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A certain standard of living By Gidi Weitz Tags: Avraham Hirschson He collected the open envelopes from the office, drove to the home of Abraham Hirchson - then chairman of the National Workers Federation (NWF, the Histadrut Haovdim Haleumit) - in Tel Aviv's fashionable Ramat Aviv Gimmel neighborhood, handed them to a Filipina employee and asked her to place them on his desk. He followed this routine for three years, time and again, without asking unnecessary questions. "Once I was given an envelope with dollars that had to be delivered to Hirchson's house before he went abroad," he told police interrogators. "The envelope got torn in my house, so I took the money out and counted it, to make sure no one would suspect that I kept part of the money. There was $7,000. I sealed the money in a new envelope and wrote on it: For MK Hirchson. I got to his house and the Filipina told me he was waiting for me in the study. I went up to the second floor. Hirchson came out to me. I remember he came out of the shower without a shirt; I remember he had a lot of hair on his chest, mostly white. I shook hands with him, handed him the envelope, wished him a good trip and went on my way." "I was just a messenger. There was nothing I could do with it. If you said 'no' they would kick you out on the spot. Hirchson was an arrogant man and people were afraid of him." Advertisement The speaker is David Cohen, a former NWF employee and a "compulsive gambler," as he himself told the police, who ran up huge debts on the gray market. From 1998 to 2003, Cohen worked as a messenger for the Nili nonprofit association, which ran a network of kindergartens and creches for the NWF. His brother, Ovadia Cohen, was then NWF chief financial manager and chairman of Nili. According to the draft indictment drawn up by the state prosecution against Abraham Hirchson - then chairman of the NWF and later Israel's finance minister - Ovadia Cohen, NWF accountant Gideon Ben Zur and others drew hundreds of checks totaling millions of shekels from the accounts of the NWF and Nili. Some of the checks were made out to David Cohen, who cashed them at a bank. "The money I converted to cash," Cohen told his interrogators, "I would pass on to Ovadia and especially to Gideon, and they prepared the envelopes for Hirchson. Gideon also put magazines into the envelope, so it would look like mail. He gave me the envelopes and told me to take them to Hirchson's house. The instructions from Ovadia would come after he spoke by phone or in his office with Hirchson, and they would coordinate what time Hirchson wanted the envelope at his house. I organized my workday around that. First priority in my schedule was that delivery." Interrogator: Do you know how much money was in the envelopes? Cohen: "Tens of thousands every time. I know, because I saw the money." Interrogator: Did you also deposit money into Hirchson's account? Cohen: "Yes. Once they sent me to cash checks for around a hundred thousand. They were cashed. Then they sent me to Bank Yahav and I deposited them in Abraham's private account." Interrogator: Why this round of cashing checks and depositing the cash? Why not deposit the checks in Hirchson's account? Cohen: "[So that] Hirchson would not be involved in depositing checks from the NWF and Nili. He preferred all the money in cash, with all the checks made out to me or others." Shlomo Aroes, messenger 'They befuddled me with all the deposits' Cohen's testimony to the police is only one of a series of testimonies in the tangled investigation of Hirchson, substantive parts of which are being published here for the first time. Hirchson allegedly received about NIS 2.5 million deceitfully from the NWF, personally and in cash, from 1998 to 2005. He was paid NIS 1.2 million for permanent monthly "expenses," between NIS 600,000 and NIS 750,000 for trips abroad, NIS 160,000 as "holiday grants," NIS 115,000 for meals in restaurants and in the Knesset cafeteria, NIS 72,000 for medicines and NIS 30,000 to host members of the Likud Central Committee. The investigators also suspect that the NWF financed Hirchson's campaigns in the Likud primaries of 1998 and 2002 to the tune of NIS 600,000. Apart from the reimbursements for restaurants and the Knesset cafeteria, Hirchson denies having received these monies. "It could be that people brought envelopes to my home and that the Filipina received them," Hirchson said in his interrogation, "but there was no money in the envelopes." In 1998, according to the indictment, Hirchson and his confidants Cohen and Ben Zur devised a scheme to take millions of shekels from the NWF and from the coffers of Nili for their private needs. "Hirchson told me he needed the money. He would ask for certain amounts and I would send him the money with David, my