What we have is an alleged loan shark who was also a slumlord. He owed millions of dollars to lenders – some apparently black market – and had defaulted on many of the loans. Some of those defaults were apparently planned and were part of a building flipping scheme involving his family and close business associates. He had many enemies and hurt many people.
Menachem "Max" Stark
Murdered Brooklyn slumlord Menachem “Max” Stark’s partner, Israel “Sam” Perlmutter, is terrified that he is next in line to be killed, the New York Post reported. He's hired armed guards and is hunkering down, hoping he won't be next.
Meanwhile, New York’s other tabloid, the Daily News, is white-gloving the story, apparently with the hope it will pick up readers there who, until the Post’s flamboyant coverage of Stark’s murder, bought the Post whenever they sought out an English language newspaper.
So the Daily News downplays Stark’s horrible track record for running decrepit residential properties and completely fails to report his multiple property companies that were allegedly used to flip properties in a scheme that defrauded lenders.
Instead, the Daily News focuses on Stark’s family’s reaction and hs community’s reaction to the murder.
For example: “The attacker is not from the Jewish community,” Moses Strulowitz, 31, a brother-in-law, asserted. “We don’t hurt each other.… It was a hit job. It looked like a Mafia job or either anti-Semitic.”
This is a great quote and it has to be printed, but it should be followed by, say, a note about the Rabbi Mendel Epstein get (Jewish religious divorce) kidnap and extortion gang, which allegedly spent much of the past 20 plus years kidnapping and torturing (with electric cattle prods on victims’ genitals and the like) men who refused to grant their wife a get. The gang did not do this for altruistic reasons – Epstein and his co-conspirators charged about $100,000 per kidnapping.
The Daily News knows all this because it prominently covered that story. But in the world of New York City tabloid journalism, the actual context of facts is not at all important.
However, the Daily News does add a few important facts to the mix.
First of all, without admitting it, the Daily News confirms the basis for the Post’s cover that so inflamed hasidim.
“Our investigation is so broad right now. We haven’t narrowed it down to any one thing,” a police official said Sunday.
Lots of people hated Stark and many shed no tears when they heard he was dead. "Who didn't want him dead?" the Post's headline asked. The answer, sadly, is that many of the people who did business with him or rented from him hated Stark. And as I wrote yesterday, because of how police investigations work, this means there are lots of suspects and very complicated investigation.
What the Daily News brings new to the story is Stark's version of his sealed arrest for forcible touching in 2011:
Stark was charged with forcible touching in 2011 when undercover cops arrested him on the subway in Midtown, accusing him of rubbing against a woman.
But the alleged victim said Stark was innocent and refused to sign a supporting affidavit, his lawyers told The News. Manhattan prosecutors later dropped the charge, and Stark filed to sue the city, lawyers George and Michael Farkas said. He settled the case for a payout in 2012, they added.
What really happened?
It's hard to say.
But these arrests are usually not made unless a victim complains. If the arrest was made without the victim, undercover cops must have clearly seen Stark do it. But we can't know unless we see the legal papers, and the only people who can release those legal papers are Stark's family. They have not done so and the Daily News simply prints Stark's lawyers' version of events unquestioned and with no context. (You'll recognize the names of those lawyers – they often defend haredi pedophiles.)
What else does the Daily News add?
That a police source said Stark lent money at high interest rates – i.e., operated as loan shark. This is almost always illegal, of course – a fact the Daily News omits – and tends to make the loan shark many enemies – another fact the Daily News omits. It also omits that this essentially confirms the Post's earlier reporting.
And then we have this:
Security video from a store near Stark’s office shows his abductors parked at the spot outside his Rutledge St. office for 20 minutes before the kidnapping, the manager of the store said.
Stark was inches from his car when the attack came and fought his assailants for four minutes.
“It looked like someone (shot him with a Taser) because he suddenly buckled down,” the manager said, adding that police viewed the video Thursday and then returned Sunday to take it away.
The Daily News doesn't touch on this but, to kidnap Stark, to be there for only 20 minutes waiting for him to leave, seems to indicate that the kidnappers had inside help.
So does the fact – unreported by either paper – that Stark appears to know his kidnappers, or at least was not afraid of them initially. (You can see this from the security camera footage I posted Saturday night.) And not that this necessarily means anything, but Rabbi Mendel Epstein's gang also allegedly used a taser.
The Daily News also reports that police are checking into suspicions Stark may been having an affair. (This is fairly normal for murder investigations, as I noted yesterday.)
What we have is an alleged loan shark who was also a slumlord. He owed millions of dollars to lenders – some apparently black market – and had defaulted on many of the loans. Some of those defaults were apparently planned and were part of a building flipping scheme involving his family and close business associates. He had many enemies and hurt many people.
In other words, despite its posturing the Daily News has confirmed much of what the Post reported – including the factual basis for the Post's Sunday cover.
(I should add that I don't blame the Daily News reporters, who certainly know these all these things. But they don't decide what stays in a story or what is excluded, editors do.
I should also the Post has failed in this way on other stories where the Daily News did a very good job of reporting.)
Stark was by most non-hasidic accounts a bad guy.
But hasidim do not care about non-hasidim or non-Jews Stark hurt, and what he was in business does not enter into their calculations of his worth, much like Chabad didn't care how many non-Jews (or non-Chabad Jews, or even the occasional Chabad Jew) Sholom Rubashkin hurt as long as the money – his family's 'charity' – kept flowing to Chabad institutions and the like. And the same is true with Satmar and Satmar institutions here.
The unfortunate thing is that, for whatever reasons the Daily News and certain other media outlets are playing into this Satmar bias rather than fully reporting the story.
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