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Still in the rackets
Even while the Bronfman family maintained a steady
march toward respectability, some members of the family
could not wholly abandon the old syndicate ties.
In 1972, the Montreal Crime Commission issued a report
identifying Edgar Bronfman's nephew Mitchell Bronfman
as a crime partner of one of Montreal's leading gangsters,
Willie Obront. According to the report, Mitchell Bronfman's
link to Obront "extends into illegal activities in which they
have mutually or jointly indulged … the special kinds of
favors they did for each other and the resulting advantages of
each in the fields of loan sharking, gambling, illegal betting,
securities, tax evasion and corruption."
In the mid-1970s, Obront and another Mitchell Bronfman cronie, Sam Rosen, were bothl jailed for drug-money laundering. One joint venture of Obront and Bronfman, the North
Miami nightclub Pagoda Northl was identified by American
law enforcement authorities as a syndicate hangout frequent- I
ed'by Vito Genovese, the New 'York City mafia boss.
Bronfman takes over
Edgar Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress, the honorary vice chairfuan of the Anti-Defamation
League and the chairman of th ADL's key fundraising arm,
the Northeast Appeal, was a major beneficiary of the Skadden
Arps law firm's expertise in COI orate takeovers.
In the mid-1980s, Irving hapiro, the chairman of the
board of the DuPont Company, one of America's oldest and
largest industrial concerns, reti ed from his corporate post to
become a partner in Skadden I rps. Shortly after his arrival
at the law firm, Edgar BronfIfan's Seagrams Corporation
began buying up stock in the DuPont Company, eventually
taking over a controlling int�rest. Shapiro, who worked
closely with Bronfman during his tenure as president of the
Business Roundtable, was reP rtedly a key inside player in
the Bronfman takeover of DuP<!mt.
Parenthetically, after his shift from DuPont to Skadden
Arps, Irving Shapiro helped rebruit his son Isaac to the firm
as well. Isaac brought with hi� the lion's share of Japanese
real estate investors in the United States, who had been his
clients at his previous firm, the lueblood-run Milbank, Hadley, Tweed and McCoy. I Armed with a string of prestigious titles as a leading
Zionist philanthropist and corpdrate billionaire, Edgar Bronfman launched a systematic effdrt in the mid-1980s to implement Meyer Lansky's second dJeam the syndicate takeover
of Israel. I If there was a single offic' al of the ADL equipped to
convince the Soviet government to open the floodgates of
Jewish emigration and to ensur� that the Russian Jews landed
in Israel, it was Edgar Bronfm�n.
Through his Seagrams distributorships, Edgar and his brother Charles had cultivated a cozy relationship with some
of the most powerful and bru�al figures in the Communist
world, beginning with East Geban Communist Party chief
Erich Honecker. Through the West German branch of Seagrams, the Bronfmans had arr I
nged to supply the East German Communist Party with Unlt'mited quantities of Seagrams
liquors, which were doled ou free of charge to the most
senior ranking members of the barty.
By 1986, a Bronfman emmisary in East Berlin had established close ties with Klaus G�si, the East German minister
of religious affairs and the fatlier of Honnecker's successor
as head of the the Communis� Party (SED), Gregor Gysi.
The Gysis are Jewish. I In 1988, Edgar Bronfman Himself traveled to East Berlin
to meet with Honecker and E st German Communist Party
official Herman Axen. During that visit, Bronfman pledged