brother, or with others," Ovadia Cohen stated in his interrogation. "If he was in the office when the money arrived, I would give it to him [there]." Nili's accountant, Amatzia Bonner, who cosigned some of the checks with Cohen, said in his interrogation: "I would go to Ovadia Cohen to explain to him and cry about the excessive overdrafts in Nili's bank account. Ovadia would quickly write checks for his thefts and say to me, 'What, don't you know that I have to give to these big shots?' Ovadia mentioned Hirchson's name explicitly, saying he had to give him money. This repeated itself many times. I am talking especially about the days before Hirchson went abroad. And he went abroad a lot." Cohen and Bonner made out most of the checks to Shlomo Aroes, at the time a NWF messenger and now a kiosk owner in Tzrifin, the sprawling army base near Ramle. He describes himself as "someone who doesn't even have a cell phone." In his interrogation, he threatened that if he was arrested, he would kill himself. Between 2000 and 2003, Aroes cashed checks totaling NIS 5.1 million made out to him and transferred the money to Cohen and Ben Zur. Aroes also deposited cash into Hirchson's account. "I got the money either from Gideon or from Hirchson's secretary. They would call me while I was making deliveries and tell me that money had to be deposited into his account," Aroes said in his interrogation. "They just befuddled me with the amount of deposits to Hirchson's account in Bank Yahav and Discount Bank." Aroes was frequently sent with a sealed envelope to the home of the former finance minister. He claims he did not know the contents of the envelopes. "They would give me a closed envelope and I would take a taxi to Hirchson's house and give the envelope to the Filipina," he said. Gilerma Croset, Filipina caregiver 'All kinds of people gave me envelopes' Gilerma Croset started to work in Hirchson's spacious home on Dresner Street in Ramat Aviv Gimmel in 1990, as a caregiver for his sick wife. After his wife died, Croset continued to look after the household. For her services she received $700 a month from Hirchson. "All kinds of people came to give me envelopes," she stated in her testimony to the police. "The messengers would tell me to put the envelope in the study and that it was important to put the envelopes high up, because I have little children, so they should not touch the envelopes. They would tell me: 'Straight to the room.'" She too did not know what was inside the envelopes. In addition to envelopes, Croset also received medication delivered for Hirchson, which were also paid for by the NWF. "I would bring the medicines from a drugstore in Be'er Sheva or from a drugstore in Dizengoff Center [in Tel Aviv]," Aroes stated. "Dr. M. from the Leumit health maintenance organization would bring me the prescription, made out in my name. I would take it to a drugstore and take the medicines to Hirchson's house. Gideon Ben Zur would give me the money to pay for the medicines, and there were also times when Ovadia would give me money for the medicines. I would take them to the Filipina and tell her to put them in the refrigerator." When Hirchson was asked by the interrogators how the drugs were paid for, he replied: "I don't remember anymore how it was done. I know that I paid for all the medicines - maybe I paid the doctor, maybe I paid Gideon, maybe, I absolutely do not remember, I really don't remember." "Where did you think the money was coming from?" one of the interrogators asked him afterward, and elicited an astonishing reply: "Excuse me, everyone can take out NIS 500 when he works with you. And you get it back. What's that? It's the most normal thing and the simplest thing between people who are together or work together. If you ask him to buy you cigarettes, he will buy them out of his pocket - not that you smoke, or him, or maybe yes - but you will give it back to him. That is something that is done every day." Interrogator: Did you know that the prescriptions were written in his name [Aroes, the messenger] and not in yours? Hirchson: "Yes." Interrogator: Why were they written in his name? Hirchson: "The truth is that there is a reason for this subject. There is a very intimate reason." "Great embarrassment" was how the NWF director of finances, Ronit Garti, summed up the episode in her interrogation. Ronit Garti, director of finances 'He told me to put the money in a brown envelope' In another month, Hirchson's high-powered lawyer, Dr. Yaakov Weinrot, will relate Hirchson's version of events to the incoming state prosecutor, Moshe Lador, in a hearing, before Lador makes a final decision on whether to try Hirchson. The experienced Weinrot will try to topple the broad front of evidence with which his client is being confronted. According to Hirchson, the witnesses devised a plot