A senior member of a criminal organization took over a construction project in Kiryat Malachi and prevented about 90 apartment buyers from receiving the property they purchased with the best of their money while blackmailing them, the police suspect.
At the same time he lived in a luxury hotel in Herzliya where he accumulated debts of millions after refusing to pay for a stay at the hotel.
The senior official was arrested, along with 21 suspects in various criminal offenses, at the end of an undercover investigation, which took place at the National Unit for the Investigation of Economic Crime (HILC).
The purpose of the investigation was to smash the economic artery of the criminal organization Jerushi.
The police know that extortion by threats is often the fuel that drives the activities of criminal organizations.
"Israel Today" has learned that as part of the investigation, the investigators found out that the senior member of the organization, which is one of the detainees, has been preventing dozens of citizens from entering the apartments for a long time.
The investigation revealed that the contractor of the project became financially entangled and handed over the reins to the suspect who took advantage of this to blackmail the buyers of the apartments.
Investigators clarified that the suspect used to demand from the buyers sums ranging from 25 to 100,000 shekels on various and strange excuses in exchange for receiving a key to the apartment, which, according to the tenants, have no grip on reality.
"He used to threaten that he would take the money he deserved out of it, for better or worse, and thus held the tenants hostage," a source close to the investigation said yesterday.
Investigators were also surprised to find that the "senior" offender had lived for a long time in a luxury hotel in Herzliya.
At first he paid rent, but one day refused to continue paying.
In time he accumulated a debt of millions for his stay at the hotel - which he refused to pay.
When the owner of the hotel realizes that he is a senior criminal in a hierarchy of a criminal organization he is better off filling his mouth with water.
And if that was not enough, it turned out that due to daring and impudence, on the ground floor of the hotel he opened his own restaurant with his character welcoming diners.
As stated, the suspicions attributed to the 21 suspects are committing offenses of extortion by threats, money laundering, receiving anything fraudulently and false use of corporation documents.
The offenses were committed using fictitious invoices, omitting income and money laundering in the amount of about half a billion shekels.
During the Jaffa investigation the investigators mapped a wide fabric of companies which was used by the suspects to commit tax offenses and money laundering and additional offenses of extortion and taking over businesses were exposed using fictitious invoices to cover the much money traffic.
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