Menacham Stark, 39, HYD.

Stark Partner Outraged by Reports He May Be Suspect

The business partner of slain Chasidic landlord Menachem Stark, is “distraught” and “outraged” by a report that he may be considered a suspect in the recent murder of his friend, his lawyer told The Algemeiner on Tuesday.

Henry E. Mazurek, an attorney at Clayman & Rosenberg LLP, said that his client Israel Perlmutter, “…is angered and distraught by such a baseless allegation.”

“Mr. Perlmutter is outraged at any insinuation that he had anything to do with this unthinkable violent act against a dear friend and partner,” Mazurek said.

On Monday night, the New York Daily News reported that Perlmutter was being treated as a possible suspect in the case, citing an unnamed “police source.”

“Perlmutter is being treated as a possible suspect because police are convinced he has been lying to them about Stark and trying to use a Russian businessman as a scapegoat, a police source said,” the Daily News reported.

Discounting the report, Mazurek said that “No one from the New York Police Department has publicly claimed — or even implied — that Mr. Perlmutter is a suspect in this terrible crime.” He also pointed out that the Daily News only cited a single “unnamed source.” At this time, legal action against the Daily News is not under consideration, the lawyer said.

Perlmutter “is still coping with the devastating news of the hideous acts committed against Mr. Stark. He has been grieving the loss of his partner and from the time of the initial kidnapping has been fully cooperating with the police investigation,” the lawyer added.

Providing an example of Perlmutter’s involvement in aiding the ongoing police investigation, Mazurek told The Algemeiner that his client provided “…immediate assistance to the police in helping secure a local business’s surveillance camera’s video shortly after Mr. Stark’s abduction.”

“This is the video that has now been widely released to help identify the abductors,” he said. “Mr. Perlmutter is committed to assisting the police in finding and prosecuting the perpetrators of these awful acts.”

Menachem Stark was abducted by two men on Friday morning who were seen on surveillance footage bundling him into a white van. He was found dead on Saturday in a Long Island dumpster burnt from the waist down.

Perlmutter and Stark were partners along with a third man, in a real estate firm called Southside Associates LLC, which owned hundreds of housing units.

20 Comments

  • nypd

    there is obviously a source in the NYPD feeding these papers, who A is getting paid big bucks to give out info or B hates the jews so much that they will go and feed these papers garbage

    either way the NYPD needs to do something to find out who this person is and have them fired

    • cma

      you’re assuming that there actually is a source and that the newspaper isn’t just making it up.

  • German sheppard

    I think the childrens museum in memory of Ari Halberstamm conveys a message that the problem of racial murder only needs public reeducation about tolerrence and may have contributed to the slaying of Stark.

  • Baal Tzedaka, Slumlord or both?

    Excerpt from Haaretz:

    How can Stark’s two faces — on the one hand a wealthy philanthropist in his community, but on the other an alleged exploiter when it came to business dealings outside of it — be reconciled? Should people compare Stark to crime-syndicate bosses, like the Jewish gangsters portrayed in the book, “But He Was Good To His Mother” ?

    People in Williamsburg have been unequivocal. The Post headline was “pure anti-Semitism,” said Sarah Teitelbaum, a Satmar housewife who asked that her real name not be used. “He was a big ba’al tzedaka (giver of charity). Everybody only has good to say about him.” Leaders of the Hasidic sect as well as Brooklyn politicians condemned the headline.

    Security footage showed Stark being attacked and pushed into a van late last Thursday night. His burned body was discovered Friday in a gas-station dumpster. New York City police have thus far not identified any suspects.

    Subsequent accounts have detailed some of the financial and legal troubles Stark faced. With a partner he owned dozens of rental buildings with roughly 1,000 apartments in trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods including Williamsburg and Greenpoint. He had not paid tens of thousands of dollars in fines levied by the city for rental properties in severe disrepair, according to the Post, which also cited anonymous sources saying that Stark was desperately seeking loans from business associates the day he was abducted.

    Stark’s business troubles date back at least a few years. The real estate trade paper The Real Deal reported in 2011 that he and a business partner had been sued for $51 million for defaulting on five separate loans. On the consumer review website Yelp, one tenant wrote that he lived in a building owned by Stark for five years and “the plumbing was a nightmare. The first-floor was overrun with big-ass rats. Electricity would randomly be shut off for days at a time.” Another poster wrote, “Think of every terrible stereotype and characterization you can possibly imagine when the phrase ‘New York City slumlords’ enters your head.”

