Leib Pinter

Rabbi Leib Pinter (1944-) was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1971, he founded a small school, the B'nai Torah Institute. In 1972, President Gerald Ford spoke at an annual dinner in support of the school. With the receipt of public funds, the school expanded quickly, and so too, increased scrutiny, beginning with taking public funds for distributing rotten kosher school lunches. On 15 February 1975, he offered the prayer of the guest chaplain before the US House of Representatives. It wasn't five days before the New York Times reported that he and his institute were under three separate federal investigations. By mid-1978 the Institute was defunct and Rabbi Pinter's career was in shambles after pleading guilty to a charge of bribing Representative Daniel J. Flood, himself under investigation at the time by a organized-crime task force of the Justice Department and other agencies. Early in the 2000s, Pinter helped lead an effort into censoring the work of Rabbi Natan Slifkin. In 2008, he was indicted for Wire Fraud Conspiracy after misappropriating refinanced mortgage loans as an executive of Olympia Mortgage Corp. He is the author of Don't Give Up (2004).