Their lawyers are seeking 15 years each, challenging recommendations that would keep all three brothers in prison for the rest of their lives.
Federal probation officials have recommended 180-year prison sentences for Alon and Tal Alexander and 195 years for their brother Oren, according to a newly filed defense sentencing memorandum. Adding those terms to their current ages would put Alon, 39, at 219; Tal, 40, at 220; and Oren, 39, at 234. All three would die long before completing them. Their lawyers are asking for 15 years each. The recommendations are disclosed in a 155-page joint sentencing memorandum filed October 13 in Manhattan federal court, ahead of the brothers’ scheduled October 27 sentencing before U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni. The defense calls the proposed terms “cruel, unprecedented, unprincipled” and argues …
Behind the Elie Wiesel tribute and Kagame gala was a proposal for a 50% cut of potential Rwanda-related weapons business.
Eleven days after Rabbi Shmuley Boteach began publicly promoting a Manhattan gala honoring President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, a member of Boteach’s family forwarded a proposed business agreement that sought to turn introductions to the Rwandan government into a source of private revenue. The unsigned agreement called for a company, Hospitality House, LLC, to receive 50 percent of the gross benefit from any business obtained through people or institutions connected to Rwanda’s government. It was sent to Botach Inc. on March 19, 2017, and was the subject of a dispute two days later, according to emails and the draft contract reviewed for this article. The documents do not name Boteach as a signa…
What really decided Israel’s war—not just the battles, but the arguments inside the war room? Elliot Kaufman reveals the inside story behind In the War Room, including the high-stakes decisions and internal rivalries that shaped Israel’s fight against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.Kaufman, a Wall Stree
What really decided Israel’s war—not just the battles, but the arguments inside the war room? Elliot Kaufman reveals the inside story behind In the War Room, including the high-stakes decisions and internal rivalries that shaped Israel’s fight against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.Kaufman, a Wall Street Journal editorial board member and co-author with Yonah Jeremy Bob, shares what he learned from conversations with Israel’s top leaders. He explains why Netanyahu hesitated before the Gaza invasion, why Gallant argued for a different path in the north, and how competing views of risk shaped the war.In this conversation with Daniel Mael, they discuss the intelligence failures before October 7, th…
The case against Saleem Alzaq alleges that donations raised for humanitarian aid ultimately supported Hamas.
A federal indictment in Manhattan describes what prosecutors say was a fundraising network built around a simple idea: seek aid for civilians in Gaza while hiding the money’s eventual destination. The defendant, Saleem Alzaq, is accused of helping run that operation from Gaza with an unnamed associate in France. Prosecutors say the two raised about $1.75 million between January 2020 and December 2025 through campaigns that appeared to support humanitarian causes. Roughly $626,000 of that total, the indictment says, came from U.S.-based donors. Prosecutors say it was not one secret account or route. Instead, they describe public pleas for food, winter supplies and animal sacrifices, social-me…
R’ Dovid Yehuda “Duki” Greenwald, the founder of Hatzalah in Israel and a pioneer of volunteer emergency medicine, leaves behind a legacy of service, compassion, and lives saved.
R’ Dovid Yehuda “Duki” Greenwald, founder of Hatzalah in Israel, has died at 57 after years of illness. A Breslov Hasid known for his devotion to helping others, Greenwald spent much of his life building volunteer emergency services and responding to people in distress. His death came just a month before his son’s wedding, a detail that has made the loss especially painful for those close to him. The original Hatzalah concept was created in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by Rabbi Hershel Weber in 1965. Weber recognized that in a medical emergency, local volunteers with proper training could often arrive faster than an ambulance. What began as a neighborhood service grew into a model copied by Jewis…
After nineteen months of ignored orders, "unconvincing" excuses and Epstein smears against opposing counsel, a federal judge ruled Botach has forfeited the right to defend himself.
For nineteen months, Shmuley Boteach ran his defamation case the way he runs his social media accounts. On Wednesday a federal judge decided he’d seen enough. U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore struck Boteach’s answer and all of his affirmative defenses, threw out his civil rights counterclaims with prejudice, and entered default judgment against him on liability in the suit brought by the Fontainebleau Miami Beach. There will be a trial in February 2027, but it won’t be about whether Boteach did anything wrong. That question is settled. The jury’s only job now is to put a number on it. The 23-page order, which refers to Boteach by his legal name, Jacob Shmuel Botach, reads less like a leg…
He was "not expected to provide introductions, relationship access... for free," his lawsuit says. The rate was 25 percent.
