Some of the Other Mafia Problems at the ADL

Roy Cohn's role as a law enforcement liaison

Jonathan Greenblatt is in an impossible position in this moment, and I don’t envy him. Watching him transform in real-time from mild-mannered bottled water salesman and Obama guy into a likeness of bruiser Abe Foxman is a sight to behold.

While Foxman shared a fair number of pathologies of the institution, in general he was a very sympathetic figure due to his dramatic personal story of having been hidden from the Nazis by a Catholic family—he was baptized and given a Polish name. That made the issues deeply personal for him in a way they aren’t for Greenblatt.

Be that as it may, the institution has long had organized crime issues and there ought to be a reckoning for it. The above address from a top FBI official in the 1950s makes reference to Roy Cohn’s role as a top liaison between federal law enforcement and the ADL. J. Edgar Hoover himself was savvy enough to keep some distance between himself and the organization, a prudence subsequent FBI directors appear to have forgotten.

Tons of mobsters have donated to the ADL over the years, like Joe Linsey, Morris Shenker, Edmund Safra, Meshulam Riklis, Moe Dalitz, Victor Posner. Dalitz, a boss of the Cleveland Mob, was even given an ADL award. In 2019 a letter went on sale in which Meyer Lansky offers his services to Ben-Gurion’s former security chief in resettling Soviet Jews. The links between organized crime and the top level of the Israeli state are not remote. Prime Minister Netanyahu has his own issues of this kind.

Some of the Reagan-era problems here involve Maxwell Rabb, who President Reagan made ambassador to Italy. Rabb was a director at the ADL’s mobbed up bank Sterling National, and involved in the New York chapter of the organization. He was very close to Roy Cohn, too. There was also Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns, who served under Ed Meese and was involved in funding Israeli tech initiatives. It was Burns that was involved in bankrupting Inslaw, in the famous PROMIS scandal. This stuff is what Danny Casolaro was investigating.

My personal feelings are not all that relevant, but this has a lot to do with my dim view of Reaganism. Tolerating all this stuff is not normal, this isn’t what we do with normal countries. There’s nothing normal about it, and decent people shouldn’t tolerate it. The gap between the deeply criminal reality and the apocalyptic delusions of Christian Zionists is a blasphemous imposture.

There is not some non-criminal Israel lobby out there. This is the Israel lobby. There is virtually no pro-Israel organization that is not either full of criminals or actively involved in breaking the law. There are a lot of well-intentioned Jews and Christians who have sympathy for Israel, and that’s perfectly legitimate, but these institutions have always been profoundly criminal, chief among them the ADL. The IAC’s main force is the felon Adam Milstein and their activities in the last decade have been highly illegal. AIPAC is getting OnlyFans cash. FDD blatantly flouts the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

President Trump’s involvement with this network is the story with him—Cohn was something of a mentor. This old network of mobbed-up Reaganites is more or less the only reason he was just barely able to be slotted into the Washington power structure. Do you think a media which, in the Trump years, was credulously repeating the ADL’s catastrophism about the rise of hate, would be willing to be honest about all this? Of course not. And that’s what’s so toxic about the likes of Buzzfeed and The Atlantic messing with the public’s sense-making about this stuff.