Alvin Malnik
"Atlanta Strip Club Scandal Marks Return of 'Our Gang' "
Article Lends Credence To Accusations Of Jewish Organized Crime

7/1/01 9:44:28 AM
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From Forward -- Jewish Community Magazine

Commentary -- Commentary -- Atlanta Strip Club Scandal Marks Return of 'Our Gang'

By SEAMUS McGRAW

FORWARD CORRESPONDENT

A federal trial going on in Atlanta may be opening a window on a nearly forgotten era in American Jewish history.

Once upon a time in America, to borrow the title of a Sergio Leone film, there were two-fisted Jews — gangsters with a capital G — who swaggered down the shadowy alleys of the Lower East Side, felt fedoras cocked over one eye, gats tucked in the waistbands of tailored trousers, their pockets crammed with rolls of ill-gotten cash.

These were guys — legendary figures such as "Bugsy" Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Arthur "Dutch Schultz" Flegenheimer and "Lepke" Buchalter — who earned their reputations and their livings by preying on the weaknesses of others, collecting large dividends from extortion, gambling and bootlegging. They protected their criminal enterprises through bribery and, when necessary, murder. They traveled in mobs with names like Murder Incorporated, the Bugs-and- Meyer Gang, the Hoff Gang in Philadelphia and the Purple Gang in Detroit. At the highest levels of the criminal universe, Jewish mobsters worked hand in hand with the heads of the Five Families of New York's La Cosa Nostra. And when no one was watching, they built Las Vegas.

But that was a long time ago, right? The dill-and-garlic-scented Lower East Side of the early 20th century is long gone, its immigrant Jewish denizens long since relocated to the suburbs. And those old-time Jewish gangsters who controlled the syndicates have died or retired to Miami, ceding their territory to new generations of mobsters from Asia, Latin America, perhaps even Russia and Israel. Right?

Well, maybe not.

"Our boys are still out there, I'm very proud to say," said Alan Block, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Pittsburgh and a noted authority on Jewish organized crime in America and overseas. They're running penny-stock scams and providing support for Colombian drug cartels, Mr. Block said. And they're still, in many cases, chummy with the leaders of the old time Italian mob.

That is certainly what federal prosecutors are alleging against the flamboyant bar owner Steve Kaplan in the United States District Court in Atlanta. In what is shaping up to be one of the longest, most costly, and, in many respects, most bizarre trials in the district's history, prosecutors are trying to prove that the flashy 40-year old used his popular Atlanta strip club, the Gold Club, as a front for a prostitution ring that provided high-priced hookers to big name athletes, laundered money and paid protection to the Gambino crime family in New York. Some reports have suggested that Mr. Kaplan was actually an associate member of the Gambino family.

Mr. Kaplan denies the allegations. The trial is expected to continue through the summer, with an army of witnesses who are expected to testify to the alleged link between Mr. Kaplan and mob boss John Gotti Jr., and to the mob's alleged involvement in the Gold Club, one of Atlanta's premier night spots.

Last Monday, for example, Craig Carlino, the former manager of the mob-linked Manhattan strip club "Scores," testified that Mr. Kaplan's Atlanta club was "a whorehouse" that operated under the protection of the mob.

To some aficionados of the old time mob scene, the case against Mr. Kaplan and his associates is, at best, insignificant.

Jerry Capeci, the former Daily News writer who has made a career out of covering the mob, put it this way: "If you look at any group, maybe you'll find a Jew or two or twelve," he said. But, he said, that's a far cry from proof that there remains a viable, old-line Ashkenazi Jewish underworld.

Professor Robert Rockaway, a historian who has written extensively on the old- line Jewish mob, contends that the essential allegation in the federal case, if true, actually proves that the classic Jewish-American mobster is a thing of the past. The Lanskys of the world, he contends, never had to stoop to paying protection to anyone.

"As far as Kaplan goes," he said, "old-time Jewish mobsters did not pay Italians for protection. The Jews took care of their own. In the old days, Jews were the equal of the Sicilians. Jews were just as tough, ruthless and murderous."

But Mr. Block contends that Mr. Rockaway's nostalgia may be a bit premature.

"This idea that the old timers all moved to the suburbs, and put their kids through school to become doctors or lawyers, and everybody's now in legitimate business, I wouldn't believe that for a minute," he says. "They're sending their kids to school, all right, but I don't know what they're studying."

Over the past several years, Jewish names have surfaced in connection with penny stock scams, in which gangs of aggressive young mobsters corner the market on low-valued stocks, then drive prices up before unloading them, he says.