    Also in 2011, Stark was arrested by undercover cops and charged with assaulting a woman on a Manhattan subway, according to The New York Daily News. After the charges were dropped Stark filed a lawsuit against the city and later received “a payout” when he settled out of court.

    Sources say that in fact there is no contradiction between the role Stark played in his Satmar community of Williamsburg, and how some tenants and legal documents say he behaved outside it.

    “What you do to the goyim is not the same as what you do to Jews,” said Samuel Heilman, an expert on Hasidic communities like Satmar. Heilman, author of “Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry” and a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College, is currently at work on a book about succession battles in Hasidic courts.

    That attitude stems from days when Jews were actively persecuted, he said. “Part of the collective mind-set in the crucible of history when this part of Jewry was formed, the outside world was filled with anti-Semitism and persecutors. The whole understanding of that was that you need to keep a distance from them, that they are a different level of human being,” Heilman told Haaretz.

    According to Samuel Katz, who was brought up as a Satmar but later became secular, boys in the community are taught that non-Jews aren’t quite human. Speaking from Berlin, where he is doing biomedical research on a Fulbright fellowship, Katz explained that growing up in such a community, “you don’t see commonality with people who aren’t Jewish. There is a completely different taxonomy of people. There are Jews and then there are non-Jews, who don’t have souls.”

    When the messiah comes, “every boy is taught that the bad goyim will be killed and the good gentiles will have the privilege of serving us, of being our slaves,” he told Haaretz. “The way Stark dealt with tenants is part of that world view… It’s not taking advantage of them, [rather] that is the world order you’re taught to expect.”

    “It informs your moral compass. Like all good people Stark was benevolent and generous to the people who he saw were like himself,” but not to other people, added Katz. “There’s an empathy ‘blind spot’ that imbues the Haredi outlook.”

    But, Katz said he also finds some of the press coverage of Stark’s murder distressing. “The ‘other-ing’ of Hasidim is as abominable as what the Hasidim do to other people. We shouldn’t ‘other’ other people. No one should.”

    • Haaretz quoting Shmuel Heilmann....

      Now THAT’s the blind leading the blind!
      (No offense to legally blind people.)

  • seeking justice

    They should look into if the 2 men on surveillance were hired by someone else (yid or goy) to kill Stark hy”d.

  • Proofreader

    The facts as written are wrong –he was abducted late THURSDAY night (before midnight) and his body was found on FRIDAY!

  • Hello???

    I can’t believe the contents of the article.
    Do you have any brains? Do you know who reads these articles!!!??? How about offering free copies of, ‘The Protocals of the Elders of Zion!

  • Cholent Mit Kugel

    Did the niftar sleep at night? Gawd I would be a mess. Yeder mench hot zein peckel…

  • A lot more to come

    When all the facts are out a lot of prople will be embarassed and will be quiet.

    • Milhouse

      Haaretz should always be referred to by its Arabic name, al-Ard. It’s an antisemitic newspaper, published and edited by antisemites, some Jewish and some not. It should never be quoted as an authoritative source.

  • something is making me think that the ny post might be responsible for this.

    with the way the ny post yimach shemo praised this murder i am begining to suspect that the 2 people that did it were employed by the ny post & because of that every person that is afiliated with the ny post should be questioned regarding this crime.just my 2 cents.

  • THANKS for the OBJECTIVE

    FACTS from the Official Haaretz authority.

    They Know. He was a biomedical researcher. Its said it clearly. Its a fact. And the other professor knows more then us because he was a DISTINGUISHED professor. He knows inside secrets about leadership succession because he is writing a book about it.

    THANKS to the newspaper for INFORMING us, the public, The People. for allowing us to THINK for ourselves, for granting us the oppertunity to serve the professors who hold the secrets to all knowlege.

    Antisemitism is long, long, history, and its about time we treat OTHERS as we treat ourselves.

    its a FACT.

  • Can no believe that the media has so much power

    People – how can anyone judge when we only know facts from the media who lie? who are we to judge? how dare we? don’t judge someone just becoz they sin differently to you. May the niftar rest in peace and may his family know no more sorrow.

  • am i the only one to realize?

    that reb mshulum was niftar on his namesakes (hatzadik reb mshulum zissill ) yortzeit?
    ive named my boychikl after them both being that he was born bais 2 shvat!