against him in order to get off cheaply in the case, in which they are involved up to their necks. It won't be easy. The police have in their possession a handwritten index card file of accounts in which Hirchson's expenses are marked with the letter Aleph ("A"), together with check stubs that were seized from the NWF finances department. On the stubs the name of the messenger Shlomo Aroes was inserted alongside the letters AH (see photo). When the police asked Hirchson why his initials were written on the stubs, he replied: "I don't know, I don't know. I wasn't the one who did that." In fact, the initials were entered on the stubs by the financial director, Gideon Ben Zur. "If it says AH," he said in his interrogation, "the logical conclusion is that it is Abraham Hirchson." Garti, too, helped police understand the meaning of the codes in the cardfile. On February 15 investigator Uri Kenner paid a first visit to her office, to confiscate documents. He described the dialogue that ensued between them in a memorandum he wrote after the visit: "Garti told me: 'The police have to catch the real culprit.' I asked her: 'Who is the real offender?' She said: 'What, you don't know?' I said I didn't, and she said to me: 'He is now your finance minister.'" During the investigation, another track by which money made its way to Hirchson was discovered. Every month, the NWF finance department received cash paid by parents for enrichment groups and other activities for children run by the cultural centers of Nili and the NWF across the country. Garti: "About once a month, Gideon Ben Zur called me into his office and said there was money to be counted. I helped him count the amount he wanted, around NIS 30,000. The money was divided into notes of 200, 100, 50 and so on. After I finished counting, Gideon or I would put elastic bands around the cash and bundle it. Sometimes he told me to put the money into a brown envelope ... The amounts that were transferred to Hirchson decreased over time ... At the beginning it was NIS 30,000." Garti said in the interrogation that when she took over as director of finances she held a dramatic meeting with the managing director of the NWF, Yitzhak Russo, about the cash transfers: "We talked about how the situation could not remain as it was. I understood from him that Hirchson had claimed in the past that he had not received severance pay, and therefore Gideon and Ovadia had decided to give Abraham the severance money in cash every month." According to Garti, in the wake of her conversation with Russo, the latter called Hirchson and informed him that he was reducing the monthly sum from NIS 25,000 to NIS 5,000 until the end of the year. Afterward, he sent him the last of the cash-stuffed envelopes. Russo, who was appointed managing director by Hirchson and once was considered very close to him, recalled the hours that preceded Hirchson's departures for destinations around the world: "There was one time when I went into Gideon Ben Zur and saw him counting dollars. At one point Abraham Hirchson arrived. I left the room. When I returned and Abraham had left, the dollars were no longer on the table." The draft indictment cites Russo as an accomplice in the theft of NIS 1.9 million, of which, police suspect, hundreds of thousands were transferred for his personal use, including the purchase of materials for his hobby - sculpting. The accountant of Nili, Amatzia Bonner, is also suspected of stealing millions of shekels, with some of the money going toward payments to the old-age home in which his mother lived. Ovadia Cohen is suspected of stealing no less than NIS 12 million from Nili. He gave half the amount to another suspect, his brother, David Cohen, who was receiving death threats because of his large gambling debts. Ovadia Cohen is suspected of pocketing hundreds of thousands of shekels to pay for private trips abroad and for "holiday grants." During the investigation, Cohen said he wanted to turn state's evidence. In a document labeled "top secret," which documents the request, a transcript recorded Cohen saying to his interrogators: "Me, I have children, I am afraid, I am telling you the truth, he is a minister, he has bodyguards, he has all kinds of things - Look, I am going to bury someone, and he can bury me, too." The prosecution rejected his request. Another brother, Zion Cohen, managing director of the NWF pension fund, is suspected of embezzling NIS 1.7 million. Gideon Ben Zur is also suspected of complicity in theft of NIS 5.7 million, half of which went into his own pocket. Abraham Hirchson, the main suspect 'I steered the money according to my needs' Nevertheless, it is Hirchson, for years the all-powerful head of the NWF - originally created by the Revisionist movement as a rival to the Labor movement's Histadrut trade union - who plays the lead