Wiseguys, Rabbis, and the FBI: How one man became the biggest loanshark in New York City, went to prison, and escaped. - Paperback

by J. a. Schwartzman (Author), Melvin Cooper (With)

Was it the Mafia behind the biggest loanshark in New York City? Or a group of Long Island Rabbis?

Melvin Cooper was a financier with an edge, making risky loans to New York businesspeople until he found himself running the biggest loansharking operation in the city. In 1984, he was arrested by then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani along with seven Mafia capos and soldiers from four organized crime families. It was one of Giuliani's first high-profile RICO trials, and he filled the courtroom with notorious informants, lowlifes, rats, and some of New York's most sought-after crime figures including "top earners" like Jimmy Rotondo and Michael Franzese. Cooper was sentenced to 30 years in prison - from which he promptly escaped.

The driving, three-decade story takes readers from the Brooklyn waterfront to Florida beaches to an Indiana penitentiary. Never before have Rabbis and the Mafia collided like this, as Mel Cooper and his partner - a dentist from Long Island - funded nightclubs and restaurants in freewheeling 1980s New York. Wiseguys, Rabbis, and the FBI captures the mayhem that follows when ambition and flexible ethics meet. And, in a unique twist on crime stories, Wiseguys, Rabbis, and the FBI is also about the business of crime: the daily bookkeeping, contracts, corruption, and cover-ups that echo to this day, and remind us why chaos and lies are not the best business tools.