NEW JERSEY
Asbury Park Press
Shannon Mullen, Asbury Park Press April 14, 2015
TRENTON – The federal kidnapping case against the Lakewood rabbi dubbed “The Prodfather” lacks a critical piece of evidence, his attorney told the jury Tuesday: an actual cattle prod.
Robert Stahl, representing Rabbi Mendel Epstein, said there were no electric shock devices or other weapons recovered in 2013 when the FBI swept into an Edison warehouse and arrested a group of men wearing dark clothing and disguises with ties to Epstein, a well-known authority on contentious religious divorces within the insular Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Lakewood.
In his closing statement, Stahl suggested that the 69-year-old rabbi was “puffing and exaggerating” when he talked to undercover FBI agents about abducting, beating and tasering Jewish men in the testicles until they agreed to grant their wives divorces.
Stahl said his client only meant to reassure someone he believed to be a “desperate” wife who was counting on the rabbi to pressure her husband into providing her with a get, the document that proves a marriage has been dissolved under Jewish law.
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