NYPD infiltrated liberal political groups, Docs show

A new report says NYPD brass at 1 Police Plaza directed undercover officers to attend meetings of liberal political groups and keep files on activists.

NEW YORK - Undercover NYPD officers attended meetings of liberal political organizations and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the country, according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities.

The infiltration echoes the tactics the NYPD used in the run-up to New York's 2004 Republican National Convention, when police monitored church groups, anti-war organizations and environmental advocates nationwide. That effort was revealed by The New York Times in 2007 and in an ongoing federal civil rights lawsuit over how the NYPD treated convention protesters.

Police said the pre-convention spying was necessary to prepare for the huge, raucous crowds that were headed to the city. But documents obtained by The Associated Press show that the police department's intelligence unit continued to keep close watch on political groups in 2008, long after the convention had passed.

In April 2008, an undercover NYPD officer traveled to New Orleans to attend the People's Summit, a gathering of liberal groups organized around their shared opposition to U.S. economic policy and the effect of trade agreements between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

When the undercover effort was summarized for supervisors, it identified groups opposed to U.S. immigration policy, labor laws and racial profiling. Two activists — Jordan Flaherty, a journalist, and Marisa Franco, a labor organizer for housekeepers and nannies — were mentioned by name in one of the police intelligence reports obtained by the AP.

"One workshop was led by Jordan Flaherty, former member of the International Solidarity Movement Chapter in New York City," officers wrote in an April 25, 2008, memo to David Cohen, the NYPD's top intelligence officer. "Mr. Flaherty is an editor and journalist of the Left Turn Magazine and was one of the main organizers of the conference. Mr. Flaherty held a discussion calling for the increase of the divestment campaign of Israel and mentioned two events related to Palestine."

The document provides the latest example of how, in the name of fighting terrorism, law enforcement agencies around the country have scrutinized groups that legally oppose government policies. The FBI, for instance, has collected information on anti-war demonstrators. The Maryland state police infiltrated meetings of anti-death penalty groups. Missouri counterterrorism analysts suggested that support for Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, might indicate support for violent militias — an assertion for which state officials later apologized. And Texas officials urged authorities to monitor lobbying efforts by pro Muslim-groups.

Police have good reason to want to know what to expect when protesters take to the streets. Many big cities, such as Seattle in 1999, Cincinnati in 2001 and Toledo in 2005, have seen protests turned into violent, destructive riots. Intelligence from undercover officers gives police an idea of what to expect and lets them plan accordingly.

There was no political surveillance," Cohen testified in the ongoing lawsuit over NYPD's handling of protesters at the Republican convention. "This was a program designed to determine in advance the likelihood of unlawful activity or acts of violence.

The result of those efforts, however, was that people and organizations can be cataloged in police files for discussing political topics or advocating even legal protests, not violence or criminal activity.

By contrast, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests and in related protests in other cities, officials at the U.S. Homeland Security Department repeatedly urged authorities not to produce intelligence reports based simply on protest activities.

"Occupy Wall Street-type protesters mostly are engaged in constitutionally protected activity," department officials wrote in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the website Gawker. "We maintain our longstanding position that DHS should not report on activities when the basis for reporting is political speech.

At the NYPD, the monitoring was carried out by the Intelligence Division, a squad that operates with nearly no outside oversight and is so secretive that police said even its organizational chart is too sensitive to publish. The division has been the subject of a series of Associated Press articles that illustrated how the NYPD monitored Muslim neighborhoods, catalogued people who prayed at mosques and eavesdropped on sermons.

The AP left phone messages with Cohen and two NYPD press officers last week seeking comment about the undercover operation in New Orleans. They did not return the calls.

The NYPD has defended its efforts, saying the threat of terrorism means officers cannot wait to open an investigation until a crime is committed. Under rules governing NYPD investigations, officers are allowed to go anywhere the public can go and can prepare reports for "operational planning.

Though the NYPD's infiltration of political groups before the 2004 convention generated some controversy and has become an element in a lawsuit over the arrest, fingerprinting and detention of protesters, the surveillance itself has not been challenged in court.

