Hasidic-Owned Concrete Companies Plead Guilty To $800K Tax Fraud
David Gross, left, and David Friedman. Image by Orange County District Attorney
By Ari Feldman January 5, 2018
Three concrete corporations run by Hasidic Jews in upstate New York pled guilty to withholding $780,000 in taxes, the Times Herald-Record reported.
Two principals of the mixing companies, David Gross and David Friedman, were also sentenced to misdemeanor tax fraud. The sentences were given in late December.
Two of the companies — Concrete On Demand and Copour — have offices in Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic enclave in Rockland County. The village is almost exclusively inhabited by members of the Satmar Hasidic group. An office for the third company, Comix, Inc., is in a nearby town in Orange County.
Each company admitted to collecting sales tax but not paying it to the state — withholding as much as $50,000 in one year.
Both Gross and Friedman gave the court checks for the full amounts owed to the state by their companies shortly after sentencing. Court-imposed penalties for the tax fraud could be as high as double the amount the nearly $800,000 the companies owed.
Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
