The Real Pidyon Shvuyim Case You've Probably Never Heard Of

Jacob Ostreicher, an orthodox Jew from New York City, is being held in a dangerous Bolivian prison while authorities investigate him for money laundering. He is the victim, he and his associates say, of a local agent he and his Swiss partner hired to manage their rice plantation. They say the agent turned out to be a Colombian confidence woman who became entwined amorously and financially with a murderous Brazilian drug trafficker. A widely respected human rights organization is backing Ostreicher and the Swiss government refuted a Bolivian claim that the Swiss partner was under investigation in Switzerland.

Jacob Ostreicher

US businessman invests in Bolivia, ends up jailed
By FRANK BAJAK

(AP) – On paper at least, growing rice in Bolivia's fertile eastern lowlands seemed like a terrific investment. The land was a bargain, the labor dirt cheap.

Jacob Ostreicher, a New York City businessman, and his Swiss partners figured they could double their $25 million investment in less than five years. And they could run it remotely.

Or so they thought. The woman they entrusted to manage the investment turned out to be a Colombian con artist who was involved, amorously and financially, with a murderous Brazilian drug trafficker, they say.

Now Ostreicher is sitting in an overcrowded, notoriously unruly Bolivian prison, while authorities have spent more than two months investigating him for money-laundering.

He is the victim, he and his associates say.

Ostreicher is backed by a local human rights group that says prosecutors have behaved suspiciously in the case, including in their apparent decision to seize and sell millions of dollars' worth of the rice.

New York police say Ostreicher has no known criminal record and U.S. diplomats, who have regularly visited him in prison, have raised his case with Bolivian ministers to express concerns about possible judicial abuses.

The prosecutor who had Ostreicher placed in preventive detention said the American had failed to prove the investors' money was obtained legally.

"At no time were his rights ever violated," Roberto Acha told The Associated Press. However, it is unclear when Ostreicher will get his next day in court.

Ostreicher, 52, and his wife, Miriam Ungar, say prosecutors never requested proof of the money's legitimacy. They suspect unscrupulous officials are trying to send them home penniless.

Ungar is at her wit's end, she said, with all the conniving she's seen. "It gives hell a good name," was her take on Bolivia, a poor, landlocked South American nation with a history of corruption.

Ostreicher, who owns a Brooklyn flooring company, said he cooperated fully with Bolivian authorities, even when they cautioned him that doing so could incriminate him.

Beyond his safety in a prison whose interior is largely ruled by its 3,200 inmates, they are worried about losing the more than 30,000 acres the investors bought and 20,000 tons of rice that authorities confiscated.

The investors' farm manager, Ronny Suarez, said the state agency in charge of seized drug assets was calling transport companies Wednesday to ask them to pick up the rice.

"They want to confiscate everything so they can make it theirs and sell it," he said.

A woman who answered the phone at the agency's local office told the AP that officials were not authorized to discuss active investigations. She would not give her name.

The venture was launched in 2008, just as U.S. relations with President Evo Morales began to seriously deteriorate.

Morales' leftist government expelled the U.S. ambassador that year, accusing him of inciting the opposition, and began moving to confiscate big farms and ranches from major landholders, including an American rancher named Ronald Larsen who authorities claimed was exploiting his workers.

Neither Ostreicher nor the principal investor, a Swiss associate named Andre Zolty, speaks Spanish or had been to Bolivia when they took the plunge, they said.

They entrusted the venture to Claudia Liliana Rodriguez, who had gained Zolty's trust years earlier when as a business student in Switzerland she did some work for him. She claimed to come from wealth, they said.

Ostreicher and Zolty say Rodriguez stole millions from them. Whenever they pressed from afar for documentation, they said, she threatened to quit.

After several trips to Bolivia to try to sort things out, with Rodriguez constantly evading him, the investors said, they finally learned the disturbing details of how she operated.

She pocketed their money while buying machinery and supplies on credit and putting land titles in her name, they said.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez planted rice on land she claimed to have purchased for the investors but that actually still belonged to a Brazilian drug trafficker named Maximiliano Dorado and his younger brother, the investors said.

