Early one morning in September 2024, two teams of F.B.I. agents descended simultaneously on a pair of homes in Orange County, New York. The agents arrived to serve arrest warrants on Mout’z Soudani, 76, a local real estate investor, and Stewart Rosenwasser, 72, a prominent former judge and recently retired county prosecutor. The two were accused in a conspiracy case.
Mr. Soudani surrendered. Mr. Rosenwasser did not. Instead, he barricaded himself inside his home in Campbell Hall, N.Y., a suburb 65 miles north of Manhattan, exchanging gunfire with F.B.I. agents, according to local news reports, which cited an unnamed source in local law enforcement. It was all over the news: He turned his gun on himself and took his own life.
The burst of violence shocked members of the community, who knew Mr. Soudani as a respected former restaurateur and Mr. Rosenwasser as a fixture in county law enforcement dating back decades.
But the allegations that precipitated the F.B.I.’s involvement reveal a darker mystery.
At the center of the controversy is Mr. Soudani’s 65-year-old sister, Eman. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in November 2023, she claimed that her brother raped, beat and controlled her for 45 years. Her suit, and a counterclaim by her brother, uncovered bank and phone records documenting a scheme in which Mr. Rosenwasser used his power as a high-ranking prosecutor to travel 1,800 miles outside his jurisdiction to personally ensure the arrest of Ms. Soudani — based on her brother’s claim that she had stolen half a million dollars from him — and return her to her brother’s control. In exchange, the F.B.I. says, Mr. Soudani paid the prosecutor approximately $63,000.
Now the Soudani siblings are caught in a web of allegations and dueling lawsuits. Mr. Soudani faces criminal charges in federal court, including bribery and making interstate threats of violence. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
This account is based on court filings, police records, newspaper coverage of the Soudani family dating back to the 1970s, and interviews with Ms. Soudani; her son, Martin; and Mr. Soudani’s son Marty.
Mr. Soudani declined to be interviewed for this article. His lawyer, Michael Burke, said that Mr. Soudani never kept his sister as a sexual slave, as she has accused, and never bribed the prosecutor.
“The allegations about sexual abuse are completely false,” said Mr. Burke, who added: “My client lent Rosenwasser money. It was not a bribe.”
Although her brother was ordered to remain under house arrest with an ankle monitor that limits his movement, Ms. Soudani said she still lives in fear of him. He always threatened that she could never escape, or else he would use his powerful connections to silence her, she said. To her, the audacious scheme he is accused of — bribing a prosecutor in exchange for her arrest — was not a surprise. It was her brother making good on his promises.
“He said if I say anything about the sexual assaults or the beatings, nobody would believe me,” Ms. Soudani said. “And he was right. I knew he always had people he controlled.”
Ms. Soudani continues to live in hiding somewhere in Colorado.
“I don’t want to be found,” she said.
‘I Know What He’s Capable Of’
Eman Soudani was 17 and living with her family in Amman, Jordan, when her eldest brother, Mout’z, made an offer. Rather than living in poverty in Jordan, he suggested, Eman should join him in America. He promised that she could learn English, attend high school and college, and plan a career, she said in a recent interview.
With their father’s permission, Ms. Soudani moved into her brother’s apartment in Spring Valley, N.Y., in August 1977. She would share space with Mout’z; his wife, Helen; their son Marty; and Helen’s two sons from a previous marriage.
A month later, Helen Soudani was murdered. She was discovered beaten and strangled inside the Aegean Grotto, the restaurant she and Mr. Soudani owned in Ramapo, N.Y. Mr. Soudani became the prime suspect after detectives learned that he had obtained two life insurance policies in her name worth $1.5 million.
No one was ever charged in the murder. Mr. Soudani told detectives that he had been at home the night his wife was killed. His alibi was supported by his sister, who had been in the United States for just a few weeks, and by Marty, who was 5 at the time.
That was a lie, Ms. Soudani and Marty, now 52, said in a joint interview in September. Mr. Soudani had, in fact, left the apartment for part of the night, they now say, and later he forced them to give false statements to the police.
Now Ms. Soudani has emerged to tell her life story, beginning with the promise of prosperity in America and then quickly devolving, she said, into a nightmare of violence and sexual slavery that ended in October 2022, when she finally seized a chance to flee.
Weeks after his wife’s murder, Mr. Soudani raped his sister for the first time, Ms. Soudani said. Rapes, beatings, threats and emotional abuse would continue for the next 45 years. Ms. Soudani believed her brother had murdered his wife, she said. If she left, she believed he would kill her or the three boys living in their home.
“That’s the reason I stayed — I was afraid for their lives,” Ms. Soudani said. “Because I know what he’s capable of.”
Mr. Soudani used threats and intimidation to prevent his sister from making friends, said both Ms. Soudani and Marty Soudani. He obtained power of attorney over his sister, which he used to transfer real estate into her name while denying her any proceeds from her nominal ownership.