As late as the 1990s, he says, Alvin Malnik, Lansky's one-time attorney, and the man who was dubbed by Reader's Digest as Lansky's "heir apparent," remained a highly visible personality in Florida. Although he has never been convicted of a crime, Mr. Malnik has long been under the scrutiny of federal and state prosecutors. Some Florida law enforcement officials have pointed to him over the years as living proof that the Lansky organization did not die with Lansky.

In a 1980 decision, reaffirmed in 1993, the New Jersey Gaming Commission banned Mr from the state's casinos, citing links to organized crime figures that dates back half a century. He had been linked to Sam Cohen, who was indicted along with Lansky on charges of skimming $30 million in profits from the Flamingo Hotel Casino in Las Vegas. Mr. Malnik and Mr. Cohen in 1971 bought 325 acres of undeveloped land that belonged to a Dade County country club and ultimately squeezed a $14.7 million profit from the sale of the land.

In 1997, Mr. Malnik's name surfaced in connection with a probe into the lucrative title loan industry in Florida. It also surfaced in the society pages of the Miami Herald in 1995 when, at age 62, he married a woman 36 years his junior, presenting her with a 50-carat emerald-and-diamond necklace as a wedding gift.

What makes men like Mr. Malnik and Mr. Kaplan unusual, said Mr. Block, are not their apparent links to some of the most notorious gangsters, nor even the fact that in Mr. Malnik's case, federal authorities never compiled enough evidence to prosecute him. What separates them from the crowd, Mr. Block said, are their high public profiles.

That, Mr. Block contends, is something one might expect from Italian mobsters.

"One of the reasons why the Italian gangsters took so much heat is that these guys, they were sort of boastful about stuff. They weren't very careful." John Gotti Sr., for example, was known to thrive on the attention he was paid by the media.

Jewish mobsters, on the other hand, prefer to keep their mouths shut, and adopted the comfortable middle class ways of the rest of America, Mr. Block said. "People are always searching for these Mafia guys," he said. "They want this stuff to look like those idiots in the Sopranos and who would want to be that stupid? They're not like that, and thank God for that."

That ability to adapt has made Jewish mobsters a more difficult target for organized crime investigators, Mr. Block said. Unlike the old-line families of La Cosa Nostra who remained in the old neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens and south Philadelphia, Jewish mobsters left the ghettos of the 1920s, '30s and '40s behind, he said.

They set up shop in the suburbs, in Miami, in Los Angeles, and all the while they maintained the international connections that helped keep them in play. Meyer Lansky is believed by some investigators to have helped Israeli mobsters go international in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s, when the Colombian drug cartels first attempted to make inroads in the United States, they turned to Jewish crime figures to help them develop their shipment and distribution networks, according to Mr. Block. Jewish names — including some linked to what investigators believe are ongoing Jewish-American mobs — have surfaced in drug roles ranging from piloting airplanes to arranging financing and political connections to providing links with European and Asian mobs. That sense of internationalism, Mr. Block said, has always been an ace-in-the-hole for Jewish crime syndicates.

What's more, Mr. Block said, although Jewish mobsters in America are not immune to federal prosecution, they have benefited from a kind of prosecutorial tunnel vision. Investigators, in part out of habit, in part because they have spent most of the past 50 years dealing with the traditional La Cosa Nostra, have tended to overlook Jewish connections in organized crime, Mr. Block said.

The result, he said, is that the Jewish American syndicates have been pretty much free to continue their work in a kind of comfortable anonymity.

"The bottom line is that there's plenty of our boys out there," Mr. Block said. "Crime is an equal opportunity employer."

 

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12-22-00
Nevada Denies L.A. Developer Gaming License.

Real estate: Regulators turn down Judah Hertz's application, citing alleged dealings with reputed mob figures. He denies wrongdoing.

From The Los Angeles Times Staff and Wire Reports

Judah Hertz, owner of the California Mart and several other major downtown Los Angeles properties, lost a bid Wednesday for a Nevada gaming license as a result of alleged ties to reputed mobsters involved in drug dealing and prostitution.

Hertz "obviously is unsuitable for licensure with the state of Nevada and has no business here," said state Gaming Commission Chairman Brian Sandoval as the commission voted 4 to 0 against Hertz's application.

Hertz denies any wrongdoing. In an interview with The Times, he said he has sold the Comstock hotel-casino in Reno and withdrew offers to buy two other Reno properties, the Flamingo Hilton and a 50% stake in Sands Regent. Hertz Investment Group and an affiliate, Sapphire Gaming, began acquiring the three Reno casinos in 1999, starting with a $5-million deal for the Comstock.

