Last update - 00:00 07/06/2007
Jailed mob boss admits hiring hitmen, escapes longer sentence
By Haaretz Service
Israeli underworld figure Ze'ev Rosenstein was convicted Thursday of bringing Columbian hitmen to Israel with the intention of targeting the brothers Ya'akov and Nissim Alperon.
Rosenstein's lawyers and the prosecution presented a plea bargain to the court, under which Rosenstein admitted conspiring to commit the crime, and in return he escaped the three-year jail sentence he would have otherwise received.
The Alperon brothers hail from one of Israel's most notorious crime families. Nissim Alperon has in the past been convicted for drug trafficking, extortion and assault.
The three-year jail sentence for Rosenstein would have been added on to a 12-year term he is already serving for conspiring to smuggle around 700,000 pills of ecstasy from Europe to the United States.
The acceptance of the plea bargain means Rosenstein will not spend a single extra day in jail for this latest conviction.
A few weeks ago Rosenstein's lawyer, Benny Nahari, said Rosenstein still has another four and a half years to serve for the drug trafficking conviction - after calculating time off for good behavior and other factors.
A U.S. federal court sentenced Rosenstein to 12 years imprisonment in January, two and a half years of which he already served in Florida while awaiting extradition to Israel.
At the end of April, Jerusalem District Court approved his request to serve the remainder of his time in Israel, within the framework of a plea bargain he made in the United States.