Some more Chillul Hashem….

NJ:

Abie Moskowitz was a businessman, authorities said, and for years he ran his tax fraud scheme like a well-oiled corporation. A former part-owner of a Carteret transport firm, Moskowitz enlisted friends and relatives who owned businesses and persuaded them to write him checks under the guise of deductible expenses. He then laundered the money through bank accounts of fictitious companies he created, retrieved the cash, repaid his financiers and kept his cut. In just three years, Moskowitz and his cohorts were able to divert and conceal more than $8.6 million, some of which he squirreled away in accounts in Israel. Moskowitz admitted as much yesterday, when he pleaded guilty to fraud, tax and money-laundering charges before U.S. District Judge Dennis Cavanaugh in Newark. The 56-year-old Brooklyn man was the last, and most significant, of the 12 defendants to plead guilty in a long-running fraud network that prosecutors suspect might have stolen millions more….Moskowitz, who emigrated from Israel in 1965, had been a part owner in Sea Jet Trucking/APA Warehouse Inc., a commercial shipping and storage company in Carteret, until he sold his share around 2000, authorities said. He also owned a piece of American Poly Inc., a Brooklyn-based commercial packaging company. And he claimed to be the president of Mosdot Nardvorna Mamar Mordechai, a U.S.-based charity raising money for a Jewish school in Israel. But it was his other companies, shell businesses with names such as Jersey York Baking and Madison Financial and Gateway, that made him rich, authorities said. Under questioning from the prosecutor, Moskowitz admitted laundering money through the fictitious companies’ bank accounts and mailing more than $378,000 to an unidentified contact in Israel. He acknowledged that he failed to report $1.9 million in personal income for the tax years 1998, 1999 and 2000 and owed more than $600,000 in income tax. Moskowitz stood with his hands folded during the hearing, answering the judge and prosecutor in one-word replies. He did not offer an explanation for his crime, but will be given an opportunity to do so at sentencing…In the past two years, 11 other defendants have pleaded guilty to lesser charges in the scheme. Among them was Moskowitz’s son, Sholom Moskowitz. Most of the others were members of the close-knit Jewish community where Moskowitz lives and is well known, the prosecutor said. “He has quite a reputation, not unfounded,” said Gannett.