On July 7, Shmuley Boteach, under his legal name Jacob Shmuel Botach, sued a ghostwriter named Dan Williams in Bergen County Superior Court. Williams had spent years trying to get a memoir deal with Miriam Adelson. Boteach says he was owed 25 percent of whatever Williams made from it, and he wants a judge to make Williams turn over “every Adelson-related contract, invoice, payment, advance, royalty, consulting fee, writing fee, editing fee, ghostwriting fee, travel reimbursement, expense reimbursement, or other remuneration” so the cut can be calculated. Fine. People sue over commissions all the time. What makes this one worth your attention is that to claim the commission, Boteach has to ex…
The vice president wants the audience without accepting the moral price.
Nick Fuentes is right about J.D. Vance in one respect. Michael Weiss observed, dismally, that Fuentes had supplied The New York Times article’s “most honest quote” about the vice president. Ben Shapiro underscored the point by replying with an image captioned, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point.” Fuentes’s point was that Vance panders to the far right while declining the baggage of being identified with it. This is not a compliment from a man whose politics are an open sewer of racial and antisemitic hatred. It is an indictment. Vance has confused access to an audience with an obligation to accommodate the people who inflame it. Vance’s relationship with Tucker…
Why the Penn State Cover-Up Narrative Falls Apart Under Scrutiny
Joe Paterno did not get “cancelled” because of the facts people were given, according to John Ziegler. He argues the Penn State-Sandusky saga was built on a rush to judgment, a broken timeline, and a media narrative that never held up under scrutiny. Daniel Mael sits down with John Ziegler, host of the Death of Journalism podcast and the investigator behind With the Benefit of Hindsight , to re-examine one of the most infamous stories in sports and media history. Ziegler makes the case that the conventional version of the Penn State scandal is not just incomplete, but fundamentally wrong - and he walks through why the details surrounding Mike McQueary’s testimony, the date of the alleged inc…
A bad ad deserved an apology. A founder’s instinct to shift blame deserves a harder look.
The Good Good Golf-Callaway ad was terrible. The campaign to treat it as evidence that Good Good supports domestic violence is worse. The commercial showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark knocking golfer Alexis Miestowski down as she moved to touch a co-branded Callaway driver. It was a parody of Obsession, a film about irrational fixation. The result was a joke without wit and an image without judgment. It should never have left the edit. Callaway approved it and later admitted that approval should never have happened. The ad deserved to be pulled, and both companies owed an apology. But a tasteless skit is not a creed. It proves neither that Clark endorses violence against women nor tha…
The Lindsay Clancy trial forces an honest reckoning with illness, accountability, and grief.
The Lindsay Clancy trial has drawn national attention because it presents a nightmare with no easy language for it. Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy are dead. Their father came home to a ruin no parent should ever see. Their mother admits she caused their deaths. The question now before a jury is whether she did so with a mind capable of criminal responsibility. The children must never disappear from this story. They were innocent. They were entitled to safety in their own home. The manner of their deaths is appalling, and no diagnosis can make it otherwise. Murder violates the most basic moral law. The commandment not to murder does not come with fine print. It speaks to the gravity of takin…
Israel's Health Ministry issues a new directive making clear that MDA runs the national first-responder network and United Hatzalah answers to it.
United Hatzalah has to stop advertising its emergency hotline. That is the headline item in a new Ministry of Health directive issued August 3, 2026, and it matters because UH was already told not to do this. The prohibition existed before. The organization advertised anyway. Now the Ministry is reasserting the rule and attaching real consequences to it. The directive, Circular 3/2026, replaces a 2017 framework that was supposed to govern how Magen David Adom and United Hatzalah work together in operating Israel’s national first-responder network. What the new circular makes clear, in a way the old one apparently did not, is that MDA runs that network. UH operates within it. Those are not th…
Yes, prosecute violent settlers. No, that does not make Israel a state in freefall.
Bret Stephens has been one of the more honest voices on Israel in American opinion journalism, which makes his recent column worth taking seriously and, in several places, worth pushing back on hard. He is right that extremist settlers have committed genuine crimes in the West Bank. Some of it is ugly. Mosques burned. Palestinian property torched. People killed. He is right that Defense Minister Israel Katz has refused to use administrative detention against suspected Jewish extremists, the same legal tool that gets applied to Palestinian suspects without much hand-wringing. These are real failures and no serious person should pretend otherwise. But Stephens does not stop there, and the furt…
After months of social media posts targeting the Fontainebleau Hotel and its attorneys, a judge has recommended stripping Boteach of his defenses and entering judgment against him.
