Wiseguys Rabbis and the FBI

<p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>Was it the Mafia behind the biggest loanshark in New York City? Or a group of Long Island Rabbis?</strong></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>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. </span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>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. </span><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>Wiseguys Rabbis and the FBI</strong><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)> captures the mayhem that follows when ambition and flexible ethics meet. And in a unique twist on crime stories </span><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>Wiseguys Rabbis and the FBI</strong><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)> 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.</span></p>