Ex-Gangster Turned Hasidic Rabbi Busted for Impersonating Cop
(JTA) — In 1995, Latin Kings gang member Roberto Eddy Santos was sentenced to prison for multiple violent robberies. Upon his release from Sing Sing Correctional Facility a decade later, Santos emerged a changed man. Literally.
Santos reportedly converted to Judaism, changed his name to Avroham Gross, and assumed the identity of a rabbi.
Unfortunately, Santos — or Gross — wasn’t wholly committed to the rabbinate. NBC New York is reporting that the ex-convict is now facing dozens of charges after allegedly posing as a law enforcement officer, making traffic stops and even helping to arrest a woman he suspected of trying to break into a car.
Gross also used forged documents to pretend to be part of a nonexistent “child abuse prevention task force.”
“This is one of the strangest cases, it is bizarre, but it is still serious to us,” said Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson in an interview with NBC New York.
Among other things, authorities are investigating whether or not Gross had a “genuine conversion.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO