Ponzi Schemer Who Got Trump Clemency Charged in New Fraud Case

Weinstein, a resident of Lakewood, New Jersey, was charged Wednesday with two other Lakewood men, Aryeh Bromberg, 49, and Joel Wittels, 57. Shlomo Erez, 55, of Israel, and Alaa Hattab, 34, of Ottowa, were also charged.

Wittels and Hattab remain at large. Weinstein, Bromberg and Erez were arrested and scheduled to appear Wednesday in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey.

SEC Involvement

In addition, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Weinstein, Wittels, Bromberg, Hattab and two other men.

“Over and over, the defendants took money from unsuspecting investors for fake deals and shuffled funds around to pay out earlier investors to give the false impression that they were receiving real profits from those deals,” Antonia M. Apps, director of the SEC’s New York office, said in a statement.

The SEC’s enforcement director, Gurbir Grewal, used to work at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark and helped to prosecute Weinstein for his earlier crimes.

Weinstein pleaded guilty to the earlier Ponzi scheme in January 2013 and was sentenced to 22 years. In 2014 he got another two years for his role in a separate fraud involving the initial public offering of Facebook Inc., now Meta Platforms Inc.

Trump commuted his sentence when a group of congressmen, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, former prosecutors, and other supporters, including members of the Orthodox Jewish community, campaigned for his release.

On Jan. 20, 2021, Trump’s last day in office, the White House released a statement saying Weinstein was “the father of seven children and a loving husband” who had “maintained an exemplary prison history.”

It said that upon his release he would have “strong support from his community and members of his faith.”

–With assistance from Chris Dolmetsch.

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