Through his lawyer, Mr. Burke, Mr. Soudani disputed his sister’s accounts. “That’s complete nonsense as far as intimating that he had any kind of involvement in the death of his wife,” Mr. Burke said. He added that Mr. Soudani had never raped his sister.
For a brief period in the early 1980s, Ms. Soudani moved out of her brother’s house, she said. In 1982, she married a man named Mohammed Elkarim — a marriage that she said her brother arranged. The couple lived for two years in an apartment near Mr. Soudani’s home. Even then, the rapes and abuse continued, Ms. Soudani said. Her brother also beat and threatened Mr. Elkarim, she said, causing him to obtain a divorce soon after their son, Martin, was born, in 1985.
When the marriage ended, Ms. Soudani returned to her brother’s house.
“I was forced to go back,” she said. “I had no job. I had no education. I had nothing.”
More recently, Mr. Soudani purchased real estate in Jordan and placed some of the properties in his sister’s name, she said. When the properties became the subject of a legal dispute among family members, he sent Ms. Soudani to Jordan in 2020 to represent his interests in court, said Mr. Burke and Arthur D. Middlemiss, a lawyer for Ms. Soudani. She returned to America and her brother’s home in 2021.
Between her marriage and her time in Jordan, Ms. Soudani spent about three years living away from her brother. Such behavior may appear contradictory, but it is not uncommon among abuse victims, experts in domestic violence say. According to Stephanie Bonnes, a professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, abusers keep their victims under control by layering sexual assault, violence, threats, financial power, social isolation and surveillance, even when they are not physically in each other’s presence.
“People want to think that this situation is rare, but this type of abuse is sadly quite common,” said Ms. Bonnes, who is not involved in Ms. Soudani’s case but was briefed about its details. She said it matched patterns of abuse that she has studied. “It’s just a complete erosion of freedom, of liberty of the person under the control of the abuser,” she said.
Mr. Soudani’s lawyer said that so much time away proved that Ms. Soudani had enjoyed freedom and autonomy.
“There are weeks, years, months when she is out of the house, living somewhere else,” Mr. Burke said. “They try to say she was under his control, and that’s all just made up.”
‘You’ve Got to Disappear’
In 1981, Mr. Soudani closed the Aegean Grotto and moved 50 miles north to Orange County, where he opened an upscale restaurant called Soudani’s in the town of Walden. Ms. Soudani and her nephew Marty both worked in the restaurant for years, they said, without pay.
The restaurant was a success, and Soudani’s became a kind of clubhouse for local politicians and law enforcement leaders. Among Mr. Soudani’s new friends was a lawyer named Stewart Rosenwasser, who would represent him in a series of real estate transactions in the 1990s, and who regularly ate dinner in the Soudanis’ home, said Ms. Soudani and Marty, both of whom served meals to Mr. Rosenwasser.
As his wealth and influence grew, so did Mr. Soudani’s power over his sister, she said. Given his prominence in the community, he pointed out to her, no one would believe her accounts of abuse. If she tried to escape, he warned, he would use his connections to find and punish her.
“Over the years, my uncle treated my mother as his property, controlling her movements, both emotionally and physically,” said Martin Soudani, Ms. Soudani’s son.
Then, at a family wedding in September 2022, Ms. Soudani was shaken to see her brother humbled. Marty, his son, had run away from home at age 12 to escape what he described as years of physical and sexual abuse by his father; he stayed with friends in Orange County throughout his teenage years and continued to work for free in his father’s restaurant, he said. Eventually he settled in Denver, where he raised a family and started a successful direct mail company. Before the wedding, Marty sent a stern text message to his estranged father, warning him not to approach him at the ceremony.
To Ms. Soudani’s astonishment, Mr. Soudani complied. Never in 45 years had she seen him back down, she said. And it gave her hope that she might also be able to defy him.
“For the first time, I see someone standing up,” she said.
The wedding also reconnected Ms. Soudani with Marty, who said he had waited years for his aunt to request help in escaping his father. With money from Marty, Ms. Soudani and her son fled her brother’s home in October 2022. They drove straight to Marty’s home in Colorado, Ms. Soudani and Marty said. He offered to house them in a location hidden from Mr. Soudani.
“I told her, ‘You’ve got to disappear,’” Marty Soudani said. “‘Because he’s coming. He can never let you go.’”
By then Mr. Rosenwasser was near the pinnacle of the Orange County legal establishment, having worked for years as a lawyer in private practice between stints as a county and state judge. In July 2019 he had returned to the Orange County district attorney’s office, and in April 2022 he was promoted to executive assistant district attorney.
After Ms. Soudani fled, her brother complained to the police in Montgomery, N.Y., that she had stolen $500,000 from his home, and that his nephew had stolen $1.2 million from his investment accounts, according to court documents. The police declined to investigate, so Mr. Soudani brought his complaint to his old friend; Mr. Rosenwasser opened a criminal investigation into Ms. Soudani and her son on Oct. 31, 2022.
Eleven days later, according to bank records uncovered by Ms. Soudani’s lawyers, Mr. Soudani wrote Mr. Rosenwasser a check for $15,000. On the memo line he wrote “loan.” In interviews and in court, Mr. Soudani’s lawyer would later say the memo was accurate.