Shmuley Boteach fancies himself a champion of the Jewish people. A federal judge sees something closer to a man who can’t follow basic instructions. On July 29, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marty Fulgueira Elfenbein issued a 48-page Report and Recommendation concluding that Boteach willfully defied a direct court order by continuing to post about the Fontainebleau Hotel, its owner, and its lawyers on social media for months after being told to stop. Her recommendation: strike his legal defenses, dismiss his counterclaim with prejudice, and enter default judgment against him on the hotel’s claims. In other words, he loses. The underlying dispute is almost beside the point now. The case began after a…
Eastern District of New York subpoenas documents from bankrupt camp operator and its founders.
The legal pressure on Simad Holdings and its founders, brothers David and Michael Shabsels, escalated this week after the Department of Justice launched a grand jury investigation into the bankrupt summer camp operator, The Real Deal first reported . The probe is being run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which has already requested documents from the company. Simad also disclosed awareness of a separate civil investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York into potential Paycheck Protection Program fraud. The company says it is cooperating with both. Michael Shabsels and his wife Alyssa serve on the US National Board o…
The vice president spoke with official authority, claimed ignorance when pressed and let the audience complete the accusation.
A vice president does not shed the authority of his office when he enters a podcast studio. His words still carry the implied weight of intelligence briefings, classified information and proximity to power. Listeners naturally assume that he knows more than they do. That is what made JD Vance’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s show more than an embarrassing performance. It was an abuse of public trust. Vance used the loose, clown-show atmosphere of the program to make grave claims about Israeli manipulation, divided loyalty and Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed intelligence connections. He spoke with the authority of the vice presidency, then took refuge in the casual evasions of an ordinary podcast guest…
A kosher lunch won't fix everything. But it beats a screaming Instagram reel.
Yossi Farro is not a rabbi. He does not claim to be one. He is a content creator who has built a following by doing something genuinely unusual: bringing tefillin to celebrities, sharing Jewish practice with people who would never encounter it otherwise, and sitting down with human beings that polite Jewish society would rather pretend do not exist. That is his lane, and he works it with energy and sincerity. His crime, according to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, was having a kosher lunch in Miami with a 20-year-old internet personality known as Clavicular, a “looksmaxxing” streamer with a large Gen Z following who has been associated with offensive rhetoric, including a “Heil Hitler” singalong. For…
Sportsmanship, Analytics, and the Future of the Game.
Eight-year MLB veteran Jeff Frye joins The Daniel Mael Show for a candid conversation about how baseball has changed, and whether those changes have made the game better or worse. From the rise of analytics and the pitch clock to the decline of sportsmanship and the culture of excessive celebration, Frye shares his perspective on what today's players, parents, and coaches are getting right and where the sport may be losing its identity. We also discuss youth baseball, the dangers of early specialization, the influence of Major League players on young athletes, steroid-era controversies, Hall of Fame debates, and how baseball can preserve the values that made generations fall in love with the…
A federal judge's words about the MDC deserved a headline. They didn't get one.
If you read The New York Times on July 1, you probably walked away thinking the federal government had just busted an operation dedicated to keeping a convicted sex trafficker connected to the outside world. The headline practically screamed it: “Federal Inmate Charged With Lending Contraband Phone to Sex Trafficker.” The story that followed described how David Motovich, a Brooklyn businessman, had procured a cellphone inside the Metropolitan Detention Center and handed it to Oren Alexander, the disgraced luxury real estate broker whose sex trafficking conviction had riveted the real estate world and the Jewish community. Great copy. The problem is, it completely misses the actual story. Rea…
Israel's National EMS Says It Has Confronted the Findings Head-On and Already Acted on Lessons Learned
Magen David Adom has officially welcomed the publication of the State Comptroller’s report examining how Israel’s national emergency medical service evacuated casualties during the October 7 terrorist attacks. In a statement released following the report’s publication, MDA said it views the review process as “highly important” and is studying its findings and recommendations as part of its ongoing commitment to strengthening operational preparedness and saving lives. The organization made clear it has not shied away from tackling the report’s findings head-on. The State Comptroller’s review detailed the unprecedented chaos of the attacks and the extreme pressure placed on the national medica…