Nothing Orthodox at The Tombs Where They Party All the Time

Up until this week, Catholics seemed to have a monopoly on calling The Tombs their party spot, the name of a famous sports bar near Georgetown University. But as more details emerge about the Manhattan detention center of the same name, it seems that Orthodox Jews were truly able to take the morbid moniker and turn it into a hotspot. Today an ex-inmate tells the Post, "It was like a party every day. It was great."

The paper talks to a financial scammer once in the now famous "private club for Orthodox jailbirds," orchestrated by Rabbi Leib Glanz. The former inmate says, "Some of us would use his desk as a craps table and shoot craps for commissary items." The Post goes onto to add that other events where the prisoners "were entertained by clowns, played basketball and ducked into bathrooms to have sex with female prisoners." They also mention that it once served as the home to Tyco execs Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz.

Mayor Bloomberg did not want to say too much about the Tombs during his radio show yesterday because there is now an ongoing investigation, but couldn't hold back altogether in mentioning the spot first outed for the lavish bar mitzvah thrown there. He said, “The term ‘lack of judgment,’ those kinds of things may — I certainly don’t want to prejudice any of this — may be in some people’s minds.”

The Times digs up more details on Rabbi Glanz, who was assisted by the Giuliani administration to become the chaplain at the detention center. The Post says that Glanz "has long used his influence to transfer Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish inmates from jails on Rikers Island." While some co-workers defended his dedication to the job, one senior official told the Times, “It flows from the fact that he does favors for all the staff, it flows from the perception that he has juice all the way up to the mayor’s office and it flows from the fact he’s a name-dropper."