“He’s known former Judge Rosenwasser for over 40 years and had lent him money in the past,” Mr. Burke told The Albany Times-Union. “The payments identified in the indictment were loans, not bribes.”
Using money orders and checks labeled “loan,” Mr. Soudani ultimately would pay Mr. Rosenwasser about $63,000. In return, Mr. Rosenwasser traced Ms. Soudani to an apartment in Parker, Colo., and shared the address with Mr. Soudani, according to court documents that quoted text messages between the two men. He then flew to Colorado himself, and on March 8, 2023, the prosecutor joined more than a dozen local officers as they arrested Ms. Soudani.
‘You Know What You Have to Do’
It is exceedingly rare for prosecutors to participate in arrests, several experts in prosecutorial practice said. Doing so means having to explain to a jury how the prosecutor can be simultaneously a witness and an independent arbiter in the same case.
Even more extraordinary, text messages uncovered in court showed that Mr. Rosenwasser was taking orders from Mr. Soudani in the middle of the arrest.
As police officers searched the apartment, they ordered Ms. Soudani to stand in the hallway. There, 1,800 miles from home, she saw someone she knew well, someone who had eaten at her house on many occasions.
“Rosenwasser?” Ms. Soudani said. “Why are you coming after me? Shame on you. I’m your friend. I made you food.”
Mr. Rosenwasser acknowledged that was true.
“Tabbouleh,” he said, the exchange captured by officers’ body-worn cameras.
As Ms. Soudani was taken into custody, Mr. Rosenwasser was sending updates to Mr. Soudani.
“Eman said she wants a lawyer,” Mr. Rosenwasser texted, according to court documents.
“You know what you have to do,” Mr. Soudani replied. “You have to find the cash before you leave so there is no money to pay a lawyer.”
Mr. Rosenwasser replied that he was working to comply with Mr. Soudani’s orders, while signaling that it was a bad idea to continue the conversation in writing.
“Don’t know yet,” Mr. Rosenwasser wrote. “We’ll talk on phone. Not crazy about texting.”
Ms. Soudani and her son were charged with theft. Months after the arrest, the Orange County district attorney’s office dropped charges against Ms. Soudani, finding no evidence to support her brother’s claims. Martin Soudani pleaded guilty to stealing $1.2 million from his uncle; his conviction was later overturned.
In November 2023, Ms. Soudani sued her brother in federal court, accusing him of battery, emotional abuse and unjust enrichment. It was this lawsuit that first made public her allegations of rape and abuse spanning decades. Law enforcement agencies did nothing to investigate her claims. Rather, as a condition to dropping the criminal charges against her, her lawyer said, the district attorney’s office forced Ms. Soudani to sign an agreement saying she would not sue the office for wrongful prosecution.
The case might have ended there, with two siblings trading accusations of theft and abuse.
But Mr. Soudani countersued, a decision that led directly to an F.B.I. investigation and arrest warrants for himself and Mr. Rosenwasser.
Since Mr. Soudani’s suit repeated his allegations of theft against his sister, which the district attorney’s office had dismissed in September 2023, Ms. Soudani’s lawyers requested and won access to his bank and phone records. That exposed the suspicious checks and texts exchanged between Mr. Soudani and Mr. Rosenwasser.
“We found these checks and we said, ‘Holy cow!’” said Mr. Middlemiss, Ms. Soudani’s lawyer. “It is shocking.”
Alerted to a case of possible bribery, the F.B.I. started a criminal investigation. The agency discovered additional payments by Mr. Soudani to Mr. Rosenwasser, who lied to his bosses and to F.B.I. agents about their relationship, according to an indictment filed in September 2024 by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Martin Soudani’s conviction was overturned in October 2024 by a federal judge who ruled that evidence of bribery rendered the case “nothing less than tainted.” He and Ms. Soudani notified the Orange County district attorney’s office in August that they plan to sue and will seek $22.5 million in damages, claiming wrongful prosecution.
Ms. Soudani and her brother are negotiating a settlement to their dueling lawsuits, said Mr. Middlemiss. Mr. Soudani still faces criminal charges. A trial has been scheduled for Dec. 8.
Mr. Rosenwasser’s boss, David Hoovler, the Orange County district attorney, has publicly distanced himself from the controversy. He told The Times-Union that he and his staff were “shocked and dismayed” by the bribery charges against Mr. Rosenwasser. After the assistant prosecutor’s violent death, Mr. Hoovler said, “It’s truly heartbreaking that it ended this way.”
Last fall, Mout’z Soudani’s sister and son recanted their statements to the local police about Mr. Soudani’s whereabouts on the night of Helen Soudani’s murder in 1977. After decades as a cold case, “it’s active now,” said Sgt. Michael Higgins, a detective with the Ramapo Police Department.
Half a continent away, Eman Soudani still lives in hiding from her brother.
“I’m always living in fear, thinking that he’s going to hurt me,” she said. “And I hate that.”
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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