NY AG Busts Children's Charity for Multi-million Dollar Fraud

by Gary Snyder

Donors gave $9.7 million to the National Children’s Leukemia Foundation over a 4 year period. It paid out only $57,451 in “direct cash assistance to leukemia patients” in that time.

The New York State attorney general’s office said in a petition that it seeks to shut down the Brooklyn-based foundation and recover money that the attorney general’s office said had been raised fraudulently.

The foundation’s Make a Dream Come True program for children with cancer was mostly a mirage since the foundation had spent nothing on the program since March 2009.

Investigators said the foundation amounted to a one-man operation doing business from the basement of a home in the Bergen Beach section of Brooklyn. That one man, the petition said, was Zvi Shor, who started the foundation in 1991 after losing a son to leukemia. The court papers said Mr. Shor, who ran a construction and plumbing business, had paid himself $595,000 in salary and $600,000 in deferred compensation from 2009 to 2013, along with the promise of a lifetime pension of more than $100,000 a year.  

He had been convicted of bank fraud in 1999. 

In 2012, Mr. Shor transferred $655,000 to an Israeli organization that Mr. Shor set up, supposedly for research.

The AG’s petition also said the foundation had paid for more than $30,000 in personal expenses for Mr. Shor, including $16,615 for gasoline and tolls and $9,000 for supplies used to renovate his house.

The foundation’s accountant and its president did not know who the foundation’s directors were. [The New York Times]

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