The New York native had asked to withdraw an outdated application for a gaming license, but regulators rejected the request and voted unanimously to deny him. Nevada officials said Hertz failed to show up to a hearing of the state's Gaming Control Board and a meeting of the gaming commission.

"I knew what the ruling was," said Hertz, who owns about 3 million square feet of office space in central Los Angeles. "There was no point in going."

The Nevada gaming control board said Hertz had dealings with reputed organized crime figures including Jacob Orgad, an Israeli immigrant and accused international drug smuggler. The board said Orgad allegedly distributed cocaine for the Gambino and Escobar crime families, supplied cocaine and recruited women for notorious Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and has been linked to the illegal distribution of methylene dioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, also called Ecstasy.

Control Board documents also state Hertz got some of the money for his Reno ventures from an uncle of Hai Waknine and Assaf Waknine, alleged enforcers for Orgad and members of the Bachsihan crime organization involved in ecstasy dealing.

Hertz said his only connection with Orgad was during the purchase of a downtown building on Hill Street. He said he paid Orgad a brokerage commission as part of the purchase and has had no further dealings with him.

The real estate investor has also been a mentor and a business associate of Hai Waknine, according to John Forbess, an attorney for Hertz. Waknine might have had a troubled past, but "he's been completely straight and has been a respectable businessperson," Forbess said. "It's not like Judah has been hanging around with unsavory characters."

Hertz, who had sought licensing approval for himself and several families, got the only denial from Nevada gaming regulators. The other applications were referred to staff. Though they could come up again, it's unlikely given the concern about Hertz.

 

 

 

 

 


 


 

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Only Blacks Flooded

New Orleans is divided along racial lines by floodwaters, with most of the affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods largely untouched, and most of the poor, predominantly black neighborhoods underwater. And some want to keep it that way.

An article in the online version of the Wall Street Journal tells the story, though it’s only available to those who pay for it. Raw Story quoted excerpts:

 

 

 

 

Old-line families plot the future

Thursday, September 08, 2005

By Christopher Cooper, The Wall Street Journal

NEW ORLEANS -- On a sultry morning earlier this week, Ashton O'Dwyer stepped out of his home on this city's grandest street and made a beeline for his neighbor's pool. Wearing nothing but a pair of blue swim trunks and carrying two milk jugs, he drew enough pool water to flush the toilet in his home.

The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators. Wednesday, officials reiterated that all residents must leave New Orleans, but it's still unclear how far they will go to enforce the order.

The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city's Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city's rich -- and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O'Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By Wednesday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor's pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline.

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s. High society is still dominated by these old-line families, represented today by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city's Coca-Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of "krewes," groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city's most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin, the former Cox Communications executive elected in 2002.

Israeli Security

A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.

The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

Not every white business leader or prominent family supports that view. Some black leaders and their allies in New Orleans fear that it boils down to preventing large numbers of blacks from returning to the city and eliminating the African-American voting majority. Rep. William Jefferson, a sharecropper's son who was educated at Harvard and is currently serving his eighth term in Congress, points out that the evacuees from New Orleans already have been spread out across many states far from their old home and won't be able to afford to return. "This is an example of poor people forced to make choices because they don't have the money to do otherwise," Mr. Jefferson says.

Calvin Fayard, a wealthy white plaintiffs' lawyer who lives near Mr. O'Dwyer, says the mass evacuation could turn a Democratic stronghold into a Republican one. Mr. Fayard, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser, says tampering with the city's demographics means tampering with its unique culture and shouldn't be done. "People can't survive a year temporarily -- they'll go somewhere, get a job and never come back," he says.

Mr. Reiss acknowledges that shrinking parts of the city occupied by hardscrabble neighborhoods would inevitably result in fewer poor and African-American residents. But he says the electoral balance of the city wouldn't change significantly and that the business elite isn't trying to reverse the last 30 years of black political control. "We understand that African Americans have had a great deal of influence on the history of New Orleans," he says.

A key question will be the position of Mr. Nagin, who was elected with the support of the city's business leadership. He couldn't be reached Wednesday. Mr. Reiss says the mayor suggested the Dallas meeting and will likely attend when he goes there to visit his evacuated family

Black politicians have controlled City Hall here since the late 1970s, but the wealthy white families of New Orleans have never been fully eclipsed. Stuffing campaign coffers with donations, these families dominate the city's professional and executive classes, including the white-shoe law firms, engineering offices, and local shipping companies. White voters often act as a swing bloc, propelling blacks or Creoles into the city's top political jobs. That was the case with Mr. Nagin, who defeated another African American to win the mayoral election in 2002.

