Moshe Lax

The Timeline

United States of America v. Lax et al (filed in EDNY July 16, 2018

CZ-National rented restaurant space from the Old Post Office, using BVS’s business address.

TRUMP OLD POST OFFICE LLC vs. CZ-NATIONAL, LLC AND BVS ACQUISITION CO., LLC Civil Case No. 2015 CA 005890 B June 16, 2016 Deposition Transcript of Donald Trump Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Geoffrey Zakarian, David Orowitz, Jeffrey Pollak, Raymond Flores, Roger Cline, John Asadoorian

Commercial Bank of Dubai alleges a plot to defraud the bank of $100m by Al-Saris Emirati oil traders involving Lax Diamonds 

POLISH YOUR DIAMOND Mishpacha

Wikipedia “Lax grew up in Brooklyn[1] as the only son of the noted diamond dealer, real estate developer, and philanthropist Chaim Lax[2] who partnered with Brooklyn developer Isaac Hager in gentrifying Williamsburg, Brooklyn.[3] He attended local Hasidic schools and the religious school (yeshiva) of Rabbi Shaul Brus.[2]

After his marriage to Shaindy Lax,[1] he ended his religious studies (kollel)[2] to found Dynamic Diamonds, a diamond sales business, together with his father.[4] He resides in a mansion in Riverdale with his wife.[1]

When his father died in 2008, Lax inherited his vast debts.[1] Lax was sued by the estate’s creditors, who alleged in court that Lax had used shell companies to hide the estate’s assets, and that he attempted to extort them and other members of the Orthodox Jewish community into giving up on the debts.[1] The lawsuit was eventually settled.[1] Lax was also the subject of several other lawsuits, many of which regarded unpaid debts and legal fees.[1]

In 2017, Lax opened a two-story fashion gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York.[4] The opening was attended by Tiffany Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lax’s landlord Eliot Spitzer.[1]

In August 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Lax for the payment of $60 million worth of taxes. The DOJ alleged that Lax, his father and his sister Zlaty Schwartz conducted complex fake transactions in order to fraudulently evade taxes.[5]”

“The Trouble With Ivanka’s Business Partner”. POLITICO Ben Schreckinger August 27, 2017 “His vendors call him a “career grifter.” His father’s creditors claim he’s a fraud and a serial extortionist who shakes people down with trumped-up threats of criminal charges. With these and other allegations piling up in court records along with judgments—against him, his wife and his businesses—for millions of dollars, his lawyers are abandoning him, saying he’s a deadbeat. All the while, he’s been living in one of the most luxurious mansions in the Bronx…..

And according to court records, Trump renewed her licensing agreement with Lax in 2011, allowing him to continue using her name even after his company defaulted on payments and he violated numerous terms of their agreement.“He cheated not just us, he also cheated Ivanka,” says Mahipal Singhvi of KGK, a company that was recently awarded a multimillion-dollar judgment against Lax, his wife and their businesses after they kept, but did not pay for, a large shipment of KGK diamonds.

In June 2015, the lawyer for Diligence, Steven Schlesinger, withdrew from the case, saying his client had failed to communicate with him and had stiffed him on $85,000 worth of legal fees. Diligence then got a replacement lawyer, David Jaroslawicz, but he also withdrew from the case this January.

In his request to abandon the case, Jaroslawicz said he had been retained by someone named Elridge Glasford running a corporate services firm on the Caribbean island of Nevis—population 11,000—that he was “not computer literate” because of a disability, and that he was never paid for his work. In November, a lawyer representing Lax’s sister, Zlaty Schwartz, and his father’s estate, withdrew from the case, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the estate.

Since then, the case has settled, according to the developers’ lawyer, William Fried, who declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement.

***

Those cases represent only a small sample of the suits filed against Lax in recent years. In September 2013, the law firm Cohen & Perfetto sued Lax, claiming he stiffed them for $48,000 in legal fees. The case settled, with Scharf representing Lax.

