Economic Parasitism, Part 1: The Wider Context of Jewish White Collar Crime

Philip Green

Philip Green

Parasite: (noun) An organism which lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other’s expense.

Three years ago I wrote an analysis of the Marc Rich case. I wanted the piece to be as clinical and empirically sound as possible, so I relied heavily on a report authored by government investigators acting for the United States Congress (House Report No. 454: Justice Undone, Clemency Decisions in the Clinton White House United States Congressional Set, No. 14778, Volumes 1—2). The finished piece was not only intended to reveal certain truths about the financial behavior of this particular luminary of the international Jewish community and the elaborate Jewish campaign surrounding his receipt of a Presidential pardon, but also that Jewish behavior in economic and political affairs is often so toxic that exaggeration or even commentary is unnecessary — the facts alone speak volumes. By the Congressional investigator’s own reckoning, the Rich case revealed Jewish communal complicity in large-scale tax evasion, the use of accusations of “anti-Semitism” to stifle criticism, extravagant political influence, and exploitative financial practices that had always walked a legal tightrope. The combined result of these factors was that the Jewish community “lived large” at the expense of ordinary workers and tax-payers. As cash went to Israel, Jewish defense groups, well-catered galas, superyachts, and an array of gaudy baubles. the common American worker was defrauded of millions upon millions of dollars as the sweat on his brow poured forth to benefit a corrupt Judeo-capitalist elite.

Implicit in that article was also the contention that the facets of the Marc Rich case were in many respects typical of the Jewish economic profile. The general features of this profile may be said to involve a marked disposition towards membership of the “super rich,” extravagant use of the “Ponzi” or “pyramid scheme” model, tactical use of bankruptcy, disproportionate use of credit as capital, tax evasion, bank or insurance fraud, fraudulent claims on public money, the use of multiple business names to obscure individual culpability, the exploitation of legal loopholes, the laundering of money via Jewish organizations, the use of Israel as a haven from prosecution, and a complex interplay between Jewish business and Jewish communal and national politics — often involving the formation of alliances with elite politicians. Typically, this latter factor results in the total avoidance of prosecution, or very lenient criminal sentences including early release from prison. As with any legitimate scientific observation, when subject to empirical testing, one would expect to see the same pattern repeated if certain environmental contexts (scale of money involved, level of Jewish identification of the subject etc.) were also similar. Confirming my contention, even very recent history has been replete with a large number of cases possessing almost identical features to the Rich case.

Solomon Dwek ran a wholly imaginary real estate empire, based on the pyramid scheme, under multiple business names. A strongly-identified Jew, he was vice-president of the Deal Yeshiva in New Jersey and was well known for his philanthropy inside the Jewish community. He was eventually taken into custody in 2006 after the FBI discovered he was behind a $400 million investment scheme in properties he never actually owned, and had defrauded PNC Bank by over $50 million dollars. After arrest Dwek attempted to bargain his way to a lighter sentence, eventually turning informant on a wider fraud ring that included over twenty Jewish businessmen and a string of bribed local non-Jewish politicians. Among the FBI’s discoveries following a series of July 2009 arrests were that five Orthodox rabbis were complicit in laundering millions of plundered cash, some from Israel, via their synagogues and religious charities. According to the official complaint, one of them, Edmund Nahum of Brooklyn, apparently told Dwek that he should spread his money through a number of rabbis: “the more it’s spread the better.” Yolie Gertner, who acted as a courier moving laundered cash between the US and Israel, disappeared before just before the July 2009 arrests and is widely believed, as was Marc Rich, to be under the protection of the Israeli authorities.

