Rabbi Exaggerating about Tasers, Kidnapping

By Shannon Mullen
Asbury Park Press
April 14, 2015

http://www.app.com/story/news/local/jackson-lakewood/lakewood/2015/04/14/rabbi-kidnapping-trial/25775777/

Prosecutors say Rabbi Mendel Epstein employed a kidnap team to force unwilling husbands to divorce their wives.

The federal kidnapping case against the Lakewood rabbi dubbed "The Prodfather" lacks a critical piece of evidence, his attorney says: an actual cattle prod.

Robert Stahl, representing Rabbi Mendel Epstein, noted in his closing remarks Tuesday there were no electric shock devices or other weapons recovered in 2013 when FBI agents swept into an Edison warehouse and arrested a group of men with ties to his client.

"The government loved Rabbi Epstein's words on the tape, but you know what? There was no cattle prod," Stahl told the jury of eight men and eight women.

The attorney was referring to one of the prosecution's key pieces of evidence, a recording in which Epstein extols the persuasive powers of such a device when applied to "certain parts of the body."

Epstein, 69, well known within the insular Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Lakewood as an authority on contentious religious divorces, is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping and one count of kidnapping.

He was arrested along with a group of alleged accomplices, including his son, David "Ari" Epstein, also of Lakewood, in October 2013 following an FBI sting in which undercover agents posing as a wife and her brother sought the elder Epstein's help in extracting a divorce from the woman's husband, in exchange for a fee of up to $70,000.

Without a get, a document that proves that a marriage has been dissolved under Jewish law, a wife cannot remarry, and face being ostracized as an agunah, a term that means "chained woman."

In his closing, Stahl also sought to undo some of the damage done by another recorded conversation in which Epstein uses blunt language to explain how the process will work.

"Basically what we are going to be doing is kidnapping a guy for a couple of hours and beating him up and torturing him and then getting him to give the get," Epstein says on the recording.

Stahl suggested that his client was "puffing and exaggerating" when he made that comment, and only meant to reassure the woman that the matter would be resolved.

"He's now telling her, 'Don't worry, we're going to get you through this,' " Stahl said. "He's telling her that he's going to get it done."

Stahl acknowledged that Epstein may have committed other crimes, such as extortion — which he isn't charged with — but not kidnapping.

"The rabbi was involved in something intended to scare, to pressure somebody to follow through, to grant their wife a divorce," Stahl said.

"It's about holding these husbands until the process of getting a get is done, but I would suggest to you it's not a kidnapping."

The attorney for one of Epstein's co-defendants, Rabbi Jay Goldstein, followed a similar path in his closing comments to the jury.

"Kidnapping, kidnapping, kidnapping. How many times did we hear that word yesterday?" Aidan P. O'Connor said, referring to the government's closing statement by Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Wolfe.

"Two-hundred thirty-nine times. I counted," he said. "As if by sheer repetition and by telling you there's no reasonable doubt they ... could bulldoze you into believing."

Another defense attorney, Nathan Lewin, said his client, Rabbi Binyamin Stimler, "was in the wrong place at the wrong time" when the FBI converged on an Edison warehouse where the fictitious husband was supposed to be coerced into agreeing to the divorce.

Lewin suggested Stimler was distracted after hearing upsetting news about his wife's health earlier that day and didn't know of any plans to use violence to obtain the get.

He said Stimler was simply there to do a mitzvah, or good deed, by signing the document.

"He is a totally, Torah observant, committed Jew who knows it's a mitzvah ... to free an agunah," Lewin said. Some of Lewin's statements were later stricken from the record by U.S. District Court Judge Freda L. Wolfson following repeated objections by Assistant U.S. Attorney R. Joseph Gribko.

Closing arguments in the trial, now in its eighth week, are expected to conclude Wednesday.

Shannon Mullen: 732-996-6921; smullen@GannettNJ.com