Creoles, as many mixed-race residents of New Orleans call themselves, dominate the city's white-collar and government ranks and tend to ally themselves with white voters on issues such as crime and education, while sharing many of the same social concerns as African-American voters. Though the flooding took a toll on many Creole neighborhoods, it's likely that Creoles will return to the city in fairly large numbers, since many of them have the means to do so.

On Thursday, President Bush issued an executive order allowing construction firms to pay less than the prevailing wage for projects to rebuild New Orleans.

One could say, therefore, that the poor will rebuild the city for the rich, and be paid as little as possible doing it.

Not everyone agrees, though. Critics argue that the Davis-Bacon Act, passed in 1931, which requires federally funded construction projects to pay at least the prevailing wage in an area, is itself discriminatory and should be repealed altogether.

 

 

 

But not all has gone well for Hertz.

In Nevada, gambling regulators rejected his application to buy three Reno casinos in 2000 because of his "reputed mob ties." Hertz this week said the problems with the Reno casinos were instigated by Las Vegas interests that didn't want his competition.

Hertz hired a former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor and a corporate investigation firm to conduct a six-month investigation into the allegations. The firm, in its report, concluded "that the central allegations made in the (Nevada) Gaming Board's denial recommendations are not supported by evidence we have reviewed."

Th most damning association was with an Israeli immigrant Hertz had a minor real estate investment with in Los Angeles during the late 1980s. The Israeli man was later indicted in a large Ectasy smuggling import ring by federal authorities.

Hertz, earlier this summer, said he had no idea of the criminal activity of the associate, and that the indictment against the man dates the criminal activity to a period after Hertz no longer had a relationship with the smuggler. Hertz added that he had met the man in a social setting and made one small transaction with him. As he said at the time, "If you have dinner with someone you don't know well, are you expected to know" their criminal intent or involvement in criminal acticvity?

Regardless, the damage has been repaired and Hertz has long been back on track doing what he does best.

 

 

 

Malnik Bahamas

The Palm Beach Post reports: "Alvin Malnik, the man once regarded as the heir apparent to mobster Meyer Lansky, ... described by federal authorities as a top associate of organized crime figures ... Among his friends, Malnik counts Saudi royalty. His son once married a princess descended from the Middle Eastern kingdom's founding family. ... The sole owner of a Georgia company, Title Loans of America, Malnik runs a national chain of loan stores that make millions of dollars from the interest charged on quick cash offered to people in desperate need of money. ... Attorney General Bob Butterworth [Florida] likens the business to 'legalized loan sharking.' ... 'It was a known fact among the criminal underworld that dealing with Al Malnik was the same as dealing with Meyer Lansky,' [said] Vincent Teresa, 'a convicted criminal and frequent government witness currently in the federal Witness Protection Program,' ...When Lansky died in 1983 at age 81, Reader's Digest named Malnik his 'heir apparent.' ... 'He is not welcome here,' James Hurley, the chairman of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission ... 'He's done nothing to overcome his reputation of being closely identified with Meyer Lansky and other organized crime figures.' ...

 In 1962, Malnik was listed as a director of the Bank of World Commerce, a Bahamas-based institution that involved 'some of the nations' top gangsters,' ... In 1978, a Bahamian company named Appolonia Investment Limited paid $3.35 million to buy the property just north of Malnik's Ranch. ... Malnik refuse to divulge Appolonia's owners. But records from the Register General's Office in the Bahamas show the principal shareholder is a Saudi Arabian prince who is a prominent member of the kingdom's royal family and longtime friend of Malnik's. ... Malnik and the prince -- a son of King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia -- once lived in neighboring condos in the Cricket Club. According to news stories in the 1980s, the pair also traveled abroad together. Malnik's son ... would later change his name from Mark to Shareef and marry into the royal Saud family."R158 It is known that the Saudi King would frequently send his private 747 to Florida to pick up Malnik and his associate so they could conduct business on the plane away from prying eyes. We do have a sizable amount of information on Malnik and his Saud family relatives. For instance, we do not know if the children born of the marriage are living in the Saud family palaces as "royals" or in Miami. Actions speak louder than words. We see time and time again the Saud family speak one way and act another. The Saudi prince whose daughter married a Malnik's son had complete control over his daughter actions. The Saudi prince not only blessed the marriage but works with the US organized crime associates.