In one of the FBIs more sinister discoveries, it was also revealed that some of the money found its way to Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn Jew who was selling human kidneys on the black market, a trade he later confessed to have been involved in for decades. Ralph J. Marra Jr., the acting United States attorney in New Jersey, stated that Rosenbaum’s “business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000, which he would turn around and sell for $160,000.” These gory profits would then be “cleaned” via the synagogues and the cash distributed once more into the Jewish network. Overlapping layers of Jewish political and social influence had concealed this rampant corruption for decades, with Marra stating at a news conference that average citizens “don’t have a chance” against the culture of “influence peddling” the investigation had unearthed. As in the Rich case, this influence extended to grumblings of an anti-Semitic FBI, eventually forcing Weysun Dun, head of the FBI in New Jersey, to state that the FBI had no religious ax to grind. Jewish media commentary sweated at the case’s potential to stir anti-Semitism, with Business Insider writer Moe Tkacik eventually concluding that because Dwek had once given money to the non-Jewish family of a 7-year old boy dying of cancer, the Dwek case might not be as bad as it could be since “the kid was a goy. The goyim totally lose it over stories like this.”

Astute readers will see the tactical advantages of comparatively minimal and occasional Jewish donations to emotive non-Jewish causes. In keeping with the pattern witnessed in the Rich case, although initially facing 30 years behind bars, Dwek walked free after 30 months.

In a separate but again almost identical case, Steven Byers and Joseph “Yossi” Shereshevsky, co-founders of Wex-Trust, were charged in 2008 with defrauding more than 1,100 investors of about $255 million in a real estate pyramid scheme. The Jewish community of Norfolk, Virginia, from which the pair operated, immediately closed ranks. Refusing to co-operate with the authorities, The Virginian Pilot reported that “at the first Saturday service after Shereshevsky’s arrest, Rabbi Chaim Silver reminded the B’nai Israel congregation that Judaism forbids lashon hara, otherwise known as gossip or evil speech.”

What The Virginian Pilot wasn’t apparently aware of was that lashon hara has a specific meaning in the context of scrutiny by non-Jews, in the sense that the Talmudic consensus on Leviticus/Vaikra 19:16 is that it is forbidden to speak ill of fellow Jews to the Gentiles. It is thus an injunction to close ranks and protect the group rather than a general injunction against gossip. Part of it also lay in that fact that, like Rich and Dwek, both were pillars of the Jewish community and heavily invested much of their ill-gotten wealth into communal assets. The pair helped establish an Orthodox day school in Portsmouth named after Shereshevsky’s father, the Rabbi Chaim Shereshevsky Institute of Mesorah Learning. The pair also sponsored a summer day camp for local children, and even sent a private jet to Jamaica to rescue an Orthodox teen who said he was being abused at a reform school. Wex-Trust was itself a communal enterprise, with The Virginian Pilot reporting that the pair assembled a sales team that “included the scions of some of the region’s prominent Orthodox families.” When the scheme began unravelling in August 2008, the FBI apprehended Shereshevsky while he was, like Marc Rich and Yolie Gertner, leaving for Israel. He had no return ticket.

I could continue with similar cases like that of Marc Dreier whose specialty was defrauding hedge funds from which he stole $400 million, Sholam Weiss an expert in insurance fraud, or Sholom Rubashkin whose kosher meat business was steeped in bank fraud, money laundering and the use of illegal immigrants and child labor. I could spend many hundreds of pages exploring the activities of Scott Rothstein, who led an extravagant lifestyle and pumped millions into Jewish causes while heading a $1.2 billion pyramid scheme. That’s without even casting a glance at the cases of Samuel “Mouli” Cohen, Nevin Shapiro, Steve Cohen and Michael Steinberg, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, Eric Stein, Eliyahu Weinstein, Sam Israel, Samuel D. Waksal, Martin Frankel, Simon Feldman, Jeffrey Greenstein, Cary Feldman, Chaim Mayer Lebovits, Bernie Madoff, David and Donna Levy, Frederick D. Berg, Lou Pearlman, Andrew Rosenfeld,  Jordan Belfort, and Timothy Roth.

