By Jeane Macintosh
New York Post
August 1, 2011
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/suite_charity_mystery_zcSuAL0vrrbTyWKGG1KIsL
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| CLEAN IT UP! The owners of this Brooklyn home are angry that it's the legal address of numerous scandal-plagued nonprofits. |
Charity may begin at home -- but nearly 200 nonprofits at one Brooklyn residence might be a record.
IRS documents show that 196 such New York groups -- including some connected to rogue rabbis jailed for money laundering and child molestation -- are registered to a house on Bedford Avenue whose owners know nothing about the organizations.
The eye-popping number accounts for about a quarter of the 720 charities in the Midwood ZIP code.
"I would love for this to be straightened out, for someone to do something," said Rose Meisner, who, with husband Joseph, bought the Bedford Avenue house 10 years ago. "I'm just an innocent little lady."
Investigators have been regular visitors to the Meisner home -- most recently when prominent Brooklyn rabbis Mordechai Fish and Saul Kassin were busted by the feds in 2009 in a massive New Jersey-based money-laundering scheme.
Both men, who copped to helping FBI informant Solomon Dwek in a $50 million fraud scheme, are now in jail.
But Fish's Congregation Sheves Achim nonprofit remains registered to the Meisner's house, as do at least two Kassin-connected groups, Bnei Shaare Zion and Shaar Zion charities.
Convicted child molester Rabbi Baruch Lebovits, who is doing 32 years in the slammer on a 2010 sentence for eight counts of sexual abuse, also used the address for his nonprofit. The Congregation Otzar Hachaim, which lists Lebovits as its contact, was registered there in 1996.
The large majority of the nonprofits are Jewish organizations. Because they are considered houses of worship, they're not required to file annual tax returns, and little information is publicly available.
An IRS spokesman declined comment.
The Post last week traced about a dozen of the registrations to Suffern-based tax lawyer Joseph Schubin, who owned the house before the Meisners and at the time operated out of an office a few blocks away.
Schubin attributed the huge number of charities at his former residence to an IRS "mistake."
"For some crazy reason, the IRS puts down the address of the lawyer who does the work on the registration and not the official address of the group," Schubin claimed. "The government does what the government does. It has the real address in another database."
But the IRS nonprofit application states that a charity must register its own address.
An Internet and records search of dozens of the Bedford Avenue charities turned up no alternate addresses, Web sites or other info beyond their initial registrations, many of which date back as far as 1991.
"Most of these organizations are very small and formed by volunteers, people who have other, full-time jobs," said Schubin, who estimated he's set up about 100 of them.
Contact: jeane.macintosh@nypost.com
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