Last January, Lax’s cousin, Aron, sued Lax and his sister for allegedly pursuing “unjust enrichment” by trying to evict Aron and his wife from a Brooklyn condo that they have resided in since 2006 but whose mortgage is in the name of Lax’s late father. Last October, the firm Porzio, Bromberg & Newman sued Lax for $100,000 in unpaid legal fees. And in June, the law firm Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone sued Lax for $20,000 in unpaid legal fees. The cases remain ongoing. Lax has also been named as a defendant in a number of cases claiming failures to make mortgage payments.

Lax’s problems have continued to entangle Ivanka Trump. In recent years, the state of New York has issued at least three warrants for unpaid taxes against Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, totaling over $300,000. The outstanding taxes were eventually paid.

The financial travails of Lax and his wife have also put Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry in danger of at least partly falling into the hands of the highest bidder at a public auction in order to satisfy their unpaid debts. In January, a New York couple, Michael and Rachel Goldenberg, sued Lax and his wife for stiffing them on a six-figure loan. Lax’s wife owned at least part of Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, and in April, a New York court ordered her to turn over her stake in the company to the city so that it could be auctioned off to settle the debt. She apparently failed to do so, leading the Goldenbergs to request in May that she be held in contempt of court. In July, the court ordered the Laxs to pay the Goldenbergs $675,000, and the motion for contempt has been put on hold until September 19, the deadline for paying the debt.

The Laxes’ finances are further obscured by the fact that they are sometimes conducted under the name Chana Weisz, an alias used by his wife, Shaindy. Lax will sometimes write checks from a checkbook made in the name of Chana Weisz, according to a person who has seen him do this. The person recently received a five-figure check from Lax out of that checkbook but said they were unable to cash it because, as an alarmed bank teller pointed out, Lax’s signature did match the name on the check.

Amid so many setbacks, Lax did score at least one massive, if temporary, reprieve thanks to some highly irregular tax relief. In October 2015, the IRS released a $27 million tax lien against his father’s estate, saying the obligation had been satisfied. But last May, the IRS reinstated the lien, saying it had been released by mistake and that the $27 million in back taxes had never actually been paid.

Michael Macgillivray, a prominent Chicago attorney specializing in tax collections and a veteran of the IRS collections department, was gobsmacked by the botched lien release. “That is extremely extraordinary,” he said. “Of the things I’ve seen in my practice, nothing has even remotely approached a million dollars when there was an erroneously released lien.”

MacGillivray added that he had difficulty fathoming the explanation the IRS offered on the form reinstating the lien—that the lien had been released “mistakenly.” A spokesman for the IRS said the agency does not comment on individual cases.

“I could not believe that on a $27 million issue somebody would just make a mistake like that. You’d think there’d be a lot of due diligence,” MacGillivray said. “I can’t say its corruption because the IRS has 80,000 employees and there are incompetents.”

As Lax’s problems mounted, Trump did not sever ties or disavow him. The continued relationship briefly came up last summer, when she gave a deposition in a dispute between the Trump Organization and restaurateur Geoffrey Zakarian, who years before had ended a partnership with Lax amid acrimony and litigation.”POLITICO

“When we last left off w/Moshe Lax, we were wondering why he & his partner in crime, Baruch Rosenfeld. donated to Rockland Cty sheriff, Louis Falco, thru three different companies months before Rosenfeld’s house at 73 Carlton Rd burned to the ground.” (@mrspanstreppon) August 4, 2018

Cops Suspect Arson After a Home Linked to Ivanka Trump’s Diamond Business Burns She may have closed down her fine jewelry line, but Ivanka’s partners have kept the old company at the center of an ever-deepening mystery. GQ February 21, 2018 “In December, GQ reported that a judge had granted a bank permission to subpoena the firm in connection with an alleged money-laundering scheme. The latest twist involves a suspected arson.

In the early morning hours of December 30, on a quiet street in a suburb of New York City, a small fire began to burn in an empty house. Soon the home was engulfed in flames. For the next six hours, firefighters battled the blaze in the cold. After that, the local police took over—opening an arson investigation that remains ongoing.”

