The FBI busted Brooklyn Rabbi Mendel Epstein and a fellow Orthodox Jewish leader, along with an eight-man “kidnap team” — saying the crew plotted to abduct, beat and even use a cattle prod to torture a husband into submitting to his wife’s desire for a divorce.
Epstein was caught in a sting operation that also nailed Rabbi Martin Wolmark, who along with Epstein allegedly offered to arrange the violence for more than $50,000 after getting it sanctioned by a Jewish court.
Epstein actually boasted to undercover agents that he had set up numerous such kidnap-beatings — one every year or so — to make reluctant husbands grant their wives a “get,” is a document needed to dissolve an Orthodox Jewish marriage, court papers charge.
During a secretly recorded conversation, Epstein, 68, told undercover agents he hired “tough guys who utilize electric cattle prods, karate, handcuffs and place plastic bags over the head of the husbands,” according to court papers.
“We take an electric cattle prod . . . You put it in certain parts of his body and in one minute, the guy will know,” Epstein allegedly said.
Two FBI agents posed as an unhappily married woman and her brother to pull off the sting, according to a New Jersey federal court complaint.
On Aug. 7, they called Wolmark, 55, who heads the Yeshiva Shaarei Torah in Suffern, and told him that “they were desperate for a religious divorce and were willing to pay a large sum of money,” the complaint says.
Wolmark referred the agents to Epstein, who was caught on video a week later saying, “Basically what we are going to be doing is kidnapping a guy for a couple of hours and beating him up and torturing him and then getting him to give the get, ” court papers say.
Epstein also said that “hopefully, there won’t even be a mark on him,” so that if he went to the police, they wouldn’t believe he was attacked and would think it was part of “some crazy Jewish affair,” the complaint says.
Wolmark and Epstein were both arrested Wednesday in Brooklyn.
One member of the goon squad “was wearing a garbage bag over his clothes” and the feds seized masks, rope, surgical blades and a screwdriver, along with feather quills and ink bottles “to ceremonially record the get,” the complaint says.
During the defendants’ appearance in Trenton federal court, prosecutor Joe Gribko called them all “a strong danger to the community.”
“I have been in touch with a husband who believes he’s been targeted and had a tracking device in his car. And another is a US congressional staffer who was assaulted by a minivan full of men,” he said.
All 10 men were ordered held without bail.
Additional reporting by Jennifer Bain, Kenneth Garger, Josh Saul and Reuven Fenton