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.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.