 

Another, Alvin Malnik (born 1932), was picked by some observers of organized crime to be Lansky's probably successor. He first came to prominence in the early 1960s with the attempt to establish a gambling resort at Paradise Island in the Bahamas. He had already established himself in the banking and real estate businesses in Miami but soon become Lansky's public "front-man." The Paradise Island venture led to the establishment of Resorts International, the entertainment and gambling conglomerate which was the subject of intense law enforcement scrutiny for years as charges of control by Meyer Lansky surfaced (Mahan, 1980).

 

Meyer Lansky was known as the treasurer of the US Mafia. He would launder Mafia money through Bahamas companies and send the money to Israel to purchase Israeli defense bonds. It is well known in Washington that the Saud family have had a long term covert relationship with Israel which has evolved into Israel being the Saud family defenders of last resort. In turn, the Saud family have shown good faith by investing in Israel through, among others, Bahamas front companies. We do not know if Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz brokers this relationship.

 

 

 

Malnik License

The New Jersey Casino Control Commission denied Malnik a casino license in 1980, citing, among other things, his long association with mob financier Meyer Lansky. The commission ruled that Malnik was "a person of unsuitable character and unsuitable reputation." And in 1993 the commission disciplined two Atlantic City casinos for allowing Malnik to set foot in them.  source

 

 

 

Bernie Rothkopf also owned the MGM Hotel. Allen Glick was, between 1974-79, "the mob's front man at the Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina hotels." [MORRISON, J.A., p. 1A] "In July, 1979 Allen Glick was stripped of his Nevada gambling license and fined over $500,000 for a variety of improprieties." Glick sold his interests in casinos to Allan Sachs, who was, with a partner, "figureheads for the Chicago mob responsible for providing skim monies" from Las Vegas gambling operations. [MOLDEA, 1989, p. 336] Jerome Mack, past president of the Dunes and Riviera, was a former national chairman of the Israel Bonds Campaign. Jewish entrepreneur Hank Greenspon owned the Las Vegas Sun newspaper and a local TV station. [See his efforts for Israel in the mass media section]

 

 

 

 

New Orleans charm could fall to bulldozers

By JOHN KESSLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/12/05

While an estimated 80 percent of the 200,000 homes in New Orleans have suffered some degree of flood damage, the decision on how to handle them will have to wait for the immediate crisis to pass. The city must first be fully evacuated, its streets pumped dry and its utilities restored.

But already two drastically different visions of a rebuilt New Orleans are starting to emerge. While home builders warn that whole neighborhoods may have to be bulldozed and rebuilt, the city's preservationists are rallying their forces in absentia to plead the case for every historic structure worthy of salvage.

What particularly concerns the latter group are not the famous structures in the French Quarter and Garden District — the city's two National Historic Landmark districts, which escaped severe flooding — but rather the many thousands of examples of vernacular architecture that contribute to New Orleans' uniqueness. The Crescent City is filled with distinctive homes that predate the Civil War — ornate if narrow shotguns sidling like piano keys on 30-foot-wide lots, camelbacks with partial second stories like jutting humps, and Creole cottages with their extended roof lines called abat vents that hang like a snoopy neighbor over the sidewalk.

"The modest houses are the flesh of our city," says Patricia Gay, director of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, a nonprofit group with more than 4,000 members that oversees neighborhood revitalization programs. "You have to look at them with some respect and think about what you might be throwing up in their place."

But prospects don't look good for "the majority" of these flood-damaged wooden structures, says economist Michael Carliner, who is the author of a study on the impact of Hurricane Katrina for the National Association of Home Builders. He predicts that every wood-frame structure that stood in more than 6 feet of floodwater will require demolition.

"For public health purposes, they're not salvageable," says Carliner, adding, "It's not clean water we're talking about, it's contaminated water." Toxins in the water range from E. coli bacteria stemming from more than 90 million tons of submerged sewage, to lead, fuel and petrochemicals leaching from thousands of submerged cars and storage tanks. He wouldn't be surprised if the cleanup involved bulldozing entire neighborhoods and dredging the toxin-laced soil "like a Superfund site."

Further, early homebuilding projects will focus on shelter, not style. Habitat for Humanity is already coordinating a "home in a box project" to get modular housing assembled quickly for displaced people.

Attempts to reach city authorities about which way they might be heading have been unsuccessful.

When it comes time to think about restoring devastated neighborhoods, homeowners who hope to rebuild in historic style will have three places to look for funds: federal and local incentive programs; flood insurance; and their own pockets.