Rodriguez paid for the land with a $3.5 million personal check that bounced, they said, never telling them she was getting them involved with a dangerous criminal.

"Max" Dorado had escaped in 2001 from a Brazilian prison where he was serving a 15-year sentence for drug trafficking, murder and money laundering, according to Brazilian police.

Soon after the investors learned they had rice growing on Dorado's land, he was gone. And so was Rodriguez.

Dorado was captured by police and deported to Brazil in December. Ostreicher and his wife say Rodriguez had betrayed him after a quarrel over the ranch.

When Bolivian counternarcotics police raided the ranch, Ungar said, "they asked the workers on the farm, 'Who do you work for?' And they said they worked for us."

Ostreicher, a loquacious man described by his Brooklyn rabbi friend Saul Klein as tough but good-hearted, had by then fired Rodriguez and filed civil and criminal complaints against her. The investors took out a full-page ad in the biggest newspaper in Santa Cruz, the eastern provincial capital, in March to announce the news.

Ostreicher said by phone from prison that when Bolivian prosecutors first came calling, they were courteous and friendly, even if they did keep asking him to buy them lunch.

In May, Rodriguez returned to Santa Cruz and was arrested on money-laundering charges. She was later transferred to a prison in the capital, La Paz, and the AP was unable to locate her lawyer. A secretary for the judge handling her case said she did not know the lawyer's name.

Less than a week after Rodriguez's arrest, prosecutors raided his office, hauling away computers, cell phones and hundreds of documents. On June 3, he was arrested and thrown into a cell that he said reeked of feces and urine.

Acha and another prosecutor told the judge who ordered Ostreicher jailed that Zolty, the principal investor, was being investigated by Swiss authorities for money-laundering, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by the AP.

That claim was disputed by Swiss federal police, who confirmed on Tuesday the authenticity of a document they issued June 6 at Zolty's request. It said neither Zolty nor his firm are under police investigation.

The Santa Cruz chapter of the respected, independent Permanent Committee for Human Rights has been assisting Ostreicher. Its vice president, Carlos Cortez, is persuaded that Rodriguez "used and defrauded" them.

Miriam Ungar, meanwhile, has been running her insurance business from Santa Cruz while taking her husband all his meals, because they are Kosher and no one else at Palmasola prison shares their special religious diet.

"I have to take double of everything," Ungar said, "because the guards take half of whatever I take him."

He's not just the only observant Jew at Palmasola, Ostreicher said. He's the only American.

Rabbi Klein said local rabbis have been trying to figure out how to help Ostreicher but recognize that Washington's leverage in Bolivia is weak.

"He is a well-loved person," Klein said. "What is this? It's a horror movie."

---

Associated Press writers Frank Jordans in Geneva, Switzerland, Colleen Long in New York, Cesar Garcia in Bogota, Colombia, Carlos Valdez in La Paz, Bolivia, and Stan Lehman in Sao Paolo, Brazil contributed to this report.

I checked Matzav.com and VIN for any stories about Jacob Ostreicher, using various spellings of his Hebrew first name, no first name, and Boliva. I found no stories about him and no appeals for Pidyon Shvuyim.

His case seems more legitimate than Rubashkin's, the Satmar yeshiva student drug smugglers in Japan, and other cases haredim have popularized as pidyon shvuyim.

I wonder why?

Perhaps Ostreicher didn't grease the right haredi wheels.

Or, perhaps, Boliva is such a corrupt, undemocratic country, the "pidyon shvuyim" campaigns used to help real criminals in free societies won't work and might even be counterproductive.

This case appears to be real pidyon shvuyim, the kind the halakha was written for.

And it is this distinction between the sham cases of pidyon shvuyim, like Sholom Rubashkin, and this sad case, that haredi Jews need to learn.

Comments

[ah-pee-chorus]

this does seem like a worthy cause. it really is amazing that the whole yeshivah world knew about rubashkin the criminal and here zilch. WOW.

