*--PRINTER FRIENDLY ARTICLE*
May 8, 2008
New Square fugitive held without bail in London for extradition hearing
Steve Lieberman
The Journal News
A New Square resident who has been a fugitive for more than a decade is being held without bail in London.
Avrum
David Friesel was ordered held yesterday pending court hearings to
bring him back to the United States to face a litany of federal grand
jury charges.
Friesel,
a son of New Square's mayor and a former village clerk, fled 11 years
ago on the heels of an indictment charging him, five other village
leaders and another man with stealing tens of millions of dollars in
federal education and other anti-poverty programs.
Last
week, London police arrested Friesel after weeks of surveillance based
on information provided by the U.S. Marshal's Service.
The
scams Friesel was accused of included creating a phony school in
Brooklyn to steal millions of dollars in federal and state educational
funds and stealing $11.6 million in tuition aid for mostly non-existent
students through a Judaic studies program run with Rockland Community
College.
They also were accused of illegally obtaining money from other anti-poverty programs.
Five
of the men - including a founding member of the Skverer Hasidic Jewish
community in Rockland -eventually were convicted and sentenced to
prison for a series of financial frauds against the government.
One man, Nathan Adler, remains a fugitive.
The
case drew greater notoriety when then-President Bill Clinton commuted
the prison sentences of four of the men before leaving office in
January 2001.
Clinton
was accused of pardoning them in exchange for New Square voting as a
bloc for Hillary Clinton in her 2000 U.. Senate Run. The community's
grand rebbe and other leaders met with the Clintons at the White House
in December 2000.
A U.S. Attorney's Office investigation found no criminality in Clinton's pardons.
Read more about this story tomorrow in The Journal News
http://lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080508/NEWS03/805080523/-1/SPORTS.
