New York Prosecutors Say Rabbi and Accomplices Stole $12 Million from Disabled Kids

In some people’s interpretation of religious morality, kids have to get fucked one way or the other.

Four men, including a rabbi, were indicted on Tuesday on charges they stole millions of dollars from a taxpayer-funded preschool for disabled kids.

Rabbi Samuel Hiller, Ira Kurman, Roy Hoffman and Daniel Laniado from the Island Child Development Center (ICDC) were busted for allegedly siphoning off $12.4 million of the institution’s $27 million state-funded budget between 2005 and 2012, using the money for themselves and for other business interests.

“The public funds provided to [ICDC] were earmarked for special needs pre-schoolers with disabilities but instead were allegedly used by the defendants for their own purposes,” said Queens DA Richard A. Brown.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli commented that the fraud demonstrated “a brazen disregard for common decency and the law.”

Jewish Journal explains that

Not only were government funds stolen but thousands of special needs children, who have no way to fight back, have had their services denied in a cynical, cruel manner.

Hiller, the rabbi, appears to be the biggest thief of the quartet. He allegedly diverted millions to summer camps and to a private girls’ school where he is the principal (none are affiliated with ICDC), but he also wasn’t above pilfering $30,000 to pay for a plumbing job at his Queens home.

Prosecutors say that the other defendants used stolen money to pay for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and home remodeling.

The four are charged with grand larceny, identity theft, and falsifying business records.

The blog Failed Messiah has more.

(Image via Shutterstock. Dreidel drollery by Terry Firma, with apologies to AC/DC)

Jesus Himself Exposed Megachurch Pastor Bob Coy’s Adultery, and His Enthusiastic Fapping

Calvary Chapel, the Fort Lauderdale megachurch founded by Pastor Bob Coy nearly 30 years ago, will have to get by with a different shepherd, after Coy was found to have “committed adultery with more than one woman.”

Also, said Outreach Pastor Chet Lowe,

“[Coy] committed sexual immorality, habitually, through pornography. … Rest assured, God will not be mocked.

There’s no doubt who ratted Coy out:

“Your sins will find you out,” Lowe said. “Jesus, because he loved [Coy], exposed him publicly.”

Though readers of this blog probably know better, John Vaughan, director of the Megachurch Research Center in Springfield, Missouri, was eager to tell the Sun Sentinel that these kinds of situations are really, really rare.

Vaughan said despite a public perception to the contrary, ministers rarely get caught up in sex scandals.

It’s not nearly as epidemic as people think it is,” he said. “When it happens, it’s big news and people extrapolate.”

Still, church leaders are as prone as any powerful man to temptation. “There are a lot of beautiful Christian women,” Vaughan said. “A pastor, as a man, would have the same kind of temptation as a man anywhere else would.”

Even the Christian Post knows that those temptations are both plentiful and readily yielded to. Its headline about the Coy ouster asks if there is “an epidemic of moral failings” among men of the cloth.

I’ll say.

(Also posted at Friendly Atheist)