The federal government grants a tax credit to those restoring historic buildings, but there's one crippling caveat for homeowners: The properties must be income-producing, such as a bed-and-breakfast. Preservationists have long lobbied for a change to the tax credit and will do so with renewed vigor. Flood insurance will help those who have it, but only to a point. Only about 84,000 (or 40 percent) of the homeowners in Orleans Parish have policies with the National Flood Insurance Program, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and those policies cap out at $250,000 for private residences. Private insurers do not provide flood insurance.

In many cases, this payout will fall seriously short. One fully restored double shotgun in Uptown listed for $495,000 in The [New Orleans] Times-Picayune classified ads before Katrina.

 

Blacks to sell

On the other hand, the more than 50 percent of New Orleans homeowners without flood insurance may have no choice but to sell their lots to developers.

"This may further the Houstonization of New Orleans and the destruction of its historic fabric," laments S. Frederick Starr, author of "Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans" and the owner of an 1826 plantation house in the Ninth Ward, adjacent to one of the levee breaches. "This is the most critical question with regard to the cultural survival of New Orleans. Are you going to incentivize the owners to rebuild, or are you going to tear it all down and build some awful thing?"

This concern may take the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans onto new turf: lending its expertise to new construction.

"New constructions don't have to be bland, Anywhere-USA constructions," says the center's Stephanie Bruno. "Recent years have seen the development of materials that make it possible to rebuild cost-consciously and make it look more like a historic building. If we take care about our rebuilding efforts, we can maintain our character."

But first and foremost, the organization wants desperately to save the old buildings. Gay, the preservation center director, says that some of the partly submerged 19th-century houses framed from impermeable, rock-solid cypress and "barge board" taken from dismantled river barges may surprise everybody with their durability.

"No city has the building stock we do," Gay asserts.

Preservationists in New Orleans turn to the example of Charleston, S.C., which managed a widely lauded restoration of its historic center after Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

Jonathan Poston of the Historic Charleston Foundation says the rebuilding effort began "three or four days after the storm" with a gathering of preservation forces from across the country and continued through a months-long building-by-building assessment followed by many months of intensive "drying procedures."

Andy Ferrell of the National Center for Preservation Technology & Training, a division of the National Park Service, says the discussion of what to rebuild and what to restore in New Orleans will draw around a familiar battle line. "There's a lot of animosity between those folks who are building new houses and those who are preserving old houses," he says.

"And remember," Ferrell adds with the guarded hope of a die-hard preservationist. "These very buildings that we are talking about have weathered storms before. [We] just need to get the water out as quickly as possible and see where to go from there."

 

ON THE WEB National Association of Home Builders study on the

Shootout

Police Kill Five Contractors on La. Bridge


Sunday September 4, 2005 11:16 PM

AP Photo VTAP102

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six, a deputy chief said. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal.

The contractors were walking across a bridge on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to fix the 17th Street Canal, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Corps.

Earlier Sunday, New Orleans Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot at eight people, killing five or six.

The shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

No other details were immediately available.

Drug Trade

Hong Kong and the Sassoon Opium Wars

The 99 year British lease on Hong Kong expired in July allowing the Red Chinese to take over. Hundreds of newspaper stories and TV reports have covered this event but not one revealed how England first gained control of Hong Kong!

The truth lies buried in the family line of David Sassoon, "The Rothschilds of The Far East," and their monopoly over the opium trade.

Britain won Hong Kong by launching the opium Wars to give the Sassoons exclusive rights to drug an entire nation!

David Sassoon was born in Baghdad in 1792. His father, Saleh Sassoon, was a wealthy banker and the treasurer to Ahmet Pasha, the governor of Baghdad. (Thus making him the "court Jew" - a highly influential position.)

In 1829 Ahmet was overthrown due to corruption and the Sassoon family fled to Bombay, India. This was the strategic trade route to interior India and the gateway to the Far East. In a brief time the British government granted Sassoon "monopoly rights" to all manufacture of cotton goods, silk and most important of all - Opium - then the most addictive drug in the world!

The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1905, states that Sassoon expanded his opium trade into China and Japan. He placed his eight sons in charge of the various major opium exchanges in China.
 

 

Pushed by that city's violent criminal milieu and pulled by the scale of the Asian drug trade, leading European drug dealers such as the Eliopolos brothers moved to Shanghai and Tientsin in the early 1930s. In his 1934 report to Washington, the U.S. Treasury attache in Shanghai reported that there had been an influx into China of individuals formerly identified with the traffic in Europe.

