Attorneys offer differing views of Iowa kosher slaughterhouse manager as federal trial starts

Attorneys offer 2 views of slaughterhouse manager

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Prosecutors portrayed a former kosher slaughterhouse manager as a schemer who funneled money through a school and grocery to avoid loan payments, while a defense attorney said he was simply involved with financial transactions he didn’t understand.

The conflicting portraits emerged Wednesday during opening statements in the man’s federal trial on financial fraud charges.

Sholom Rubashkin, the former manager at an Agriprocessors, Inc., plant in northeast Iowa, faces 91 financial charges, including bank fraud, mail and wire fraud and money laundering. He was arrested months after federal agents raided the plant in May 2008, arresting 389 illegal immigrants.

Assistant U.S. Attorney C.J. Williams said Rubashkin paid some top human resources and accounting employees at the Postville, Iowa, plant more than three times their salaries off the books to conceal alleged fraud.

“The defendant was expanding the plant beyond the pace he was able to,” Williams said. “Evidence will show you that he was in charge of the day-to-day operation of the Agriprocessors plant on the ground there in Postville for years.”

Defense attorney Guy Cook said Rubashkin was “a kid from Brooklyn” with no business experience when he took over the plant’s operations from his father and a former plant manager who died shortly before his arrival in the late 1990s.

The company had taken out a $28 million revolving loan with St. Louis-based First Bank Business Capital in 1998. The loan grew to $35 million, and the company could borrow against it daily. After the immigration raid, Agriprocessors faltered financially, and the bank called the loan. The company declared bankruptcy in November.

Cook acknowledged illegal immigrants worked in the plant, but said it wasn’t Rubashkin’s fault and the alleged bank fraud was instead the result of a risky loan that went bad. Many of First Bank’s loans have defaulted in the past couple of years, he said.

Rubashkin and his father were “in over their heads” in a fragile business, Cook said.

“Any inappropriate, sloppy or unethical business practices don’t equal a crime,” he said.

Cook also disputed prosecutors’ assertion that Rubashkin laundered the money through a school and kosher grocery store, saying each was part of the Orthodox Jewish “religious infrastructure” in Postville.

“The money went in a circle, not in a straight line,” Cook said. “There was never any laundering because the money wasn’t dirty.”

Wednesday afternoon, prosecutors called three witnesses who testified that about $10 million in invoices were not connected to any shipments made from the plant. Former Agriprocessors human resources employee Darlis Hendry said Rubashkin ordered her to create invoices of more than $25,000 for “outside products,” and after the immigration raid, he began ordering invoices created multiple times a day.

Rubashkin’s trial was moved from Iowa to South Dakota because of pretrial publicity.