One night last December, six men met at a home in the Hollywood Hills to plot a kidnapping, prosecutors say.
Their alleged target was a 17-year-old operator of a cryptocurrency business. His abductors, authorities charge, included a felon with ties to Israeli organized crime and a former officer from the Los Angeles Police Department.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Jane Brownstone on Friday disclosed details of the alleged kidnapping at bail hearings for the alleged gangster, Gabby Ben, and the former officer, Eric Halem. Both men have pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
Ben, 51, has twice been convicted of fraud and deported to Israel, according to court records. Along with his blue jail jumpsuit, he wore a yarmulke and towel around his neck. He shrugged and shook his head when Brownstone said he has “ties to the Israeli mafia.”
Halem, 38, who appeared in court in an orange jumpsuit, served 13 years in the LAPD. By the time he left the department in 2022, he had developed lucrative side hustles, including a luxury car rental business and an app that allowed actors to audition remotely. He was also flirting with the idea of developing a reality show about his life, former associates told The Times.
Around 2 a.m. on Dec. 28, 2024, Halem, Ben and four other men drove in two cars — Ben’s rented Lamborghini Urus and a Range Rover — to a luxury high-rise in Koreatown where the alleged victim lived, Brownstone said in court.
Dressed in dark clothing, Halem, Ben and two other men punched in the access code to the victim’s apartment, Brownstone said. The teenager wasn’t home, but the intruders found his girlfriend in a closet and restrained her with LAPD-issued handcuffs, according to the prosecutor.
“Everyone was armed,” Brownstone said. “They claimed they were from the Los Angeles Police Department and they were executing a search warrant.”
When the intended victim returned home, the men handcuffed him and demanded he open his crypto wallet on his phone and computer, Brownstone said. The teen tried to bluff by showing an empty digital wallet, she said.
The intruders threatened to shoot the teenager in the foot and waterboard him if he didn’t surrender his crypto, turning on a shower to emphasize the threat, the prosecutor said.
Only then did he provide the code to a safe that held a “hard-wired” crypto wallet stored on a thumb drive, Brownstone told the judge. The wallet contained $350,000 in crypto, she said.
Surveillance footage showed Ben, Halem and the other intruders leaving the victim’s apartment building about 25 minutes after they entered, according to the prosecutor. They did not touch the Rolex watches or stacks of cash inside the safe and scattered throughout the apartment.
Halem’s attorney, Megan Maitia, cast doubt on the “alleged motive” for the case, questioning how the young man described by authorities as a victim had accumulated so much crypto.
“How does a 17-year-old do this?” she asked.
Maitia argued it wasn’t her client who’d threatened to hurt the teenager, but a sixth, still-unidentified suspect who “everyone thought was the most dangerous.”
Brownstone told the judge that police are still searching for a sixth suspect.
Maitia asked Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Victoria Wilson to grant her client bail. Far from the high-flying, deep-pocketed wheeler-dealer he was portrayed to be, Halem, a father of two, was now broke, his lawyer said. His house was encumbered with liens and he’d sold a “prop plane” that prosecutors cited when arguing he was a risk to abscond, Maitia said.
“The bank accounts are empty,” she told Wilson.
Maitia also argued Halem was in danger in the Los Angeles County jails. “He worries he is going to be killed because he was a cop,” she said.
Wilson said she would order the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jails, to protect Halem but was not moved to grant him bail.
Nor did she approve the release of Ben. His attorney, Kellen Davis, said his client had no violent convictions and always complied with court orders “from the limited record he does have.”
Ben was convicted of orchestrating a “bust out” scheme by paying people to open bank accounts that were later used to commit fraud, court records show. He was also accused of defrauding elderly people after entering their homes disguised as an HVAC technician and secretly photographing driver’s licenses and bank statements.
Ben, who lived in Los Angeles and Miami, owned healthcare and assisted living facilities, Davis said. “They are legitimate and he’s been operating them for years,” he told Wilson.
The judge wasn’t persuaded. Wilson called the allegation that Ben and his co-defendants posed as policemen “extremely troubling,” and she said there was a chance he could cause “great bodily harm to others” if let out of jail.
Times staff writers Libor Jany and Richard Winton contributed to this report.
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