For L.A. Investigator, Exposing Kosher Meat Fraud Was A Mitzvah

Eric Agaki (man who exposed kashrus scandal)

 

A semi-automatic weapon sits propped beside the front door of the ranch-style home that Eric Agaki shares with his wife, a couple of goats, some chickens and a horse. Only it’s not the real thing.
“That’s an air gun for raccoons,” Agaki says. “For intruders I’ve got other things.”
Agaki, 41, is particularly concerned with home security, and with good reason. A private investigator for the past 10 years, Agaki has put murderers in jail and staked out hundreds of spouses suspected of extramarital affairs.
Most recently, he exposed the unkosher business practices of the Doheny Glatt Kosher Meat Market, one of this city's largest purveyors of kosher meats.
Days before Passover, Agaki showed a group of Los Angeles rabbis the video he shot of Michael Engelman, Doheny's owner, loading boxes of meat into the trunk of an SUV in a McDonald’s parking lot. A second video showed Engelman at his store in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, where a worker carried the boxes inside. The mashgiach, or rabbinic overseer, was nowhere in sight.
As a result of Agaki’s seven-month investigation, the Rabbinic Council of California revoked Doheny Market’s kosher certification on March 24. The following day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an investigation. Within a week, Engelman sold his shop to businessman Shlomo Rechnitz.
All of this happened because of Agaki, though the investigator has not been paid a dime.

photo taken by Agaki

“I decided to do it as a mitzvah,” he says.
Born in Israel to Persian Jewish parents, Agaki moved to L.A. at age 12. He never served in the Israeli army, but he has more than a decade of training in the Israeli hand-to-hand combat method known as Krav Maga. His height may not intimidate, but his thick torso and massive biceps would be enough to ward off many threats. As would the Kahr CW9 handgun he carries at all times.
“I’m licensed to carry an exposed gun,” he says, pulling back his shirt to reveal a silver 9mm pistol tucked into a brown leather holster.
In his decade of private investigation, Agaki has never had to use the handgun. Nor has he had to use the collection of shotguns, hunting rifles and Civil War-era reproduction pistols that he keeps in a refrigerator-sized safe in his bedroom. He uses the four wood-handled pistols for Civil War reenactments, which he participates in once a year at an event billed as the largest annual Civil War battle reenactment west of the Mississippi.
For fun, he also collects knives and swords. A glass case filled with Samurai blades sits near the mezuzah at the entrance to his living room.
In September, a group of rabbis approached him with a host of rumors that Engelman was up to no good. Agaki clocked more than 150 hours of work on the case.
“Just the hours I put in, without all the research, is close to $20,000,” he says.
Agaki started his firm, Hover View Investigations, after graduating at the top of his class from the Nick Harris Detective Academy in Van Nuys. It was a dream deferred. He had enrolled at the academy right after high school, but had to drop out when he couldn’t afford the tuition.
Eventually he opened a candy store in Westwood Village. Later Agaki worked as a dental technician, then as a helicopter pilot. Finally a girlfriend encouraged him to return to his original passion.
Twelve years after he first enrolled, Agaki was back at the Harris academy. Within two weeks he convinced an instructor to put him on a case with the school’s affiliated agency. The case involved a husband who suspected his wife of drug abuse.
He followed the woman all day and photographed her hiding bags of cocaine in the trunk of her car.
“I’m very good at keeping myself hidden when I follow you by car,” Agaki says. In P.I. lingo, the skill is known as “rolling surveillance.”
Not long after, Agaki was hired by another firm to track a suspected cheating husband who routinely drove between 80 and 120 miles per hour on the freeway. Where other private investigators had failed, Agaki was able to track him 76 miles from Thousand Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, to Riverside County, where the suspect parked at a nudist colony in Corona.
After sweet-talking a secretary, Agaki managed to slide into the nudist colony in under an hour -- a process that normally takes weeks.
“To be a good P.I., you have to have good hand-eye coordination, be a good driver, be some kind of an actor and be a good videographer,” Agaki says. “You also need to know people and be able to profile them.”
For all of his successes as a P.I., Agaki says it is the Doheny case of which he is most proud.
“I’ve put a murderer behind bars,” he says. “But this had an impact on a lot of people.”

