Now that we know how much of a scumbag Abramoff was and all of his connections, let's look back on how he has used and abused the Jewish faith to hide and deceive his money-making schemes:
First off, let's look at how he
used donations to Jewish charities as a cover and laundry for his ill-gotten gains. None of the charities reported ever receiving any of the money. The school he set up, Yeshkol Academy,
was essentially a money laundromat, using money to buy zambonis when it didn't own a hockey rink and
didn't pay it's staff and
"screwed it's tuition-paying students out of a diploma".
He tried to get his good friend and rabbi, Daniel Lapin of the Toward Traditions, to create fake awards for him, then used money from the Choctaw tribe funneled to Russian businesses to fund Israeli paramilitary groups. Such a nice boy.
He is bonded at the hip with Lapin, who was paid $60,000 as an absentee dean at the yeshiva Abramoff set up. Lapin has a history all it's own teetering on anti-semitism:
"You'd have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture
The sad fact is that through Jewish actors, playwrights, and producers, the Berlin stage of Weimar Germany linked Jews and deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations just as surely as Broadway does today.
He set up Stacks, the only Jewish deli in D.C., used like Signatures for wining and dining politicos, and then closed soon after. I wonder how it didn't make money when people didn't pay their tabs as political favors.
He produced the movie Red Scorpion, a movie where Dolph Lundgren kills everything in sight, then "established a short-lived Committee for Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment, but then concluded he wouldn't be able to put out movies that met his standards."
I'm no religious expert, but for a guy who wore his orthodox Judaism on his sleeve and dealt almost exclusively with gambling, he forgets that the Talmud states that "one who plays with dice" is unfit to bear witness.
Maybe he was using all of his greed to send money to paramilitary operations in Israel for some exrtremist religious vision, but he abused people's faith to get his own ends in the process which seems unconscionable.