The NY Times will NOT let up on Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes, who's getting hammered for, critics say, failing to aggressively go after child molesters in politically powerful ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhoods. The paper's latest in the series is pretty revolting: Hynes is accused of doing nothing to try and extradite an alleged child molester who fled to Israel after abusing children for years in Borough Park. "Compulsive pedophile" Avrohom Mondrowitz counseled children out of his home and was charged with molesting five boys, but an author who wrote a book on sex scandals in Jewish communities believes Mondrowitz had at least 100 victims.
Mondrowitz fled to Israel in 1984 to avoid arrest and lives there to this day. Hynes has said that since taking office in 1990 he's worked "vigorously" to try and extradite Mondrowitz, and the DA claims his office was "instrumental" in changing in a treaty that had stymied early extradition efforts between the U.S. and Israel.
But after a long legal battle, a lawyer for some of the victims has obtained 103 pages of files from Hynes's office relating to the case, and there's nothing in there about trying to extradite Mondrowitz. "There isn’t a single e-mail, a single letter, a single memo, either originating from the D.A.’s office or addressed to it, that so much as mentions any attempt by the D.A. to seek a change in the extradition treaty,” attorney Michael Lesher tells the Times. “It’s just inconceivable that such important negotiation on such a detailed issue could have taken place and not left a trace in the documentary record."
Hynes's office maintains there are other documents that Lesher didn't obtain which show the full scope of the office’s efforts. Initial attempts to extradite Mondrowitz failed because Israeli authorities ruled that the extradition treaty did not cover sodomy. After the treaty was amended in 2007, an Israeli court ordered Mondrowitz to be returned to Brooklyn, but the Israel Supreme Court reversed the decision.
