A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.
It was replete with tales of the illegal sales of body parts; of furtive negotiations in diners, parking lots and boiler rooms; of nervous jokes about “patting down” a man who turned out to indeed be an informant; and, again and again, of the passing of cash — once in a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000.
The authorities laid out two separate schemes, one involving money laundering that led to rabbis and members of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and in the Jersey Shore town of Deal, where many of them have summer homes. The other dealt with political corruption and bribery and involved public officials mostly in Jersey City and Hoboken.
Linking the two schemes was the federal informant who was not named in court papers but whom people involved with the investigation identified as Solomon Dwek, a failed real estate developer and philanthropist who was arrested in May 2006 on charges of passing a bad $25 million check at a bank in Monmouth County, N.J.
Early on, Mr. Dwek helped investigators penetrate an extensive network of money laundering that involved rabbis in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the Syrian Jewish community is based, and in Deal and Elberon, towns on the Jersey Shore.
Mr. Dwek, a well-known member of the Syrian Jewish community whose parents founded the Deal Yeshiva, never concealed that he was facing bank fraud charges, instead telling targets, who included three rabbis in Brooklyn and two in New Jersey, that he was bankrupt and trying to conceal his assets, according to people involved in the case. The targets, in turn, accepted bank checks Mr. Dwek made out to charities that they oversaw, deducted a fee, and returned the rest to him in cash.
Much of the cash they provided him came from Israel, and some of that in turn came from a Swiss banker, prosecutors said. All told, some $3 million was laundered for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, prosecutors said.