Persian Jews still sorting out the Ezri Namvar scam

He's due to be sentenced next month for wire fraud, but that won't be the end of case, which has resulted in millions of dollars in investment losses among Persian-American Jews (as a rule, scam artists are always looking for affinity groups) . Besides the criminal case, Namvar's firm was forced into bankruptcy, causing more problems. The Weekly's Gene Maddaus managed to interview Namvar as part of a lengthy piece on the scandal, which otherwise has received little media coverage (except for the Business Journal, whose reporter on the story has since left). From the Weekly:

"We got into trouble like everybody else -- Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, everybody," Namvar says. "We would have paid everybody off if it wasn't for the bankruptcy." He says his credit cards have been cut off. His situation is so dire that he relies on his brothers to buy him groceries. He used to have a $230,000 Mercedes. Now he drives his mother's Prius. Standing on the front doorstep, he pulls up his pant leg to reveal his ankle monitor. It's made of hard, black plastic. He sleeps with it. He showers with it. The only thing he can't do is go into the pool.

The Namvar bankruptcy is a tangled mess of competing factions, with hidden agendas and allegations of secret payoffs. But it is also quite simple, says Dan Schechter, a professor of bankruptcy at Loyola Law School. "At bottom, it's just a busted Ponzi scheme," Schechter says. "The pieces are all over the floor and the victims are scrambling around trying to get something."

There all kinds of angles to the story, among them the role that area rabbis have been asked to play.

Rabbi David Shofet, the leader of Nessah Synagogue, and Rabbi David Zargary have been urged repeatedly to publicly require Ezri Namvar's brothers to repay his debts. They have demurred, leading many to conclude that they are in the pocket of the Namvars. Last fall, Shofet and Zargary issued a letter saying they lacked expertise in this area and recommending that the case be referred to a Jewish court known as a Beit Din. The letter also criticized "the aggressive route of forced bankruptcy." In language that seemed to give more weight to Namvar's view of events, the rabbis attributed his downfall to "rumors and panic coupled with plummeting real estate prices, as well as mistakes and lapse of judgment committed by Mr. Ezri Namvar." For many, that wasn't good enough. Chief among them was Benjamin Hakakha, who launched a blog denouncing the Namvars and the rabbis.