Green Church Bulletin: PS 331

Lew Fidler, David Storobin and the Politics of Insinuation

What are skinheads, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists doing in a special election race between Democratic City Council Member Lew Fidler and Republican lawyer David Storobin for Carl Kruger's vacant State Senate seat?

Good question.

The accusations by Fidler stem from Storobin's having written for conservative website Global Politician.  In his posts, Storobin mentions that both Arabs and Jews are Semitic people, which is, like, true.

Some skinheads, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists linked to Storobin's posts. That's apparently the basis for Fidler's accusations against Storobin.

Storobin, a Jew who says his family left Russia because of anti-Semitism, denies being an anti-Semite, and has brought in a religious heavy to back him up.

Storobin supporter Rabbi Mordechai Tokarsky has written a scolding letter to Fidler telling him to cut out the Nazi skinhead thing.

Good advice.

The post from the Daily News.

Living Diversity

Hijab-wearing Palestinian-American mother of three Linda Sarsour, who is the executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York in Bay Ridge, plans to run for the New York City Council when a  seat opens up in 2017.

If she wins, she will be the first Arab-American City Council Member.

Because the increasingly high-profile Sarsour, who took over the AAANY in 2005, now travels a lot, the organization's daily operations have been delegated to Jennie Goldstein, a 24-year-old from the Upper East Side of Manhattan whose father is Jewish and whose mother is Protestant.

Goldstein, a non-Arabic speaker who grew up lighting Shabbat candles on Fridays and going to church with her mother on Sundays, is a Middlebury graduate in international economics who came to AANY in 2009 through AmericCorps to do community-building.

By the most conservative estimate, there are 35,000 Arabs in Bay Ridge, making it the biggest Arab-American community outside of  Michigan and California.  Over the next two months, the AAANY, which receives no government funding, will conduct its first-ever census of the Arab community.

The ten-year-old organization has quintupled its budget over the past five years to a half-million dollars, sourced from individual donations and foundation support, including grants from the New York Foundation, the Union Square Awards, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation.

As The Forward did a century ago for Eastern European immigrants, the AAANY has become an acculturation portal for tens of thousands of Arabs from Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, and other Mid-Eastern countries.

The post from Tablet Magazine.

Kris Hermansen Remembered at PC's

From 2-6 PM on February 11, PC's Bar and Grill, at 7215 5th Avenue in Bay Ridge, will host a celebration of the life of Kris Hermansen, who would have turned 50 on January 30, had he survived his battle with cancer and RSD.

The $40 admission includes open bar and buffet.

There will be raffles, a 50/50 and prizes. 

Funds raised at the event will be donated to non-profit organizations fighting the two diseases that prematurely ended Kris's life.

Call Laurie at 718-619-5046 or Lydia at 917-566-8079 for more information.

Occupy Brooklyn General Assembly at Dutch Reformed Church

Occupy Brooklyn will hold its next General Assembly from 7-9 PM on Thursday, February 2, at the Dutch Reformed Church, 890 Flatbush Avenue.

If you haven't been following the group, here’s a description of what they've been doing. If you're looking for a place to jump in, here are some ways to do that. For more information about the Occupy movement, here's an FAQ list.

The Occupy Brooklyn General Assembly maintains a website to consolidate and disseminate information about Occupy activities in Brooklyn.

Mortgage-Backed Securities Fraudsters Face Hybrid Task Force

State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, whose idea it was, will co-chair the U.S. Attorney's federal financial crimes enforcement task force, which will grant broad joint authority to federal and state officials to investigate abuses by the financial industry in the packaging, selling and valuing of residential mortgage-backed securities, the bundled investments containing near-worthless mortgages that bankrupted many investors and caused the 2008 financial crisis.

The task force will target the financial institutions that fraudulently marketed these mortgage products, which have been called "ground zero" in the financial crisis, causing unprecedented losses.

The first-of-its-kind task force will deploy 55 prosecutors, FBI agents and analysts in what Schneiderman promises will be the broadest, deepest investigation so far into what blew up the U.S. economy.

Information-sharing between federal and state investigators is expected to leverage the investigative power of the task force, since, as Schneiderman pointed out, New York state securities law is more flexible than federal securities law, making it easier for the task force to put cases together.

Holder said he expects the task force will improve outcomes at the federal level.

The article from USA Today.

More from the Daily News.

Michael Grimm and the Rabbi's Followers

According to the New York Times, the campaign finances of U.S. Representative Michael Grimm have come under scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (his former employer) and the U.S. Attorney's Office.

After Grimm, a Conservative Republican from Staten Island, announced his congressional run in 2009, he had to convince GOP leaders in Washington that he had the fundraising chops to merit their investment.

Grimm made his bones by gathering $500,000 from followers of celebrity Orthodox Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, an Israeli who only speaks Hebrew and won't meet with women.  At the side of Ofer Biton, a porn shop owner who was one of the rabbi's top aides, Grimm traveled throughout the New York region raising money from the rabbi's followers.

Most of these donors had never given to a federal campaign before and didn't live in the district where Grimm was running, but their money was key to Grimm's defeat of first-term Democratic incumbent Michael McMahon in 2010.

McMahon fired his assistant Jennifer Nelson mid-campaign for using the label "Jewish money" in reference to these donations.  

Now Biton and Ronn Tarossian, CEO of a public relations firm,  are the subjects of a federal investigation into whether they embezzled millions from the rabbi's congregation.

The New York Times, in a spinoff of its investigation into the allegations against Biton and Tarossian, questions Biton's role in the Grimm campaign (Biton reportedly said he wanted a green card out of it), and whether Grimm solicited donations from the rabbi's followers that he knew broke campaign finance rules -- because they were either too big or came from people without green cards.

Grimm has now lawyered up; the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI aren't talking to the press;  the rabbi denies knowing what Grimm and Biton were doing; Biton's lawyer says his client never raised money for Grimm; and Tarossian's lawyer calls his client a "victim" in the case.

Few of the rabbi's followers have donated to Grimm's re-election campaign, some telling the Times that they are wary of the federal embezzlement case against Biton.

The article from the New York Times.

More from Staten Island Live.

More from Brooklyn Daily.

Mousa Khalil and the Hard Money Guys

In 2006, before the real estate bubble burst and before most of Bay Ridge was down-zoned, real estate speculator Mousa Khalil, owner of a plumbing business in Sunset Park, got a $1.5 million blanket mortgage from Congregation Imrei Yehuda and Parkay LLC at 24% interest -- a point below the usury rate -- to buy seven properties in Bay Ridge.

Those properties are now in foreclosure.  No one bid on them at a public foreclosure auction earlier this month.

Khalil owns 23 other similar properties in Bay Ridge, 19 of which, according to Real Deal, are at some stage in the foreclosure process.

Real estate speculator Meyer Unsdorfer, prosecuted in 1999 by the U.S. Attorney's Office (click through the reset screen) for Sherman Act violations, represents Congregation Imrei Yehuda.

Unsdorfer and his co-conspirators were charged in federal court with rigging bankruptcy auctions, then holding a second, secret auction, after the rigged public one, and splitting the difference between the winning public bid and the winning secret bid.

That case ended in a plea deal the same year. 

A poster to local online message board Bay Ridge Talk gave this description of the scene at a foreclosure auction at Kings County Civil Court:  "It was heartbreaking to see home owners crying during the bidding and these guys laughing and playing the game."

Mousa Khalil is now $2.35 million in arrears on the Imrei Yehuda/Parkay seven-property spreader mortgage.  He fell behind in 2008, when the recession hit his business and some of his tenants stopped paying rent, sending him to housing court.

Hard money guys, according a landlord friend in Clinton Hill, offer recourse to ambitious buyers who don't qualify for bank loans -- or don't want to deal with a bank.  Hard money loans come at significantly higher interest rates for shorter terms, and may end in a balloon.

Hard money lenders are very comfortable with risk, my friend said, because, like hedge funds, they bet against themselves.  The value of the properties they invest in is far more important to them than whether the borrower can pay off the mortgage.

The absurdly over-leveraged Khalil says he’s trying to sell some of his properties, but can't get enough for them.