NY Times Profile Joe Levin

T.O.T. Private Investigation and Consulting, founded by Joe Levin, a practicing Orthodox Jew, specializes in Orthodox-related cases worldwide

























Hasidic Sleuth’s Beat: Mean Streets of Brooklyn

JOE LEVIN, a private investigator in Brooklyn, was waiting to meet a new client in the parking lot of a kosher supermarket in Borough Park one recent morning. Glancing in the side-view mirror of his chauffeured sport utility vehicle, Mr. Levin said he liked this particular spot because he knew the manager, the delivery man and the security guard, who lets him borrow footage from the lot’s surveillance equipment.

Most of the time, though, Mr. Levin does his own snooping. On his iPad, he scrolled through photographs of people he was being paid about $100 an hour to follow, including a rebellious Hasidic girl in a white miniskirt and a long-bearded rabbi lighting a cigarette on the sidewalk.

“He’s a bad guy,” Mr. Levin said, enlarging the rabbi’s image. “A very bad guy.”

Not your usual private eye, Mr. Levin is a practicing Orthodox Jew, a member of the Bobov Hasidic sect and the founder of T.O.T. Private Investigation and Consulting, a New York-based company that specializes in Orthodox-related cases worldwide. The company, whose focus is uncommon — and perhaps unique in the United States — hires forensic experts, former homicide detectives, photographers and even pilots, mostly on a per-case basis. Its services range from investigations into international banks and Israeli investment companies to local background checks for prospective Shidduchim, or Orthodox marital arrangements.

Since Mr. Levin started the business 12 years ago, his life has often resembled the plot of a TV crime drama. He has trailed unwitting subjects into synagogues and strip clubs, sat beside them on international flights and tracked them down in remote areas of Puerto Rico and Brazil. While he usually wears the black frock coat and fedora of the Hasidim, when undercover he has donned stocking caps and Yankees jerseys to conceal his brown knit skullcap and tzitzit, the ritual fringes worn by observant Jews.

His organization’s mission is encoded in the name T.O.T., an acronym for the Yiddish expression “Tuchis afn tish.”

“It means ‘Put your tuchis on the table,’ ” said Mr. Levin, a bearded, powerfully built man in his late 30s, who shaved off his side locks years ago out of personal preference. “In other words, ‘Show me the proof.’ And that’s what I do. I bring my proof to the people.”

Mr. Levin has provided key evidence in dozens of high-profile cases. In November, he found Yitzhak Shuchat, a Hasidic man from Crown Heights whom the police were seeking as a suspect in the 2008 beating of a police officer’s son, in a village outside Tel Aviv. Though Mr. Levin was hired by a member of a Hasidic volunteer crime patrol, he turned his information over to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which has requested Mr. Shuchat’s extradition.

Mr. Levin said that information he learned in April led to the indictment of Rabbi Samuel Kellner of Brooklyn on charges that he had bribed a witness in a child molestation case against Baruch Mordechai Lebovits of Borough Park in an effort to extort money from Mr. Lebovits.

Mr. Levin was hired by the family of Mr. Lebovits after he was sentenced last year to up to 32 years in prison on a sexual abuse conviction. Mr. Lebovits, who is referred to as “rabbi” by his peers, though his lawyer said last year that he was not ordained, has been released on bail pending the outcome of Rabbi Kellner’s trial.

Mr. Levin is intentionally vague about his background. He acknowledges that he served in the Israeli Army before moving to New York in 1994, but beyond that, he has managed to keep much of his life, and his livelihood, invisible.

“For years I tried to have not just a low profile, but no profile,” he said. “People would say to me, ‘I haven’t heard of you,’ and I’d say: ‘That’s great! If you’ve heard of me, you must have been in trouble.’ ”

Still, last year he started a Web site and began talking to the news media, figuring that he might as well capitalize on the publicized cases that had helped spread his name. But his main motivation, he said, was a growing concern for the safety of the Orthodox. Financial crime is on the rise in Orthodox neighborhoods, fueled, in Mr. Levin’s view, by the recession, high birth rates and a lack of higher education that keeps young people from getting high-paying jobs.

In the Hasidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for instance, police statistics show that while the number of violent crimes has fallen in the past 10 years, episodes of grand larceny have increased by more than 40 percent.