role in this criminal drama. Anshel Ashkenazi, whom Hirchson appointed to replace him as head of the NWF when he retired in 2005, stated in his interrogation: "Hirchson was the chairman and no one dared to examine him. In that period Hirchson did whatever he pleased, including reimbursement for expenses, but not only that." In addition to the testimonies, which vividly describe the mechanism of money transfers in the organization, the investigators obtained Hirchson's bank statements, which show that in the period parallel to the embezzlements, NIS 1 million in cash was deposited in his accounts. Hirchson insisted that he received this money from the sister of his late wife, Ada Rogeri, who lives in Italy, and above all from his son, Ofer. "He helped, he helped with large amounts of money," Hirchson said of his son. "I can't tell you today how much, but he helped. He put money into the bank accounts and he paid for all kinds of things that way. He gave me cash so that I would be able to pay for things. He put money in the bank when needed. He also helped me with cash and with money transfers during all the years, very, very aggressively." "Why did you need Ofer's help?" the interrogator asks, and Hirchson replies: "I was living at a very particular standard and Ofer saw to all my wants. I went through a period that I don't wish on those who hate me. After my wife died, I sat in front of the television set for two years and didn't move. There is no doubt that Ofer only wanted things to be good for me and for me to live well. A week ago we went on a family holiday and he paid for everything happily." Asked why his son gave him cash, Hirchson replied: "He gave me [money] both in transfers and in cash, at his convenience, and I did not see fit to ask or inquire." At this point the interrogators show Hirchson the statements for his Bank Yahav account, according to which more than a million shekels in cash was deposited there between 1998 and 2005. "All the money came from my son," Hirchson asserts vehemently. To which the interrogator retorts: "All the cash deposits that we showed you, sir, were made by people connected to the NWF. The only one who did not deposit money was your son, Ofer, who you say was the source of the money." Hirchson: "I steered the money according to my needs, and therefore he couldn't deposit the money, because he worked in a different place. The people who deposited the money as it was needed were people connected with my place of work. I did not see this as something I had to hide. It is day-to-day management, I had nothing to hide. As far as I was concerned, let [the messenger] Aroes do it." Interrogator: Who sent Aroes? Hirchson: "I think sometimes my secretary, sometimes someone else, I cannot be exact about who I asked." Interrogator: I would never even consider letting my secretary do something like that. Hirchson: "Maybe I am more open. I am very open." Interrogator: Weren't you afraid the money would be stolen? Hirchson: "I wasn't afraid of that and it never crossed my mind." Interrogator: Physically, how was Ofer's money transferred? In a bag? In an envelope? Hirchson: "I don't remember." Ofer Hirchson, the son 'I gave him money and said, "Dad, take it"' At the beginning of 2000, Ofer Hirchson was a star in the gossip columns. He appeared on the front pages of economic supplements as an entrepreneur, he took huge bank loans, bought skeletons of companies on the stock exchange - and lost tens of millions of shekels. His debt repayment schedule with Bank Hapoalim was concluded far from the public eye. Who covered his debts? In his police interrogation, seeking to provide a financial alibi for his father, the son insisted that it was precisely during his economic downfall that he supported his father. According to the family, in the decade before the investigation, Ofer Hirchson gave his father money regularly, in cash and via bank transfers. Ofer's interrogation focused on the suspect cash deposits. "Every year I gave him tens of thousands of shekels," the younger Hirchson stated in his interrogation. "All told, this came to hundreds of thousands. If you add up the assistance I gave him, including bank transfers and financing family vacations, it comes to millions. Twice I gave him large amounts for the long term - fifty thousand, a hundred thousand." Interrogator: Tell me how large your debts were up to 2005. Ofer Hirchson: "Around 150 million. Those are personal debts and debts of my companies. That is a debt that accumulated gradually over the years until the end of 2005. Part of the debt exists to this day: more than 100 million." Interrogator: In the years of crisis you described, did your father help you with these debts? Ofer Hirchson: "On the contrary: I'm the one who helped dad in recent years." Interrogator: How did you transfer the