NEW YORK
Jewish Daily Forward
By Paul Berger
Published July 18, 2013, issue of July 26, 2013.
To the Orthodox boys of Englewood, N.J., and Monsey, N.Y., Richard “Ricky” Andron was unbelievably cool: a 30-something bachelor and martial arts expert who hosted Sabbath sleepovers at his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where they played cards and looked at pornographic magazines.
But Andron’s apartment, just off Central Park, was a trap, according to interviews with about a dozen men who say they were abused or know people who were abused by Andron during the late 1970s and early ’80s.
“He manhandled me below the waist and caused me to have my first (sexual) experience,” said one of the men to step forward, who requested anonymity. “I was a 13-year-old and I had an experience that was not something a 13-year-old boy should experience from another man.”
Another man, who woke in the night to find Andron “fiddling below the sheets,” said: “He was the perfect pedophile. He had you doing things you knew you should not be doing, in terms of magazines and [going to see] R-rated movies, so it made it awkward for any victim to volunteer information.”
Dave Raben, a Miami attorney who specializes in criminal defense and who identified himself as representing Andron, declined to comment.
Andron, 67, first came to public attention when he was named in a high-profile lawsuit filed July 8 in U.S. District Court in White Plains, N.Y., by 19 former students at Yeshiva University High School for Boys, in Manhattan. The suit accuses Y.U. administrators and teachers of covering up decades of physical and sexual abuse. The abuse allegations are principally against two former Y.U. high school employees, Rabbi George Finkelstein and Rabbi Macy Gordon.
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