[Ex Man]

Vus Iz Neis Just put up the story. Seems like no one knows about this until today! Waiting to see if there will be any asifos and gatherings for this man. Or even if all the singers will get together and make a song for him.

[Flatbusher]

I know this person. A big ball tzedakah and a 'regular guy'. What a shame! And your headline is spot on: The REAL pidyon Sheveim case you've never heard of'.

Where are our 'leaders'? Where is the 'Aguda'? Where is the outrage!

As the article describes he is not a an American or Japanese Prison where he is guaranteed to get up the next morning. He could chas vsholom be dead tomorrow morning... Incredibly , where is the outrage?! Where are the asseblies of G-d?

[Adam Neira]

Prayers for Jacob Ostreicher.

Doing business in some countries is fraught with difficulties. I know of a young guy who spent six years building up a small hotel investment on an island in southern Thailand. He had a Thai girlfriend and had invested a great deal of time and money in the effort. One day, the brothers of the girl he was with walked into his office and said "You go now." And he did.

When in Rome do as Romans do but sometimes it is best not to set foot in Rome.

[ah-pee-chorus]

one of the dangers of calling every lowlife criminal that wears a yarmulke -like SMR and the drug-smuggling satmar scum- an urgent case of pidyon shvuyim, is the "boy who cried wolf" effect.
i know whenever i hear the haredi world scream 'pidyon shvuyim' i just assume its another fraudster or pedophile that must come home to make shabbos and continue his tremendous chessed.
here there is a real question as to the mans guilt, the conditions he's being held in are deplorable and unsafe, and a government like this is probably one that would meet the criteria of when the halacha should apply. what a shame that at best his case will be mentioned with and tainted by real criminals. and his name will also be sullied by the association with the names of guys who earned their stays in jail, and were afforded fair trials and fair treatment. in the other cases the campaigns were pure chillul hashem. getting ostreicher out is where all of the pidyon shvuyim resources should be allocated.

[Chutzpah]

OH PLEASE! He knew or should have known that Rodriquez was not simply "a trustworthy Spanish-speaking business student". They hired her specifically because she was a seasoned con artist, which is the main credential one would need for running a cover business of growing "Bolivian Rice". This story came straight out of the Showtime series "Weeds". "Bolivian Rice" was probably the street name for the cocaine or weed that they were selling with full Rabbinic Supervision. There is not a question in my mind that he belongs in jail, at the very least for the negligent hiring of a criminal to run his business.

[Flatbusher]

Chutzpah your moniker is appropriate. How can you write that? Did you read the article? This woman studied BUSINESS in Switzerland and worked for a wealthy investor there, and conned him, who gave his recommendation for the Bolivia hire.

Has our humanity become so jaded that we can't recognize a REAL case where we have to rescue the poor man?

[Adam Neira]

To Flatbusher,

I trust Shmarya's judgment when presenting an article for perusal. Chutzpah's comments reconfirm that we are living in the prophesied days when most people would have trouble telling right from wrong. Or perhaps more information about the case is required.

P.S. Maybe FM can become an internet courtroom to judge on various cases and offer Psak Dins and commentary, wise counsel and advice or is that what is already happening ?

Shmarya has a real talent for picking interesting cases which have larger consequences for the Jewish and Non-Jewish world as a whole. He is like the cheeky court visitor who brings in reports from the kingdom to show to the smug leaders that not all is ok in the realm. Some people want to chop his head off and banish him forever but he is winning them over slowly.

[Captool]

sraeli diamond traders Chaim Leibovitz and Dan Gertler.39 Emaxon lists as its address an office in Montreal, Canada, but Emaxon’s majority shareholder is listed as FTS Worldwide, a nebulous global corporation whose business address is that of a firm of lawyers, Mossack Fonseca & Company, in Panama City. FTS Worldwide is registered with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to lawyer Andre Zolty of Geneva Switzerland. A copy of the MIBA-Emaxon contract was signed on 13 April 2003 by Israeli-Americans Yaakov Neeman and Chaim Leibovitz

[Captool]

http://www.haaretz.com/news/this-way-to-paradise-cont-1.209113 do a search for zolty, find out whose money it really is.

