Orthodox Shomrim Patrol Faces New Questions after Brooklyn Bribery Scandal
By Josh Nathan-Kazis
Now, a sprawling FBI investigation into corrupt relationships between Orthodox activists and the NYPD is drawing new attention to longstanding concerns about the group’s influence in the neighborhood, and its unusually close ties to the NYPD’s 66th Precinct in Boro Park. On April 17, a Shomrim leader named Shaya Lichtenstein was arrested on charges that he attempted to bribe a police officer into helping him secure gun licenses, which are tightly regulated in New York City by the police department. Lichtenstein met the officer he allegedly tried to bribe through his involvement in the Shomrim, according to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. “I’ll give you… more than you’ll make in the police department,” Lichtenstein allegedly told the officer. The arrest of Lichtenstein came a week after New York media identified Jeremy Reichberg, a Boro Park Hasidic activist with with close ties to the 66th Precinct, as being one of two Orthodox men at the center of an FBI corruption investigation. The 66th Precinct’s longtime community affairs officer has been placed on modified duty amid the ongoing FBI probe, as has one former commanding officer of the 66th Precinct. Other top police brass have been disciplined and transferred. Reichberg, sources say, was an independent operator in Boro Park; not a member of the Shomrim, but a rival who tried to build his own relationships with the police there. In early statements to the press, police officials asserted that the FBI investigation addressed a narrow problem among a few bad officers. “It goes to perhaps bad judgment among a small group of people,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters Lawrence Byrne told the New York Times on April 7. But as more details of the FBI probe have been revealed police commissioner Bill Bratton has admitted that the scandal is the worst to hit the NYPD in decades. The arrest of Lichtenstein raises questions about the vast network of relationships with government and police that the Shomrim have cultivated in recent years; ties that have won them government grants, close on-the-street cooperation with cops, and strong social bonds with officers throughout the NYPD. These ties have helped the Shomrim increase their influence, while giving the 66th Precinct help in managing security within Boro Park’s difficult-to-penetrate Hasidic world. The Shomrim, headquartered on 14th Avenue in Boro Park, consist entirely of married Orthodox men, many of them owners of small Boro Park businesses. While the criminal complaint against Lichtenstein asserts that he is a member of the Shomrim, officials with the group say he dropped out after moving to Rockland County. Yet Lichtenstein played on the Shomrim softball team in an August 2015 game against the 66th Precinct, and a photo tweeted from the official Shomrim twitter account less than a week ago appears to show Lichtenstein in attendance at a Shomrim meeting with the current commanding officer of the 66th Precinct about the upcoming Passover holiday. Founded in the early 1990s as the Bakery Boys, a loose gang of young Hasidic men who worked nighttime delivery jobs, the Shormim were formalized under the tutelage of the 66th Precinct. The group was officially incorporated in 1995 as the Shmira Civilian Volunteer Patrol of Boro Park. (Confusingly, Shmira is also the name of a rival Boro Park volunteer patrol. The original group is known on the streets as the Shomrim, despite the official designation on its tax forms.) Today, the Boro Park Shomrim are largely government-funded, according to the group’s tax filings, with New York City giving the organization over $300,000 since 2011. New York City Council member David Greenfield alone has directed more than $100,000 to the group during that period. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s liaison to the Jewish community, Pinny Ringel, is a former member. One of the Shomrim leaders, Marc Katz, is president of the city-supported Community Council that advises the 66th Precinct. As a result of the federal investigation, the city froze $35,000 worth of city contracts with the Shomrim, according to a report in Politico New York. The NYPD declined to make the current commanding officer of the 66th Precinct, Captain Kenneth Quick, available for an interview. But from the group’s early days up until just weeks ago, police officials who work with the Shomrim on the ground have seemed particularly enamored of them. In a 2015 interview posted on the local Jewish news website JPUpdates, Quick called the Shomrim a “good force multiplier.” And Joseph Esposito, a former top-ranked NYPD official who was stationed at the 66th Precinct from 1986 until the early 1990s, eventually serving as the precinct’s commanding officer, said he “felt the Shomrim, the Bakery Boys that run in the 6-6, was one of the best-run, most controlled civilian patrols I’ve ever experienced in my tenure in the police department.” Esposito went on to become the Chief of Department, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD, and serves today as commissioner of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management. “What we did in the 6-6 could be a model for the rest of the city,” he said. The Shomrim reinforce their ties to police through official dinners and fancy parties. On March 22, a Shomrim coordinator and a member of its board of directors, Simcha Bernath, hosted a meal at a pricey Boro Park kosher steakhouse for roughly 30 NYPD officers and brass, including Quick and the high-ranking commander of Patrol Borough Brooklyn South, Assistant Chief Steven M. Powers. Also in attendance was Deputy Chief Eric Rodriguez, Powers’s second-in-command, who was transferred to desk duty on April 8 amid the FBI investigation. A skirt steak entree at The Loft costs $42, according to the restaurant’s website.
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.