Flaherty, who also writes for The Huffington Post, said he was not an organizer of the summit, as police wrote in the NYPD report. He said the event described by police actually was a film festival in New Orleans that same week, suggesting that the undercover officer's duties were more widespread than described in the report.

Flaherty said he recalls introducing a film about Palestinians but spoke only briefly and does not understand why that landed him a reference in police files.

The only threat was the threat of ideas," he said. "I think this idea of secret police following you around is terrifying. It really has an effect of spreading fear and squashing dissent.

Before the terrorist attacks of September 2001, infiltrating political groups was one of the most tightly controlled powers the NYPD could use. Such investigations were restricted by a longstanding court order in a lawsuit over the NYPD's spying on protest groups in the 1960s.

After the attacks, Cohen told a federal judge that, to keep the city safe, police must be allowed to open investigations before there's evidence of a crime. A federal judge agreed and relaxed the rules.

Since then, police have monitored not only suspected terrorists but also entire Muslim neighborhoods, mosques, restaurants and law-abiding protesters.

Keeping tabs on planned demonstrations is a key function of Cohen's division. Investigators with his Cyber Intelligence Unit monitor websites of activist groups, and undercover officers put themselves on email distribution lists for upcoming events. Plainclothes officers collect fliers on public demonstrations. Officers and informants infiltrate the groups and attend rallies, parades and marches.

Intelligence analysts take all this information and distill it into summaries for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly's daily briefing, documents show.

The April 2008 memo offers an unusually candid view of how political monitoring fit into the NYPD's larger, post-9/11 intelligence mission. As the AP has reported previously, Cohen's unit has transformed the NYPD into one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies in the United States, one that infiltrated Muslim student groups, monitored their websites and used informants as listening posts inside mosques.

Along with the political monitoring, the document describes plans to use informants to monitor mosques for conversations about the imminent verdict in the trial of three NYPD officers charged in the 2006 shooting death of Sean Bell, an unarmed man who died in a hail of gunfire. Police were worried about how the black community, particularly the New Black Panther Party, would respond to the verdict, according to this and other documents obtained by the AP.

The document also contained details of a whitewater rafting trip that an undercover officer attended with Muslim students from City College New York.

The group prayed at least four times a day, and much of the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature," the report reads.

Eugene Puryear, 26, an activist who attended the New Orleans summit, said he was not surprised to learn that police were monitoring it. He said it was entirely peaceful, a way to connect community organizers around the issues of racism and the rights of the poor. But he described it as a challenge to corporate power and said the NYPD probably felt threatened by it.

From their perspective, they need to spy on peaceful groups so they're not effective at putting out their peaceful message," he said. "They are threatened by anything challenging the status quo."

Lakewood, NJ: When divorce refused, Orthodox Jewish society acts

Yisrael Briskman














Lakewood, NJ - Yisrael Briskman’s wife in Israel wanted a divorce, and a rabbinical court decided she should be granted one. But Briskman refused and fled to the United States, where the FBI says an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and his wife lured him to their New Jersey home, kidnapped him and said they’d bury him alive in the Pocono Mountains if he didn’t relent.

Briskman said he was kicked repeatedly in the ribs at the home in Lakewood, robbed and shown the dark body bag he’d soon inhabit if he didn’t free his wife from their marital bonds.

“For you to get used to the size,” the Rabbi is quoted as saying in the criminal complaint leading to his surrender to the FBI this month.

If this Sopranos-style plot is true — which the The Rabbi denies — it is an anomaly. But it’s not uncommon for religious communities to use coercive tactics to pressure recalcitrant husbands into granting their wives a “get,” or religious divorce. Tactics run the gamut from denying social and religious privileges to using financial and legal leverage.

And while few cases involving unlawful methods have been reported to authorities, rumors abound in insular religious communities about what can happen to someone who keeps a spouse chained to a defunct marriage.

“They take the man to the water, to the Hudson River, and they put his head in and if you don’t give the get, you’re not coming out of the water,” said Estelle Freilich, recounting a story passed back and forth in Brooklyn, home to some of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities outside Israel. Freilich directs the New York-based Agunah International, a group that aids women whose husbands refuse to grant them a get.

