Met Council Insurance Broker Gets 18 Months for $9M Fraud
Another co-conspirator in the scheme that stole approximately $9 million from New York’s Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty was sentenced to prison.
Joseph Ross, the former insurance broker for the nonprofit social service group, was sentenced to 18 months in jail, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced Monday in a news release. Ross also paid $534,000 in restitution to the Met Council and agreed to a judgment against him in the amount of $956,000.
Ross personally stole $1.5 million from Met Council, according to the news release. Ross, who pleaded guilty, admitted that from 1992 to 2013 he conspired with former Met Council CEO William Rapfogel, former Executive Director David Cohen and others to rob the Met Council through a kickback scheme in which top staff at the nonprofit knowingly paid inflated insurance premiums to Century Coverage Corp. in exchange for kickbacks.
Ross and Cohen devised the scheme in 1992, and when Rapfogel became Met Council’s head a year later, he joined the conspiracy. The inflated amount on the insurance policies and the amount of the kickbacks increased over the years,with Rapfogel ultimately receiving approximately $30,000 per month, the news release said.
In July, Rapfogel was convicted and sentenced to 3 1/3 to 10 years in prison, and ordered to pay $3 million in restitution to the Met Council. Herb Friedman, the Met Council’s former chief financial officer, was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail, and ordered to pay $775,000 in restitution.
In February, Solomon Ross and William Lieber, former insurance brokers for Met Council, were each sentenced to five years of probation and $1.5 million in restitution.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker’s rabbi has notes on Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech
-
Fast Forward Naftali Bennett is back: Former Israeli prime minister will make another run at Netanyahu
-
Fast Forward Citing post-Holocaust doctrine, Germany seeks to deport 4 pro-Palestinian protesters, including one American
-
Fast Forward Trump administration freezes research funding to Princeton amid antisemitism investigations
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.