by ALAN FEUER
Rabbi Milton Balkany, the director of a Brooklyn Jewish day school, was on the phone last month with a proposition for a man he had never met, the president of a giant Connecticut hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors.
The matter required tact. The rabbi, who often counsels Jewish inmates, had recently met a prisoner at the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution, a prison in Orange County, N.Y., who had told him that the hedge fund had been trading on illegal information. Rabbi Balkany was calling now, the government contends, to make a deal: $4 million for two religious schools in Brooklyn — one of them his own — in exchange for the prisoner’s silence.
“I would probably be a little more comfortable just, you know, seeing you face to face because not everything — even though it’s legal and nothing improper — not everything is for a telephone,” he reassured the fund’s president, according to an excerpt of a transcript of the recorded call.
When the president asked outright what the payments were for, Rabbi Balkany did not mince words. According to the excerpt, he said: “You can go to sleep completely comfortable, without any worry. That’s what I can tell you.”
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(Submitted by reader)