The issue grows from the intricacies of Jewish law governing marriage and divorce. In Orthodox Judaism, men and women cannot remarry without a proper rabbinical divorce. Other streams of Judaism in the United States, such as the Conservative and Reform movements, generally honor civil divorces and don’t require a separate religious document.

Orthodox rabbis are required to try to reconcile marriages to prevent divorce, but if that fails, rabbinical courts can issue a divorce decree, or a “get” in Hebrew. But the get isn’t valid until both husband and wife consent. If one party refuses, the other cannot remarry or procreate without the children being considered illegitimate and prevented from ever marrying religious Jews.

The aggrieved spouse becomes “agunah” — Hebrew for “chained.”

Religious officials say the vast majority of divorces in their communities are resolved amicably and rarely get to the agunah stage. But disgruntled spouses will occasionally flout the rabbinical courts, either out of spite or in an attempt to extort money or secure favorable divorce conditions. A husband might tell his wife he’ll grant the get for $100,000, said Dov Hikind, a New York State assemblyman whose Brooklyn district includes many of ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods.

“It’s one of the most horrendous things I’ve ever had to witness,” Hikind said. “Women who sometimes for a great number of years are literally tied, their hands are tied.”

The situation in the United States and the modern Jewish diaspora differs from that in Israel and the long-ago Orthodox communities of eastern Europe because of the issue of jurisdiction. Israel’s religious courts are official legal institutions, and can impose sanctions on recalcitrant spouses, ranging from driver’s license suspension to imprisonment.

A few hundred years ago, rabbinical courts in isolated Jewish communities in Europe had relative autonomy, said Rabbi Michael Broyde, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta and a member of the Beth Din of America, the country’s largest rabbinical court. American rabbis operate within the realm of legal, protected behaviors to convince a spouse that a get is in order.

“In no way, shape or form does any rabbinical court ever direct conduct against the party that’s a violation of secular law,” Broyde said. “I’ve never encountered a story like (the one in New Jersey) in my sittings on a rabbinical court.”

But the court can issue a “seruv” — the Jewish equivalent of a contempt of court citation. Such a move directs rabbis to keep the person from receiving certain honors in the synagogue, and can even block entry to the synagogue. In a society where the synagogue is at the center of daily life, often that threat can be enough.

And if that doesn’t work, the community can take matters into its own hands. The group ORA, or the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot, exists to do just that.

Rabbi Jeremy Stern of New York City, ORA’s executive director, said communities can exert social pressure by persuading the spouse’s friends and family to shun them and deny them financial support until they give the get. The group has also resolved cases by suing a husband in civil court for infliction of emotional distress, but promising to drop the tort as soon as the divorce is granted.

“From our perspective, the withholding of a get is a form of domestic abuse,” Stern said. “The entire community says, ‘We won’t tolerate this kind of abuse in our community.’”

In Jewish neighborhoods across the country, protests have been organized outside the houses of recalcitrant spouses to embarrass them. Hikind, the Brooklyn assemblyman, said he’s personally attended several such demonstrations. Other visible ostracism includes signs posted around the spouse’s neighborhood and notices placed in Jewish religious publications.

In Briskman’s case, an order by the Israeli rabbinate instructed the community not to do business with him or extend him any kindness. It also urged followers not to give him a place to stay and ordered he serve a year in prison — perhaps one reason he left the country.

Federal prosecutors say The Rabbi and his wife, lured Briskman to their Lakewood home in October. He was handcuffed and blindfolded and forced to repeat in English and Hebrew that he would release his wife from the marriage. The couple surrendered to the FBI on kidnapping charges July 18 and are free on bail, pending indictment by a grand jury. They face life in prison if found guilty.

The Rabbi is also charged with making a telephone threat to Briskman’s father in Israel, telling the father he’d get a bullet in the head if he didn’t give the wife’s family $100,000 within two hours.

Lawyers for The Rabbi say they will plead not guilty.

Community-based sanctions are only effective so long as the individual is tied to that community. As societies have become more fluid and long-distance travel cheaper, it’s become easier for a spiteful spouse to skip town and resettle in a place where they won’t face repercussions, rabbis said.

