Alleged Fraud Par Excellence - Leib Tropper - Center
By Tropper is Troubled
Leib Tropper has only himself to blame for the grim situation he is in facing Guma Aguiar's mighty billionare's wrath.
When Tropper and Guma met, presumably through the good graces of Guma's uncle Dr. Tom Kaplan who had become a dyed in the wool Tropper disciple, they all bonded together strongly and intimately. They were all going to fulfil each other's big visions and dreams. If this sounds grandiose, it was. Tropper was willing to overlook that at that time Guma was living with his then still not converted wife Jamie and even having kids with her. So what? Tropper had kept his own first wife an aguna for a long time, until one day he bumped into his next wife a pretty model who wasn't even religious, but that was solved after a couple of months of quick brainwashing at a seminary, besides she had excellent connections too, like a sister who was major PR executive in the "Mad Men" style and by now Tropper was swimming deep in the Upper East and West Sides jet set scenes and wanted to make it big time there too. If Steven Riskin could do it, so could he.
All he needed was mega-bucks from blind disciples wowed by his charisma and supposed Torah spouting status, and he was about to get it from Kaplan and Guma to launch his name up high in the Jewish world with constant fake articles in The Jewish Press and other Jewish and even secular media outlets.
By now Tropper has had someone fill out an egomanical "biography" of himself on Wikipedia. Read it carefully. Forget his titles and his half dozen claims of semichas. It clearly says that first and foremost he is the disciple of R' Pinchas Scheinberg who must have implanted in him more ideas of grandeur and "saving the Jews" than he needed.
At some point early in his life, while in Israel, Tropper latched on to the potential of the new Kiruv movement in the 1970s. He was hired by Ohr Somayach, even while Noach Weinberg was there. Weinberg soon worked to get rid of Tropper. Tropper never forgave them for tossing him out. He was going to outdo them and outsmart them, and he would recruit from the widening open pools of starry-eyed BTs that were all over the place to create his own brand of Tropper disciples. His method, regardless if he knew it or not, was that of a cult, exactly like Scientology, where the members must give up their personalities, ideas, and most importantly empty their bank accounts for "the cause".
Tropper's sixth and seventh senses are well honed. He has his ears close to the ground and can clearly sniff a trend years before anyone else can, especially in the "saving the Jews" business of which he is a supposed, self-declared, grand leader.
As the 21st century beckoned, most of the world's searching Jews were already from mixed interfaith marriages or living with gentiles. The old time BTs were now joined by people with only one Jewish parent, often not the mother, and even gentiles are looking like Madonna's Kabbalah Centre style, some who even wish to become "Jews by choice" and many are gladly willing to convert to snare a Jewish wealthy man, or for other thought-out personal agendas, nothing to do with sincerely accepting the yoke of the Torah and mitzvos.
So conversion to Judaism was now the hot button central problem for many of these "spiritual seeking" folks that Tropper set out to exploit, and he was going to do it under the guise of fighting for higher standards of conversion, what he cunningly called "universal standards" in conversion; the game plan was to sell the higher standards argument to the big rabbis, pay them off with free conventions and a few small grants here and there, and use the big money to launch Tropper's new role of seller and owner of conversions to the world.
Kaplan was a partner in all of this and Guma, and just as Kaplan trusted Guma in the business world, so too they were co-founders and co-chairmen of the EJF plot as they set about to finance to the hilt Tropper's and their "dreams" for "saving the intermarried Jews" like a kind of misbegotten step-child new "Reform movement", grabbing at straws when it legitimated patrilineal descent thirty years ago. Since Judaism historically forbids reaching out to gentiles to convert them in mass movements, in the guise of Tropper's seemingly very Haredi EJF movement to make everyone into a Tropper approved ger or disciple was going well beyond teaching a handful of BTs in Monsey, like Tropper used to do.
Tropper latched onto this new cohort very quickly and when Guma Aguiar and Tom Kaplan came along and met Tropper about ten years ago, falling into his by then well-tuned and finely honed entrapment skills, they were putty in his hands as he quickly spun his spider's web and got them hooked on his personality, which naturally they equated with "Torah-true Judaism", which it was certainly not.
What came out of the nexus and uniting of Tropper, Kaplan and Guma was their brainchild the Eternal Jewish Family (EJF), to be funded by a new philanthropy to be called the Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation.
For a long time only Tom Kaplan's name was presented to the world and the haredi rabbonim as being the lay leader of EJF and the Kaplan Foundation. But it was not so. As it transpires, just as Guma Aguiar was an equal partner with his uncle Tom Kaplan in their main Leor Energy gas drilling business in Texas that they eventually sold off for over two billion dollars, likewise they were equal partners in setting up the Eternal Jewish Family and the Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation. In fact as a Florida court recently found, Guma Aguiar and his mother Ellen Kaplan Aguiar had more legal authority in the case of the dispute concerning control of the Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation and awarded full continiung control to them.
The same legal battle is now going on in US courts about who controls the more than two billion dollars that was paid for Leor Energy, and Tropper is running scared that if Kaplan loses the Leor Energy profits case like he lost the Lillian Jean Kaplan Foundation case, he is up the creek for good, and will be revealed as the manipulative haredi Rasputin that he is.
So it's no surprise that Tropper will create crazy claims. Break his own nominal principles, which he lacks in case like any sociopath, running to the anti-religious Israeli police in Jerusalem that's beating up Tropper's own haredi brothers, and press charages in secular Israeli courts against Guma, and then drag that into the case now ongoing in Florida that he needs a "protection order" from Guma. Weird. What does he think Guma is going to do to him? And even weirder, what is Tropper doing being involved in the case of the dispute between Tom Kaplan and Guma Aguiar in the two billion and more profits from Leor Energy?
The only answer has to be that this is like the Scientologists going to fight for what they view as "their" assets, meaning what belongs to their disciples they regard as "theirs" and so therefore in Tropper's eyes, Kaplan's stake in the two billion are not Kaplan's, they are his, the mighty Tropper, whom Guma Aguiar has now revealed to be a manipulative crook who cannot account for the ten million dollars he recived from Guma.
Allegedly, Shmuel Kaminetzky has received large sums of money from Leib Tropper and Reuvein Feinstein received $3 million dollars.
Kaminetzky at the podium at a EJF event, Feinstein seated to Kaminetzky's left.
