ГУЛаг Палестины

New York's 47th Street : Maariv, September 2, 1994 By Ben Kaspit, the New York correspondent

Rabbi Yosef Crozet fell because of his big mouth. "I launder money, a lot of money," he once told an acquaintance. "Every day I take $300,000 from 47th

Street in Manhattan, bring it to the synagogue, give a receipt and then take a commission." The man who heard that story from Crozer was, how sad, an

undercover Jewish agent of the US agency for fighting drugs, DEA.

A month later, in February 1990, Crozer was arrested by agents on his way from 47th Street to Brooklyn. They found on him prayer books, five passports

and also $280,000 in cash in the trunk of his car. He traveled that route every day. He would arrive at the gold trading office on 47th Street in the afternoon,

and leave a little later, carrying suitcases and bags loaded with cash. From there he drove to the Hessed Ve'Tzadaka ["Mercy and Charity"] synagogue in

Brooklyn which had been turned into a laundry for millions of dollars, the revenue from drug sales in the New York area.

That was how Crozer made his living. Assuming that the commission for laundering money ranged in the area of 2% to 6%, Rabbi Crozet can be presumed

not to have suffered from hunger. The investigators who questioned him faced a simple task.

A respectable and pious jew who never imagined that he would be interrogated, a son of a highly respected rabbi who headed a large yeshiva in city of New

Square, Crozer broke down and cooperated. But then his lawyer, Stanley Lupkin, argued that his client, a pious Jew, had no idea that he was laundering

drug money. Crozer, according to his lawyer, believed that he was laundering money for a Jewish diamond trader .'who trades in cash" and not for Gentile

drug traders and was using the situation to make some extra money, for his synagogue.

It seems that this argument had some effect since Crozer was sentenced to one year and one days imprisonment. In exchange for a lenient science, he

supplied his interrogators with valuable information which helped them to capture a person whom they had been seeking for a long time: Avraham Sharir,

another pious Jew, the owner of a gold trading office on 47th Street, who was really one of the biggest sharks for laundering drug money in New York City.

Sharir, an Israeli Jew aged about 45, to whom we will later return, subsequently confessed to having laundered $200 million for the Colombian drug cartel of

Kali.

The drug trade is considered to be the most profitable branch of crime in the world. The profit margin ranges in the area of 200% for cocaine and 1,200% for

heroin. The amounts of money laundered in the trading office are larger than the budgets of many small states. The temptation is great. The main problem of

the Colombian drug barons who control a significant part of world drug trade is how to get rid of the money. It is a problem of the rich but a nagging one.

Two major Colombian drug cartels operate in the US - the Kali cartel and the Medellin cartel.

The killing of the head of the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escovar, by the Colombian authorities in December 1993 greatly weakened this cartel which had

controlled the drug trade in the New York area. The Kali people, in contrast, hold a monopoly over the Los Angeles and Miami area markets. At present,

the Kali people distribute about 80 per cent of the world's cocaine and a third of the heroin- The Kali drug cartel makes $25 billion each year within the US

alone. The money must somehow be shipped out of the US without arousing the attention of the American authorities. Besides, the cash must be given a seal

of approval and, one way or another, become legitimized.

Around this complex issue a mega-business has sprung up - laundering and smuggling drug money. American customs investigators have found millions of

dollars in containers supposed to have contained dried peas, in double-sided gas tanks, in steel boxes attached to freight ships. In 1990 they found $14

million in cash in a shipment of cables, supposed to have been sent from a Long Island warehouse to Colombia.

According to records found on the site, that was shipment No. 234 (multiplied by 14 million, calculate it yourselves). The same year, at Kennedy Airport, in a

warehouse, 26 large containers were found which were supposed to have contained bull sperm. The latter was not there but there were $6.5 million. In May

of this year American investigators raided a bowling ball plant in Long Island. They picked up the balls, cut them in half and found within them $210,000 in

used $100 bills.

Despite their active imaginations, the drug barons find it hard to keep up. $25 billion is a lot of money and it must fill a lot of space since most of the money

gained in drug deals comes in bills of $10 to $20. And that is how the match was made between the drug cartels and 47th Street in Manhattan.

This street is the world center for trading diamonds, gold, jewels and precious stones. Hundreds of businesses are crowded in there, between Fifth and Sixth