Unlike the retired government agents and police officials who often start their own private investigation companies, Mr. Levin can penetrate insular Orthodox strongholds without raising suspicion.

“There are a lot of intricate rules and coded behaviors that people from outside these communities don’t understand,” said Shmarya Rosenberg, a former Chabad-Lubavitch Hasid and the author of the muckraking blog FailedMessiah.com, who has interviewed Mr. Levin for several articles. “You might think you blend in at the synagogue, for example, but to the Hasidim, it’s as if a monkey in a spacesuit has just descended from outer space.”

As an Orthodox Jew, Mr. Levin is also allowed to testify in rabbinical court, where matters like divorces and business disputes are settled according to Jewish law. Rabbis who oversee these trials often refuse to look at the explicit evidence Mr. Levin collects, like photographs of a husband committing adultery. They will, however, take his personal testimony.

All the same, non-Jews come in handy on the Sabbath, when Mr. Levin is not able to work. “Saturday is a very busy day for mischief inside the Hasidic world,” he said, adding that he mainly hires off-duty police officers to cover for him until the sun goes down. “Everyone thinks we’re sleeping. But in reality we’re wide awake.”

Mr. Levin outsources jobs that are beyond his expertise. Some Orthodox people come to him with marital problems because, he said, they do not know that therapists and marriage counselors exist. He recalled one client from Long Island who suspected her husband of infidelity. “I asked if she still loved her husband, and she said yes,” he recalled. “So I told her, ‘Don’t hire me.’ Because if I come back with the evidence, it’s too late for the marriage counselor.”

When investigating Internet-related crimes like identity theft and e-mail harassment, he turns to a small cadre of computer forensics specialists.

In fact, the only time Mr. Levin sits at a computer is to post news stories of interest to Jews on his blog each morning. (Subjects of recent posts have included the Colombian singer Shakira’s visit to the Western Wall and the Twitter scandal of Anthony D. Weiner, the former representative.) Mr. Levin spends most of his day driving around Brooklyn to consult new clients, meet with lawyers and potential sources, and deal with unexpected twists in his cases.

On a recent job in Borough Park, he stared through the tinted windows of his S.U.V. at a nervous-looking Hasidic man on the sidewalk. Days earlier, the man had claimed to possess a videotape of a rabbi having sex with two underage girls.

Mr. Levin, who was dressed in a beige topcoat, Burberry sunglasses and a Nike baseball cap, expressed skepticism. “I’m not believing this baloney,” he said as his driver snapped photographs of the man through the windshield. “Look at how he’s pacing, and smoking cigarettes one after one. He’s not reliable, this guy.”

A few hours later, Mr. Levin met with the man and several others in an empty synagogue. It turned out that the videotape was actually held by a man who was not there, and who might hand it over in exchange for money, a prostitute and a new iPhone.

Back in the car, Mr. Levin said that because the holder of the tape was black, he would send a black off-duty police officer to try to recover it. “An Orthodox guy knocking on his door would not be a good start,” he said.

Though members of the Orthodox faith say they have faced harassment or intimidation for committing even mildly subversive acts, Mr. Levin plays down the risks of spying and telling within the community. In rabbinical court, he said, the subjects of his investigations have become enraged. “They scream at me,” he said. “But that’s normal. Gradually they calm down.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Rosenberg of FailedMessiah said Mr. Levin faced a difficult choice when investigating big, newsworthy scandals. “You don’t want to draw bad publicity to the Orthodox faith,” he said, “but you also don’t want to see the crime continue.”

As a religious man, Mr. Levin says the crimes he sees pain him deeply.

“When I wake up in the morning, I pray to God and I want to believe that there are good people in the world,” he said. “But when I go to work every day and I see what I see, it’s a very big challenge for me.”

Mr. Levin’s wife of 13 years, Ruthie Levin, 33, said he often has trouble sleeping.

“Last night he was up every hour,” she said recently, sitting beside him outside their home. She added that the pressure of a new case involving two powerful rabbis was causing him stress.

Asked whether Mr. Levin had ever used his investigative skills in their relationship, she raised her eyebrows.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “Before we met, he knew all the boys I’d ever dated. He knew everything about me.”

How did he come to know these things? “I’d been looking into it,” Mr. Levin said, cracking a smile. “Let’s put it like that.”