“On July 16, the feds filed a 120 page complaint against Moshe, his wife, Shaindy & dozen or so other defendants in Brooklyn, The judge is I. Leo Glasser, 94, & the case was referred by magistrate, Peggy Kuo. I can name some other people who should be on the docket… pic.twitter.com/ZXYq9sIwgw”(@mrspanstreppon) August 5, 2018

“Wonder if the IRS is investigating how a $27 million lien against the Chaim Lax estate was “accidentally” released in ’15, then quickly reinstated? If my theory is right, it’s going to open another whole can of worms…(ACRIS) pic.twitter.com/Shie161x55″ (@mrspanstreppon) August 5, 2018

Hmm…the feds filed the complaint against Moshe Lax on July 16, slapping an $88 million lien on his & his wife’s assets including Madison Avenue Diamonds LLC dba Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry. On July 24, Ivanka abruptly shuts down her fashion biz. Coincidence?Okay. I’ve read the entire 120 page complaint filed against Moshe & Shaindy. Given the feds claim Moshe intentionally & knowingly diverted more than $40 million from his father’s estate owed to the IRS into his own pocket, I cant see how this doesn’t become a criminal case. The federal prosecutors left out a lot of details in their case against Moshe & Shaindy. No mention of Chaim Lax setting up a foundation to “donate” a building at 84 Sanford St & then pocket the $6 million in proceeds. (Funniest 990 I’ve ever seen! )For anyone interested in helping the government case against the Laxes, the prosecutors conveniently included their address, phone numbers & email accounts on the complaint. According to Deputy AG Richard E. Zuckerman’s DOJ bio, he’s quite experienced in white collar crime.@mrspanstreppon

2006 Lax Charity Foundation 990 – Moshe Lax, director

“Ivanka was on the board of Signature Bank (SB) until 2013. Attended 10 board mtgs. SB provided loans to Trump’s Florida golf course, Michael Cohen, Jared and Charles Kushner. Scott Shay Ch’man of SB since inception. Shay was a director of Bank Hapoalim, SB’s former parent co.

Signature Bank President and Chief Executive Officer Joseph J. DePaolo: “Ivanka is a perfect fit in that her creativity, capabilities and track record in today’s digital-based marketplace reflect an important segment of our clientele”. therealdeal.com/issues_article…
In 2018, New York’s Department of Financial Services requested information from Signature about its credit lines to the Kushners. nytimes.com/2018/07/23/bus…
Sometimes you learn more from a “response to inaccuracies”press release than was intended. Ivanka was on the Signature Bank board but the relationship with the Trump org was “purely a depository one”. investor.signatureny.com/static-files/1…

3:03 AM · Feb 25, 2019

“Which reminds me, someone was kind enough to forward some news about our favorite fraudster, something to the effect that Moshe doesn’t want anyone to know when his Brooklyn house is being auctioned off (September)…. pic.twitter.com/XTqS7yyiJi” @mrspanstreppon July 16, 2019


Thread by @DerWouter “So Judge I. Leo Glasser, a 95-year old federal judge, is involved with both the Moshe Lax case and prior Felix Sater matters. So this attorney, William Hughes, was recently onboarded by Barr to DOJ. Hughes had most recently been at the Trump White House in a non-lawyer capacity. (He had also clerked for Judge Glasser). Hughes had been an associate at NY’s Sullivan & Cromwell. He had also *checks notes* been an advance staffer in the Bush WH. “

Former Sullivan & Cromwell Associate Takes Justice Dept. Front-Office Post William Hughes has taken a post as an associate deputy attorney general, leaving the White House, where he was deputy director in the office of administration. Law.com By Mike Scarcella  April 23, 2019

Erin Brady, William Hughes NY Times September 18, 2010

Bill Hughes on LinkedIn

Bill Hughes: White House eyeing two candidates to replace Joe Hagin Politico By ANDREW RESTUCCIA and ELIANA JOHNSON.  June 28, 2018

ANN COMPTON RETIRING AFTER 41 YEARS AT THE WHITE HOUSE – CHUCK TODD takes over ‘Meet’ on Sept. 7; Andrea moderates this weekend – HOT TREND: ‘game-ifying the news’ Politico MIKE ALLEN “Crowd-sourced reviews of Judge Glasser’s recent cases are not great: The Robing Room. Judge Glasser also oversaw the John Gotti trial in 1992.“-@DerWouter”