['Yechiel']

I know this Ostreicher guy. I hope he gets out OK and hastily. However it should be known that he is not exactly a טלית שכולה תכלת...

[Nussir]

Where is mr L from the yatet now

[Fellow Jew]

@Yechial:
Why should it be known? Is it so necessary for people to know all of your flaws? Nobody is perfect. Right now, this man is suffering and he is in a very dangerous place. Your comment is completely out of place. "It should be known" that he is a fellow human being and if he would be in a car accident with massive injuries you wouldn't be busy with how perfect his middos are. Stop thinking of yourself and put yourself in another person's shoes for a change.

[Bilaam's Donkey]

I lived in Bolivia as a child, and went back to visit in 2004. It's a gorgeous country, but a totally dysfunctional shit-hole. No one should invest $.25 there, much less $25,000,000. On the plus side, if he has a lotta money beyond what he's lost, his prison stay shouldn't be *too bad.* Bolivia's main prisons, as I recall, use a bizarre free market system whereby wealthy inmates can sometimes arrange to live in nice flats with satellite tvs. That being said, he's probably paying a small fortune in protection money.

[Yissy-CA]

What can we do to help?

[Dovy]

I worked for a Schloime Ostreicher in Kensington, owner of the "Torah Times". Worst scum-bag I've ever met!! And that's saying quite a bit.

[Maskil]

What can we do to help?

Posted by: Yissy-CA

It's very complicated and there is no simple solution. He may be choosing to remain there for fear of financial retribution or just because he fears returning home a pauper.

At this point it's gotta be about cash to bribe his freedom. Thing is: He's got the resources, but doesn't want to give up on the investment and that's why he's still there. He wants the land and the crops. There's a very good chance that he fears going back to Zolty and having them demand that he take full responsibility for the failure.

To get him out with his investments - that is a big, big problem.

First question: Why would Zolty, a Swiss investment company, put money on Bolivian land after Morales was elected? Any true investment research, as Bilaam's Donkey insinuates, should reveal that Evo Morales (an non-fully educated native suffering from severe paranoia of explploitation and seeking every venue to nationalize all private holdings, while being played for the idiot he is by Iran-backed Venezuala's Chavez) isn't going to let some gringo colonizer enter and leave with his spoils. So why was the investment approved to begin with?

Even if we could secure him with lawyers from here to kingdom come that will protect him from any claim by Zolty he still won't want to exit without his personal losses recovered. This is not covered in Pidyon Shevuyim, but protection from Zolty and perhaps a legal ruling to have Zolty partially compensate him for his losses would be a fair start. Pidyon Shevuyim still applies, but if we do what we can and he's still to proud to leave then he'll have to wait for Bolivia's aggression against Chile over the sea issue which could take decades but may result in the destruction of Bolivia as a country. Morales leaving politics through death, assasination, or succession will only leave the country more vulnerable - there's no hope there.

Finally, there is the possibility to pay his way out, whether he agrees to it or not, and provide him with the therapy he needs to get over the losses he suffered, and of course legal protection from financial claims stemming from Zolty.

[seymour]

this story does not add up

investing 25,000,000 without ever going there?

[Adam Neira]

To Seymour,

You have heard of venture capital haven't you ?

[Moshe in Israel]

I think that more effort should be spent researching his business partner Andre Zolty. (Here's a project for you Shmarya)

Zolty has a history of involvement with shady companies and dealings.

Zolty is better known in Switzerland as a lawyer who represents offshore companies, whose owners prefer to remain anonymous.

He has been involved with a couple of Israel-based diamond companies that were establishing operations in Panama and the Congo.

I wonder if in fact the real investment was in diamonds in Bolivia, and the rice fields was a backdrop for that.

Something to consider.