money to him? Ofer Hirchson: "I would come and give him the money and say, 'Dad, take it.'" Interrogator: Who saw this? Ofer Hirchson: "No one." Interrogator: If you went to the trouble of withdrawing cash in such large amounts, what prevented you from depositing it in the account on the same occasion? Ofer Hirchson: "I do not deposit it for him because I was not a client of his bank. Besides that, I gave him the money for him to decide. I don't know what he wanted to deposit and what he didn't." The police showed the younger Hirchson a table according to which there is no correlation between large cash withdrawals he made from accounts of the companies he controlled, or from his private accounts, and the cash deposits in his father's accounts. "I have to analyze that," the son said in reaction. "I can't react off the cuff." Later, investigators showed Ofer Hirchson documents proving that between 1997 and 2000 there were no cash withdrawals from his account in excess of NIS 3,000. During this period, NIS 550,000 was deposited in his father's accounts. "I don't know in what year I started to give," he said in response. "I also don't know what the situation was in regard to my aunt's assistance in those years." Ada Rogeri, the aunt from Italy 'For me, Abraham is like a brother' In March 2007 the aunt, Ada Rogeri, arrived in Israel. Ofer Hirchson picked her up at the airport and took her straight to his father's place. He asked her to go to the police and give testimony. The family held out big hopes for this inquiry. According to Abraham Hirchson, since his wife's death, in 1994, the aunt transferred to him thousands of dollars in cash, which he himself deposited in the bank or used for various payments. Afterward, from 1999 to 2006, the aunt gave him power-of-attorney to withdraw funds from her account in the Yehuda Hamaccabee branch of Bank Hapoalim in Tel Aviv. From there NIS 1.7 million was withdrawn and deposited, mainly in bank checks, in his private account in Bank Yahav. According to Hirchson, the money he received in this way explains a portion of the suspect deposits in his account. The police and the prosecution did not buy the story; the draft indictment makes no mention of the sister-in-law or any other funds originating abroad. Ada Rogeri, 73, Libyan-born, lives in Vicenza, in northern Italy. Her fortune comes from inheritances from her brother and from the family of her husband, a wealthy businessman who owned a jewelry shop in Rome. Hirchson said in his interrogation: "Ada Rogeri was also with me here when my wife was sick, for almost a year ... She left her family ... to help and take care of the children. So the commitment is hers, from deep in her heart ... She heard that Ofer was helping me with large amounts ... She said she was ready to deposit money in her account [in Israel]. If you need, take, there will be power-of-attorney, and in the future we will settle accounts ... I am very highly regarded in my wife's family. I took care of their mother when she was sick." On the day after her arrival, Rogeri went to the headquarters of the police financial crimes unit, in Ramle, where she was questioned under caution on suspicion of money laundering and tax offenses. "For me, Abraham is like a brother," she told the interrogators. I always bring cash whenever I come to Israel - 3,000, 5,000, 1,000." Interrogator: Do you make the transfers from abroad? Rogeri: "No." Here the interrogators surprise Rogeri by showing her a document according to which she transferred $215,000 from a secret account in Bank Hapoalim / Switzerland to her account in Israel in the spring of 2000. "I did it at my initiative," she suddenly recalled. "I wanted to have money here. I was thinking of moving here." The interrogators pull out another document, which contradicts this: five days after the money was transferred to the account in Israel, Hirchson instructed the bank to place the money in the account of his son, Ofer, whom he claimed was supporting him economically at that very time. In 2000, Hirchson and his son took loans of more than NIS 1 million from Bank Tefahot. Who was the Tefahot loan for, the police asked Hirchson, who replied: "I have a blackout, I absolutely can't remember." The reason for the loans was supplied by the Hirchsons' lawyer, Baruch Adler: "Abraham Hirchson told me on more than one occasion that he took these loans - in whole part or in part - in order to cover business losses of Ofer's." When Ofer Hirchson was asked to comment on the fact that in the period when he claimed to be supporting his father, he could not meet the repayments of the loans the two of them took, he replied that this might have been a technical hitch. "Possibly he took this money too [for repaying the loan] from me, I don't remember. You have to look at the overall picture." The overall