Before counter-arguments are made that these crimes and activities are the sins of bankers and lawyers rather than Jews, consider the following cases from a range of professions and try to find another link. David Silverstein was an already wealthy Washington chiropractor but made fraudulent welfare claims in order to pad his lifestyle a little more. Georgia chiropractor Andrew Sokol made over $6.5 million before he got caught. New Jersey chiropractor Scott Greenberg made more than half a million dollars in insurance scams before he was detected. Another New Jersey chiropractor, Daniel Dahan, almost made it to $4 million. In Brooklyn, dentist Lawrence J. Bruckner was convicted of defrauding the Medicaid program by paying people $25–$30 to solicit homeless Medicaid patients and billing taxpayers under his son’s name for services never provided. Together with three other Jewish dentists, including his son, the group stole around $6.3 million from Medicaid. By 2014 the problem of Jewish abuses of Medicaid in this manner reached a stage were a further four Russian-Jewish dentists were arrested under the instruction of the Attorney General. Outside Brooklyn, in Jacksonville, Florida, Howard Schneider was being arrested for identical crimes.

Despite lackluster Jewish apologetics on this issue (Abraham Foxman’s Jews and Money: Story of a Stereotype bring a particularly risible example) white-collar crime and a seemingly insatiable drive for wealth accumulation has been well-established by empirical academic studies as the most prominent feature of the Jewish socio-criminal profile. In 1971 A. Menachem of the Berkeley School of Criminology published a study in Issues in Criminology titled “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview.”[1] In this study, Menachem argued that ‘the Jewish crime rate tends to be higher than that of non-Jews and other religious groups for white-collar offenses, that is, commercial or commercially related crimes, such as fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, and embezzlement.” In 1988, Yale University’s Stanton Wheeler published “White-Collar Crimes and Criminals” for the Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. Among Wheeler’s findings were that while Protestants and Catholics were under-represented among white-collar criminals relative to their share of the population, Jews were over-represented to a very large degree (2% of the population, 15.2% of white-collar convictions). Wheeler states that “It would be a fair summary of our data to say that, demographically speaking, white-collar offenders are predominantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews.”

While Stanton’s statistics are enlightening in themselves, a more detailed picture emerges in David Weisburd’s Yale-published Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (1991). Here Weisburd informs us that although Jews comprise only around 2% of the United States population, they contribute at least 9% of lower category white-collar crimes (bank embezzlement, tax fraud and bank fraud), at least 15% of moderate category white-collar crimes (mail fraud, false claims, and bribery), and at least 33% of high category white-collar crimes (antitrust and securities fraud). Weisburg’s updated data showed that overall, Jews were responsible for an astonishing 23.9% of financial crime in America.[2]

Given the statistical data, not to mention the well-charted historical trajectory of Jewish financial behavior,[3] the argument that a Jewish predilection for financial misdeeds is a mere “canard” is totally unsustainable. The “canard” strategy in fact perpetuates a fallacy designed to conceal widespread crimes of considerable cost to non-Jews, and should itself be seen as an extension of the Jewish socio-criminal profile.

Contrary to Jewish accounts and apologetics, it is actually empirical data, rather than blind prejudice, that suggests that Jewish economic activity is disproportionately criminal and, indeed, parasitic. Given that a large amount of narrative evidence and anecdotal case studies indicate that the majority of illegal monies are diverted into Jewish causes to serve Jewish interests, it is clear that Jewish financial criminality involves a large transfer of wealth from non-Jewish economies to more insular Jewish micro-economies. Combining the Yale studies with FBI estimates that white-collar crime costs the United States more than $300 billion annually, and taking into consideration the great preponderance of Jews in the worst tier of financial crime, one arrives at the conclusion that the financial burden of detected Jewish white-collar criminality is somewhere between $75–$100 billion each year. Figures from other White nations can be considered to be proportionally similar given the pattern of Jewish wealth worldwide. This figure also doesn’t take into account those Jews whose endeavors remain undetected, or those whose practices are deeply immoral but manage somehow to stay on the lucky side of the law. And it is to an example of one of these malicious but “at large” characters that we now turn our attention.

Go to Part 2


[1] A. Menachem, “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview,” Issues in Criminality, Volume 6, Issue 2, (Summer 1971), pp.1-39.

[2] D. Weisburg, Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (Yale University Press, 1991), p.72

[3] For example, across Europe, between 1881 and 1914, Jews were over-represented in bankruptcy, forgery, fraud and libel. See P. Knepper, The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making, 1881-1914, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p.80. The trend, of course, went much further back in history.

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