(jewishjournal.com)

More On The Los Angeles Kashrus Scandal

Despite the situation, Doheny Market was open for business on Thursday and its front window displayed a new kosher certificate  -- valid only until April 1.

The name and signature of Rabbi Meshulom Dov Weiss appear on the certificate, and the rabbi’s son, Rabbi Menachem Weiss, told the Journal that he and his father are working with Engelman to ensure that everything sold by Doheny is certified kosher. Weiss said that any opened meat packages had been removed from the store, and that two mashgiachs will now be on site at all times, and seven video cameras were to be installed throughout the premises, allowing the father to monitor the store via the web from his home in North Hollywood.

“We’re not going into it naïve,” Menachem Weiss told the Journal on Thursday. “These are the precautions that we’re putting into place to allow him to stay in business from now until April 1. What happens after that, we’ll have to see.”

The Weisses have acted as supervisors for Doheny before, for about 18 months starting in 2007 or 2008. Menachem Weiss did not remember the exact years, but said that Engelman brought them in after the RCC informed him – along with the rest of the shops they certified – that from then on, all meat sold under RCC kosher supervision had to be not just kosher, but glatt kosher.

For meat to be considered kosher, it must be from the right kind of animal and must be slaughtered and prepared properly. For large animals – not poultry – the animal’s innards must be checked to ensure that there are no signs of disease. If, for instance, a cow has a hole in its lung, the animal is not considered kosher by any standard.

But to be kosher under the higher “glatt” standard – the word means “smooth” in Yiddish – the animal’s lungs must have no signs of ever having had any ulcers. If the ulcers have healed, the meat is considered kosher – but not glatt kosher.

When the RCC began to insist upon the higher standard, it brought with it higher prices. Engelman, Weiss said, initially decided to drop the RCC’s certification and to continue selling kosher meat that did not meet the glatt standard under the Weisses’ supervision.

However without the RCC certification, Weiss said, Doheny’s business suffered, and Engelman decided to adhere to the glatt standard and return to the RCC.

“Our intent is not to replace the RCC,” Menachem Weiss said. “Our hope is that the RCC will take Mike back; we’re trying to help Mike earn back the trust of the community.”

Whether that’s possible remains to be seen, but it may not only be Doheny that needs to win back the trust of kosher consumers in Los Angeles. The RCC’s reputation may have sustained some damage as well.

“I have no clue who to trust anymore,” said another woman shopping at Pico Glatt Mart on Thursday said, asking to be identified only as Friede. “I don’t trust RCC.”

Suspicions about Doheny Meats practices were brought to the RCC's attention repeatedly over the last three years, according to Daryl Schwarz, the owner of the now-closed Kosher Club.
Schwartz also said that, as early as 2010, he reported seeing the empty boxes, fraudulent labels and fraudulent tape to Rabbi Nissim Davidi, the RCC’s kashrut administrator.
“It was numerous times over the years,” Schwartz said.

In other developments, Eric Agaki, the investigator who broke the case, said that so far he has only enough evidence to prove that Doheny was repackaging meat that was Kosher, but not Glatt Kosher, though he fully suspects Doheny was using treyf.

Los Angeles, CA - Surveillance Video Allegedly Catches Kosher Meat Distributor Selling Treif

Los Angeles, CA - A month’s long undercover investigation has resulted in a major local Kosher meat distributor being stripped of its certification by California’s Rabbinical Council.
KTLA (http://bit.ly/10EBFQO) is reporting that Doheny Glatt Kosher Meats lost its certification after investigators uncovered an ongoing practice of switching Kosher meats with USDA products.
Eric Agaki, an investigator with Hover View Investigations Inc., told KTLA that employees from Doheny Glatt were frequently viewed repackaging the boxes at times when the mashgiach was not on site.
Agaki also told KTLA that Doheny Glatt was in possession of a “stack” of fraudulent labels.
Doheny Glatt operates a retail market onsite at its Pico location, as well as providing Kosher meats for many of the areas restaurants, merchants and caterers.
The Rabbinical council notified members of the Jewish community via email that meat purchased before 3:00 p.m. Sunday meets Kosher certifications.