[asher]

With all due respect shmarya. This story stinks from too many inconsistencies

[Moshe in Israel]

With all due respect shmarya. This story stinks from too many inconsistencies

Posted by: asher | August 25, 2011 at 08:46 AM

Asher, Shmarya didn't write the piece. If you do a Google on it, you'll see that this AP article has been reprinted in numerous places.

I would suggest that you Tweet the author Frank Bajak at http://www.twitter.com/fbajak and ask him further questions for clarifications. He obviously sourced his information from somewhere.

['Yechiel']

Fellow jew
My point is his business practices... And yes, I do hope he gets out hastily and healthy. Yet, I hope that he and his ilk learn something from it and finally correct their business ethics.

[Leibel Schenkel]

There was a story about 15 years ago about someone from Monsey being imprisoned for some fraud involving Peruvian Rice Growers. Seems like the Latin Americans like to slice & dice Jews into their ice!

[Deremes]

A: I and many folks in the frum community know about this sad story from DAY ONE. The ones whom FM attracts most have not heard of this case till this post.

B:Everything possible is being done to get him out from Bolivia which is a corrupt country.The people who usually help out Jews in trouble are here to help him.
Rabbi David Neiderman from the UJO of Wiiliamsburg (the guy who all he does is to "protect" child molesters) and others are using all their political connections in Washington DC.

C:No two cases are alike and just becuase in one case there is noise doesn't mean that another case needs to be noise too.Certain cases much noise can only backfire.

D:Your point that this is real pidyon shvuyim,frum Jews know exactly what is or isn't pidyon shvuyim.Prison is prison unless on things it states in Shulchan Aruch and in the poskim differently.But it happens to be that this is way different then many cases excluding the Japan case and as i noted all is being done to help him without the help of FM.

And finally, 'Yechiel', your posts is pure rishaes.

[Fellow Jew]

The public can greatly help Mr. Ostreicher by contacting the US Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia and telling them (in a very respectful manner) that there is community outrage regarding what is being done to an innocent man and that we would like to know what is being done to help an innocent US citizen. The number to call is 011-591-2-216-8000 and ask for John Creamer, US Charge D\'Affaires

[ah-pee-chorus]

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/195296.html

the mood in bolivia led by morales is currently a major obstacle to any american.

[chutzpah]

Hiring someone to be responsible for $25 million dollars usually requires more credentials than "speaks Spanish, comes from wealthy family". A person who is going to handle 25 million has to show a proven track record of managing large budgets on an executive level in a corporation, several years of management experience with increasing levels of responsibility, reliable job references, several recommendation and transcripts from University. It's not like he was hiring someone to close out the cash register at the end of the night in the Kosher Pizza place. He had a fiduciary duty to investigate her background at least as strictly as how he inspects his estrog on Succot. I'm sorry, he can't use the "I didn't know" excuse when it comes to 25 million. It is just not plausible in the least bit. Would he let his son enter into a Shidduch without knowing everything there is a to know about the person's background? I'm sure the reference he got from Zolty was "if I don't get her a job she's going to tell my wife we had sex".

[Yitzchok M. Pinkesz]

I know this man and actually lived in the same house as him for quite a while. I do not know if he is guilty but I would be far from surprised if he were. He is an alcoholic and a terribly evil man. Guilty or not, the world is better off with him in prison. My experiences with him (and his wife) show that they have no morals (they care not for child molestation, among other things). They aren't stupid enough to be fooled like that and invest $25 million in a country like Bolivia. What I would point out is that if he is guilty, there is a great chance that his wife is involved as well, seeing that he does nothing without her.

This is not a case of Pidyon Shvuyim. Leave him there. Please!

[Mikhail]

$25 million.....sight unseen ??? Are you people that stupid are just that blindly loyal regardless of guilt ??? $25 million without seeing it ??? You people show yourself to the world as fools. Search "Solomon Dwek" and you'll find just how innocent people like this really are. Seriously, $25 million without have ever seen what they're investing in ??? If that's the case.......Bernie Madoff is innocent, too. No wonder the American taxpayer tires of Jews.