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"Managed a million-dollar prostitution network": Israeli declared extraditable to US - Walla! News

2022-04-17T11:30:58.882Z


After being arrested at the request of the Americans, a Hadera resident will be sent to trial in New York, following a suspicion that he and a woman from Colorado ran a network of escort girls, while operating 400 sites that offered the services. In the meantime, she signed a plea deal, indicted him and was released


"Managed a million-dollar prostitution network": the Israeli who was declared extraditable to the United States

After being arrested at the request of the Americans, a Hadera resident will be sent to trial in New York, following a suspicion that he and a woman from Colorado ran a network of escort girls, while operating 400 sites that offered the services.

In the meantime, she signed a plea deal, indicted him and was released

Yoav Itiel

15/04/2022

Friday, 15 April 2022, 02:54 Updated: Sunday, 17 April 2022, 14:05

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VIP ESCORTS website (Photo: Official website, from Facebook)

The Jerusalem District Court this week declared Hadera resident Yitzhak Cohen, 55, already extradited to the United States.

This follows the US Department of Justice's claim that his and his partner, 47-year-old Tracy Reynolds of Colorado, who operated under the brand name "VIP ESCORTS", rolled in millions of dollars, operating about 400 websites that offered The services.



Cohen is suspected of money laundering offenses, and if convicted, he faces up to 60 years in prison.

At the request of the Americans, Israel through the Coastal District Central Unit arrested Cohen in 2020 on suspicion of trafficking in human beings, aggravated pimping, pimping and money laundering offenses.

According to the suspicion, the offenses in Israel began to be committed more than a decade earlier under the auspices of the law enforcement authorities, and those abroad even earlier.



The investigation at the Coastal Police Station was short but rigid. Cohen claims that during it, the investigators broke his teeth while trying to force a saliva sample from him for a DNA test.

Subsequently, in the Jerusalem District Court, Judge Shirley Renner ruled that his defense attorney's request to prevent his extradition because of this was far-reaching.

She also rejected the claim that his interrogators had pressured him to indict his partner through a threat that if he did not do so they would work to have an extradition request filed in his case as actually happened.

Meanwhile in the United States, Reynolds' version actually incriminates him.

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  • Millions of dollars a year: The anonymous from Hadera who ran a world-wide prostitution network

Up to 60 years in prison is expected.

Yitzhak Cohen (Photo: Official website, from Facebook)

During his interrogation, Cohen did not actually deny his connection to the sites registered in his name.

However, he argued, and continues to argue vigorously even today, that he only rented them out to others and that he had no control over what use was made of them.

On the other hand, not so in the United States, authorities claimed that Cohen and Reynolds arranged for escort girls in Manhattan and many other places, where they provided them with prostitution services and charged them thousands of dollars.

According to them, Reynolds and Cohen demanded that the escort girls deposit the money they received into a large number of bank accounts controlled by the two, many of them in the name of fake entities.



U.S. authorities claim that Reynolds and Cohen subsequently "laundered" the money through thousands of local and international financial transactions and thus, in total, about $ 11.5 million went through various personal and business accounts.

Cohen allegedly received about $ 1.2 million for the services he provided.

It was further alleged that the funds from Reynolds in the United States were transferred to serve in Israel in hundreds of small transactions designed to hide their nature, location, and origin.



Tracy Sarah Reynolds, a rock-blues singer who works under the name "Maggie Raines," was arrested in Florida.

Her trial was held separately in the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York in February last year, after authorities took advantage of Cohen's absence to recruit her for a plea deal.

Thus, she was convicted of conspiracy to launder money and was sentenced to only 12 months in prison and one more day.

Last month she finished serving her sentence in a federal prison in Arizona, and was released.

Assisted in "washing" the money.

Tracy Reynolds (Photo: Official Website, From Facebook)

At Reynolds' trial, she indicted her Israeli partner.

"I was hired to work in a business run by Cohen, which was a prestigious escort services business and provided sex for money," she told the judge without hesitation.

She said that she met Cohen through a job ad on the site he owned, for a data entry job.

"His support for me, my family and my music has always warmed my heart. He even came to my shows around town. Over the years we became good friends. As an innocent young woman in her mid-20s I admired him. I understand now that it was not a good decision," she noted.



Deputy Attorney General Mike Herman explained the method of disguising the source of the funds.

According to him, Cohen would withdraw the money from ATMs in Israel using Reynolds' cards, and she would repeatedly close the debt created in the credit account.

He and defense attorney Marenda Fritz stressed that the funds used for this were prostitution service funds and that the conversation between the two shows that this is the reason why he received funds from her at all.



However, at the end of the investigation when they asked the Haifa Magistrate's Court to release him on high financial guarantees, his defense attorneys Tami Ullman, Yaakov Shlomovich, Shadi Seroji and Shahaf Ullman claimed that he could not afford the sums.

Judge after judge gnawed at them, and in the end Judge Maria Ficus-Bogdanov agreed to deposit a bank guarantee in the amount of NIS 65,000 and she released him under restrictive conditions that included depositing his passport and a ban on leaving the country.



Cohen reserves the right to appeal within 30 days the decision of the Jerusalem District Court and from now until his actual extradition he will be held under house arrest with electronic restraint.

On behalf of Yitzhak Cohen, it was stated: "Yitzhak Cohen owns the addresses of several sites that he rents to various parties, and he had no connection to the services published through those sites. "Scandal. He intends to appeal the decision to extradite him to the Supreme Court."

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Source: walla

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