picture shows that apart from a number of bank transfers from the son's accounts to the father's account from 1998-2006, the Hirchson family managed itself like any normal family, in which the father helps a son who has run up huge debts. In his testimony, Mario Schnir, manager of the Bank Hapoalim branch in Ramat Aviv Gimmel from 1997 to 2000, described Ofer Hirchson as "a playboy and a very problematic client - the bank had to keep chasing him all the time to get him to cover his overdraft." Ofer Hirchson still maintains a high standard of living. He is renting a house - which contains a Jacuzzi for 12 people - in the affluent community of Kfar Shmaryahu, just north of Tel Aviv, for $3,000 a month. He stated in his interrogation that he withdraws between NIS 30,000 and NIS 40,000 a month from the bank. Ovadia Cohen, chairman of Nili 'Hirchson asked for cash for the elections' Hirchson's method of financing his campaign in the Likud primaries of 2002 was described by Ovadia Cohen, who related in his interrogation that on the eve of the primaries, in the winter of 2002, Hirchson asked him to get cash to fill his campaign coffers. Interrogator: How much money did Hirchson ask you for? Cohen: "As much as possible." Accordingly, Cohen contacted a friend of his in Paris, Avi Amar, and suggested that he make a loan to the Nili association in exchange for checks with high interest. "That was a loan I took from him and transferred in parts to Abraham Hirchson," Cohen said. On the eve of the primaries, Ovadia sent his brother, David Cohen, to meet with Amar. In his interrogation, Amar related that he withdrew NIS 350,000 from the bank and transferred it to the brother. Afterward, Amar received from the NWF 10 checks of NIS 36,000 each - a total of NIS 360,000. This embezzlement was laundered in an original way. A document signed by the NWF made Amar the founder of the first NWF branch in Paris. In appreciation of this international cooperation, Amar was made the director of a fictitious branch, earning thousands of dollars a month. Ovadia Cohen stated in his interrogation that Hirchson was privy to this maneuver. When Hirchson was asked about this collaborative effort, he replied: "I know that at the time, the National Workers Federation made a decision to expand its activity abroad. The Histadrut [federation of labor] is active internationally, and we decided to open a branch in France." Hirchson said he thinks the man in question is a relative of Ovadia Cohen. Interrogator: What are the man's qualifications, other than the fact that he is a relative of Ovadia Cohen? Hirchson: "I don't know." Interrogator: Like they would take him now to be ambassador to the United States, more or less. Hirchson: "I don't know. You know what - maybe." Hirchson admitted that he had never visited this "branch." "I didn't follow it closely," he explained his managerial doctrine. "The international activity really interested me less on a personal basis. I didn't give it much thought. Maybe I was wrong in not thinking about it, maybe I wasn't. I am sure that if there had been a tremendous success in the international activity, I would not have said anything. I would have said: Well done." When the interrogators claim the money was earmarked for his election campaign, Hirchson grows furious: "My dear sir, I did not get either $70,000 or $7,000 from Ovadia Cohen. It's like some story out of the 1,001 Nights." Epilogue 'I am ashamed to go to the gym' That was not the first time Hirchson reacted with deep emotion to accusations that came from people considered part of his inner circle. Even the interrogators feared for his life. After one interrogation, interrogator Ephraim Bracha called Ofer Hirchson to tell him that his father was "going through a difficult period" and to ask that he "keep an eye on him." At the conclusion of one interrogation, Bracha went over to Hirchson, who refused to eat almost anything during the long sessions. "Have a chocolate croissant," he urged him. Hirchson declined: "It's sweet, I shouldn't eat that. Now you know that I stopped working out." Bracha: Why? Hirchson: "I'm ashamed to go to the gym." Bracha: What, come on. Hirchson: "I am sitting with you here, not under interrogation. I am ashamed, Ephraim, I am ashamed of only one thing. Thief, thief, thief. I am ashamed."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   'Bush go home' Israeli Arab parties join leftist protests against the Bush visit. Peace overture Syria says it isn't seeking a military solution with Israel.   1.   corruption 23:02  |  olmert and friends 05/01/08   2.   When Hirchson needs medications 00:31  |  Nora 06/01/08   3.   another member for the "i got away with it" club 10:13  |  SJ 06/01/08   4.   General Corruption 20:03  |  Aaron 06/01/08

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