In particular, the Jewish syndicates that dominated New York's drug trade under the leadership of Yasha Katzenberg and Louis Lepke Buchalter sent agents to purchase heroin through European dealers based in Shanghai.

Simultaneously, Shanghai's Green Gang leader Tu Yueh-sheng emerged as the city's leading drug dealer and a key intelligence operative for the Nationalist Government--an alliance that protected the narcotics network from the regime's anti-opium campaign of the 1930s.

 

The American people have also been led to believe that the (Mafia) crime syndicate in America is strictly an Italian affair. Our Jewish entertainment media has produced countless films and Television shows, (like the award winning “Sopranos”) depicting Italo-Americans as the masters of the syndicate. But a closer look reveals that Jews, NOT Italians, founded and financed “the syndicate” in the early days before prohibition. From the late 1940s to the present, the upper structure of the syndicate has remained pretty much the same - Jewish Meyer Lansky dispatched his right-hand man, Bugsy Siegel, to Las Vegas in 1946 to start the gambling and prostitution rackets in that area. Lansky ordered Siegel's death when he learned that Siegel was embezzling from him. Siegel was then replaced by Morris Rosen, Gus Greenbaum, and Morris Sidwirts. In Los Angeles, Lansky's men were Jack Dragna and Mickey Cohen - all strictly "kosher."

 

The banks on the rare occasions when they are caught laundering drug money, shed rivers of crocodile tears, rub their eyes and whine how they were victimized by devious ole’ dope dealers and when the evidence is too damning, they simply point the finger at the lowest level employee plausible. The fact is, that not only do the banks knowingly handle drug money, they compete avidly for the business. Whole sections of financial institutions, law firms, accounting firms, and consulting firms, have been specifically set up to run money-laundering operations; it is a huge, lucrative business and yet again, principally run by Jews.

 

In a recent article in the OBSERVER, London - Sunday, November 10, 2002, entitled “Ultra Orthodox US Jews accused of 'cleaning' Colombian coke cartel cash,” reporter Ed Vulliamy, not only proves the point of covert Jewish involvement in CRIMINAL enterprises including drugs, but the article clearly illustrates how the belief system of the oh-so-pious Hassidic Jews, are a complete and utter sham! “British and American drug-busting authorities claim to have smashed one of the most bizarre money-laundering services ever operated for Colombian cocaine cartels: a circle of ultra-religious Hassidic Jews in New York. The ring is said to be one of the biggest to be 'cleaning' profits amassed by the Colombian coke barons, with the strange twist that it is run by a group from the Jewish community that acts as moral and spiritual guardian of the Orthodox faith. This is not the first time the Hassidim have been exposed as involved in the big-time drug trade.

Jews And Cocaine Trade

 Aloysio de Andrade Faria ...Brazilian Drug Family

 Roberto Rocca and family ....Colombian Drug cartel

Alfonso Romo Garza family .....Mexico Drugs

Aliza`s family went to Colombia with the Sephardic Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the early 1500`s. Her family maintained a traditional home and she is glad to have taken stronger steps to building a Jewish home. Zeev`s parents are both from Rumania. After WWII they traveled to Bogotá, Colombia where they also kept a traditional home. Neither Aliza nor Zeev were religious nor did they think much about aliyah or Judaism
 

Cocaine in its various forms is derived from the coca plant which is native to the high mountain ranges of South America.The first recognized authority and advocate for this drug was world famous psychologist, Sigmund Freud. Early in his career, Freud broadly promoted cocaine as a safe and useful tonic that could cure depression and sexual impotence. Cocaine got a further boost in acceptability when in 1886 John Pemberton included cocaine a

 From the 1850's to the early 1900's, cocaine and opium laced elixirs, tonics and wines were broadly used by people of all social classes. This is a fact that is for the most part hidden in American history. The truth is that at this time there was a large drug culture affecting a broad sector of American society. Other famous people that promoted the "miraculous" effects of cocaine elixirs were Thomas Edison and actress Sarah Bernhart. Because there were no restrictions placed on acquiring these drugs in the early 1900's, narcotics were an acceptable way of life for a large number of people, many of whom were people of stature. Cocaine was a main stay in the silent film industry. The pro-drug messages coming out of Hollywood at this time were receiving international attention which influenced the attitudes of millions of people about cocaine.
 