“In Lakewood, a relative close-knit community, that would be effective,” said Rabbi Moshe Zev Weisberg, a key leader in the enclave of Lakewood, home to about 10,000 Orthodox families and one the world’s largest Jewish academies. “This is not done lightly. It’s done extremely rarely, when the Beth Din (rabbinical court) has exhausted every other option.”

In 2009, a divorce between two Israeli-born Florida residents broke down into extended litigation over the husband’s refusal to grant a get unless the wife, Oranit Shaked, agreed to pay legal fees and alimony.

“He knows the impact of what a get would do to me,” Shaked testified during the divorce trial. “I have no control over my future. If I want to get married, I can’t get married.”

The court ruled that it lacked jurisdiction over the religious aspect of the marriage and couldn’t force him to give a get. That prompted Shaked’s attorney, Martin Kofsky, to approach south Florida lawmakers about introducing a legal remedy for future divorces.

“The response I got was, we have some Orthodox male constituents, and we don’t want to lose them,” Kofsky said.

To this day, Oranit Shaked’s husband, Eran Ben David, has not granted her the get, her attorney said. Shaked, an emergency-room pediatrician, is free to remarry in a civil court, but an Orthodox rabbi would not perform a marriage for her and any children she birthed would be considered “mamzers,” or bastards.

In New York State, lawmakers have responded with what’s colloquially referred to as the “get law.” It requires anyone who was married in a religious ceremony to confirm that they have removed any impediments to their spouse’s remarriage before being granted a civil divorce.

The get law is a good start, but doesn’t help all couples, said Hikind, the state assemblyman.

“The rabbis, the leaders, they’re concerned about this, but what’s the solution?” he said. “I just don’t know.”

6 Israeli lawmakers to study US Jewish community .

BOSTON — Six Israeli lawmakers are headed to the United States this weekend for an intense study of American Jewish life amid concerns about a growing gap between American and Israeli Jews.

The members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, arrive Sunday at Brandeis University, near Boston, then head to New York City mid-week as part of the inaugural Ruderman Fellows Program.

The six-day program aims to give the legislators a detailed understanding of the structure and history of the American Jewish community. Each day is devoted to a single aspect of it, such as "How the Case of Israel is Made in United States," and includes lectures and meetings with American Jewish leaders in academics, business, philanthropy, even entertainment (at a Broadway play). A planned town hall-style meeting at Brandeis will give critics of Israeli policy a change to question the lawmakers.

Avi Dichter, one of the fellows, said he hopes the group returns to Israel as "ambassadors ... about what it means to be a Jew overseas in general and in the United States in particular."

Just last week, the Knesset drew rebukes from American Jewish leaders for what they considered meddlesome and inappropriate hearings on whether a left-leaning Washington-based Jewish group, J Street, was anti-Israel. And last month, the Jerusalem Post ran a lengthy essay, "Do American Jews still like Israel?" that discussed how American Jews no longer see Israel as the center of the Jewish world.

The fellows program's founder, Jay Ruderman of the Ruderman Family Foundation, moved to Israel from Boston in 2005 and said it was quickly clear that Israeli lawmakers often misunderstand basic aspects of American Jewish life.

The Ruderman fellowships target influential Israelis to ensure different perspectives don't harden into permanent divisions within the small global Jewish population, which "would be disastrous for the Jewish people," he said.

"The future unity of the Jewish people, that's what's driving me," Ruderman said. "In order to have unity, you have to have an understanding."

The six lawmakers were recruited from a range of Israeli political views and experience. Eitan Cabel and Daniel Ben Simon are from the liberal Labor party, Dichter and Ronit Tirosh from the centrist Kadima and Tzipi Hotovely and Carmel Shama from conservative Likud. The 30-year-old Hotovely is the youngest member of the parliament. The 59-year-old Dichter was a longtime member of Israel's internal security service, then its director, before being elected to parliament in 2006.

Ruderman hopes this year's fellows are the first of many who eventually have "a major impact" in the 120-seat Knesset.