1855   Cocaine first extracted from coca leaves.  2
1862   Merck produces 1/4 pound of cocaine.  2
1869   Seeds from the commercial variety of coca arrived at Kew Gardens.
1870   Vin Mariani (coca wine) is for sale throughout France, containing 6 mg cocaine per ounce of wine. Exported Vin Mariani contained 7.2 mg per ounce to compete with the higher cocaine content of American competitors.  2
1870s   Parke,Davis manufactures a fluid extract of coca.  2
1876 - 1885   Race walkers in England chew coca leaves to improve their performance.  2
1883   Merck produces 3/4 pound of cocaine.  2
1884   Cocaine's use as a local anesthetic in eye surgery is popularized.  2
1884   Freud publishes On Coca in which he recommends the use of cocaine to treat a variety of conditions including morphine addiction.  2
1884   Merck produces 3,179 pounds of cocaine.  2
1886   Merck produces 158,352 pounds of cocaine.  2
1886   Coca-Cola is first introduced by John Pemberton, containing cocaine laced syrup and caffeine.
Late 1880s   Parke,Davis starts to manufacture refined cocaine.  2
c. 1901   Coca-Cola removed coca from their formula.  2
c. 1905   Snorting cocaine becomes popular.  2
1910   First cases of nasal damage from cocaine snorting are written of in medical literature.   2
1910   First cases of nasal damage from cocaine snorting are seen in hospitals.  2
1912   U.S. government reports 5,000 cocaine related fatalities in one year.  2
1914   Cocaine banned in United States.  1
Early 1930s   Japan is the world's leading cocaine producer (23.3%) followed by the United States (21.3%), Germany (15%), U.K. (9.9%), France (8.3%).  2
c. 1976   Freebase cocaine first developed (probably in California). It would soon be popularized by dealers and glamorized by Hollywood media.

 

Blacks leave New Orleans

 

Study: New Orleans could lose 80 percent of black population

By Michelle R. Smith, Associated Press Writer | January 26, 2006

PROVIDENCE, R.I. --The city of New Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population if people displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not able to return to their damaged neighborhoods, according to an analysis released Thursday by a Brown University sociologist.

Blacks and the poor were disproportionately affected by Katrina, according to the study led by Brown Professor John R. Logan. The analysis concludes that the difficulty in moving back to the city could mean a massive loss of population, overwhelmingly among blacks.

New Orleans was more than 65 percent black before Katrina hit in August, but it appears most of the estimated 135,000 residents who have been able to return are white. Mayor Ray Nagin recently apologized for saying New Orleans would remain a "chocolate city" as he tried to allay fears that blacks would not return.

The study found that if New Orleans' returning population was limited to the neighborhoods undamaged by Katrina, about half the white population would not return and 80 percent of its black population would not.

"There's very good reason for people to be concerned that the future New Orleans will not be a place for the people who used to live there, that there won't be room in New Orleans for large segments of the population that used to call it home," said Logan, who studies urban areas.

The study used maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that detailed flood and wind damage and compared them to data from the 2000 U.S. Census to determine who was affected and in what numbers.

It found the hurricane-damaged areas of New Orleans were 75 percent black compared to 46 percent black in undamaged areas of the city. It also found that 29 percent of the households in those areas lived below the poverty line, compared with 24 percent of households in undamaged areas.

More than half of those who lived in the city's damaged neighborhoods were renters, the analysis found. Those people were unlikely to have property insurance, and because so many are poor, would be unlikely to have the resources to return to the city.

"The odds of living in a damaged area were clearly much greater for blacks, renters and poor people," the study said. "In these respects the most vulnerable residents turned out also to be at greatest risk."

Along the Gulf Coast, about 46 percent of the population in damaged areas was black, compared with 26 percent in non-damaged areas. The study did not consider areas damaged if they reported just superficial problems, such as missing roof shingles.

By sheer numbers, the study noted there were almost as many non-Hispanic whites as blacks affected in damaged areas of the Gulf Coast region -- just under 300,000 of both populations. But it said that whites would be more likely to return to damaged neighborhoods.

"Whites are more likely to be homeowners," the study said. "But more important, they are much more likely to have the personal resources to reinvest in their homes or to find a new residence in a difficult housing market."

Some former residents may not be able to return to their old neighborhoods even if they wanted to, Logan said. Parts of New Orleans may close forever to development, renters can't necessarily return to homes they've left for months, and the housing market is tight. In addition, several large public housing complexes in the city have been closed since the storm and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has not offered specific details on how or when those projects may be restored or rebuilt.

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This city will be chocolate at the end of the day," he said. "I don't care what people are saying Uptown," referring to a mostly white area of New Orleans. Nagin also suggested that God unleashed last year's hurricanes because he was "mad at America"—and particularly at the black community, for failing to take better care of itself. "I was shocked," recalls Wilson