The global Jewish population is estimated at 13.4 million, with Israel (5.7 million) and the United States (5.25 million) home to nearly 82 percent of the total.

Numbers aren't all that make the communities vital to each other, said Brandeis professor Jonathan Sarna, an expert in American Jewish history who helped design the program. Israel sees itself as both a physical and spiritual homeland for Jews worldwide, and the American community is by far the most influential outside Israel. Meanwhile, American Jews expect understanding from its government in the same way American Catholics expect the Vatican to try to understand them, he said.

But Sarna said many Israelis struggle to grasp the diversity of Jewish life and practice in America, including an alphabet soup of advocacy groups and interests.

Judaism in Israel, financially sponsored and guided by government through offices such as the Chief Rabbi, is far more monolithic, Sarna said. The Israeli government sometimes answers sensitive questions about Judaism in ways American Jews object to — such as who among those who've converted are Jewish (and thus eligible for Israeli citizenship), whose marriages are Jewish, whose children are Jewish.

"Judaism in the United States had to develop in an utterly different way, in the absence of government control, oversight, power," Sarna said. "It had to develop in a competitive religious market."

The liberal Reform movement has grown to be the largest of the three major American denominations, and its members are also the least likely among them (21 percent) to describe themselves as "very emotionally attached to Israel," according to a 2005 report by the United Jewish Communities.

Meanwhile, most Jews in Israel believe Jews worldwide should eventually settle there, Ruderman said. The fellows program can help Israelis see why American Jews are content to stay in America, he said.

"To see it live in action, and to understand that, 'Hey, there's a rich Jewish life here in America that people enjoy being part of, I think that will help them in their understanding of what this community's all about,'" Ruderman said.

Anti-Defamation League president Abraham Foxman, who will meet the Knesset members in New York, said today's debates between Americans and Israelis are the same as they've been for decades, but the Internet has ramped up the intensity and impact. On top of it, he said, many younger American Jews don't fully understand the context in which Israelis make their case, surrounded by unbendingly hostile neighbors and worried about their nation's survival.

Said Dichter: "I think the temperature in Israel is different."

Foxman said face-to-face visits can clarify where both sides are coming from, emphasize the importance of respectful debate and make clear that disagreement with Israel's government doesn't signal lack of American support for the nation.

"It's only for the good," Foxman said.

Review: 'The Jersey Sting' Tells of FBI Raid

Review: 'Jersey Sting' tells how the FBI deployed over 300 agents in 1 New Jersey raid

"The Jersey Sting: A True Story of Corrupt Pols, Money Laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys, and the Informant Who Brought it All Down" (St. Martin's Press), by Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin: It was like a small military undertaking when the FBI deployed over 300 agents in eastern New Jersey and the New York borough of Brooklyn early one July morning in 2009.

They captured 44 people, including five rabbis. Most were accused of political bribery, money laundering and tax evasion. One rabbi was charged with trafficking in human kidneys.

The story of "The Jersey Sting" is meticulously, seriously — and humorously — told by Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin, two reporters at The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. (Margolin now works for the New York Post.) The book won honors from the American Society of Newspaper Editors and made the finals for a Pulitzer Prize.

The tale is complex. It centers on the career of Solomon Dwek, the son of a rabbi. He combined the roles of an unlicensed real estate broker, school executive, money launderer, political operator with a specialty in bribes, and an FBI informant wearing a concealed camera and voice recorder.

Dwek's work for the FBI was authorized by U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, now governor of New Jersey and a not-too-dark horse for the Republican nomination in the 2012 presidential race.

Christie was also the first to announce Dwek's arrest following a plea agreement. Dwek pleaded guilty of trying to defraud a bank by cashing two phony checks — $25 million each. It was an attempt to shore up a Ponzi scheme in connection with his real estate business. He faces nine to 11 years in prison, remaining under "house arrest" while other cases are being decided.

So it's not light reading to undertake instead of a TV whodunit after a heavy dinner and a long day at the office. The alert reader will also get an introduction to New Jersey politics and its reputation for corruption. It's a help that the authors have furnished a convenient cast of characters with nearly 100 names and roles.