Sigal Chattah, the Israeli-born acting U.S. attorney in Nevada, who declined to prosecute an Israeli government official arrested last month for attempting to go on a date with an undercover agent posing as a 15-year-old girl, has drawn attention for her seemingly bottomless online footprint of unapologetically genocidal social media posts, text messages likening a political opponent to Hamas, and a campaign ad featuring a photo of Rep. Ilhan Omar engulfed by flames.
But a shallow dive into the long list of donors who contributed to her 2022 Nevada attorney general campaign gives a fuller picture of Chattah, and by extension the emerging Mafia bureaucracy comprising Trump’s Department of Justice.
Chattah is just one of five U.S. attorneys the Trump administration has repeatedly appointed on an “interim,” “acting,” and/or “assistant” basis in order to sidestep the Senate confirmation process, the best-known of whom is Marc Jacobs marketer turned parking garage general counsel turned Trump defamation lawyer Alina Habba, whom a Republican federal judge (and card-carrying Federalist Society member) just ruled had been illegally operating as New Jersey’s lead federal prosecutor since July 1. The other three—former assistant U.S. attorney Ryan Ellison of New Mexico, 39-year-old former state assemblyman Bilal Essayli of the Central District of California, and John Sarcone III, a 62-year-old Westchester, New York–based former General Services Administration employee who claimed to live in a boarded-up house in Albany whose mortgage is owned by a former client to nab the job of U.S. attorney for New York’s Northern District—are mostly obscure or inexperienced figures, likely chosen for their amenability to the Trump agenda.
Chattah, by contrast, is higher-profile: a prolific social media user whose personal X profile had 27,500 followers until she deleted it in the aftermath of the pedophile sting fallout. She was invited to the inauguration, ran for statewide office in a cycle that was initially expected to be a GOP blowout, and has been prominent in conservative Zionist circles for years in a town with no shortage of competition in that realm. As chairwoman of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network in 2019, Chattah even lobbied for federal legislation that would have recognized “Israeli Americans” as a protected class.
And while she came up 80,000 votes and eight points short of victory in the general election against incumbent Aaron Ford, after a Democratic operative who had been working as an undercover organizer of far-right activists in Nevada shared text messages in which the Israeli-born attorney opined that her (African American) opponent “should be hanging from a fucking crane,” Chattah raised more than a million dollars from a colorful collection of deep-pocketed donors, many of whose lengthy rap sheets might have scared off a more traditional candidate for the state’s top law enforcement post.
Take Curtis Debord of Reno, who donated the statutory maximum $10,000 to Chattah’s campaign. Back in the ’90s, Debord was charged with attempting to smuggle “hundreds of thousands” of machine guns, assault rifles, grenade launchers, ammunition, and parts worth $5 million from Vietnam in shipping containers claiming to contain “sewing machines.” The case was dismissed nearly a decade later because of the lack of a speedy trial. He had been charged in the ’80s as well with trafficking illicit weapons to survivalists, but by that point his customers were mostly street gangs.
“If there’s a rat, we kill them, the family, the kids,” Debord told an undercover agent posing as a Miami mobster looking to buy guns in an undercover sting of a sprawling arms smuggling organization run by or adjacent to an arms manufacturer owned by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The arms manufacturer’s chairman had been a guest of honor at a DNC fundraiser headlined by Bill Clinton in 1996; the DNC ended up returning $1.5 million in donations tainted by the scandal. Not Chattah! Asked by local media if she planned to return his contribution in 2022, Chattah described Debord as a “patriot” and said absolutely not.
Then there is Millennium Super Yachts owner John Staluppi, a longtime auto dealership and strip club magnate who also donated $10,000 to Chattah in 2021. He is a former business partner of Donald Trump who recently came into the ownership of a 234-foot mega-yacht formerly owned by former Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. Staluppi is also a made member of the Colombo crime family, according to memoranda filed in various federal organized-crime indictments going back at least to the early ’90s. Staluppi himself has said these mob allegations are false, though he did plead guilty to receiving stolen car parts in the 1970s.
Staluppi once sold his interest in a Palm Beach auto dealership to another Fattah maxed-out donor, billionaire vulture capitalist and rabid Israeli government supporter Paul Singer, though Singer’s indiscretions aren’t the sort that ever get charged. To be fair, some Chattah donors like Singer, who recently donated $1 million to the effort to primary Rep. Tom Massie (R-KY) for repeated votes against military aid to Israel, fall squarely into the “usual suspects” MAGA camp: Along with Singer, Adelson network stalwarts Margaret Topper, Larry Mizel, and Robert Schostak gave $5,000, $10,000, and $5,000, respectively, to Chattah’s AG bid, and Little Rock poultry billionaire Ronald Cameron pitched in $10,000 as well.
But perhaps Chattah’s most generous donors outside her immediate family are Guy Madmon and Yuval Amiel, two partners in a convenience store operator called FuelBros (and an apparent Bojangles franchisee) who both do business under a large assortment of aliases, alternative spellings, and corporate imprimaturs. Together the pair, who like Chattah are dual citizens of Israel, gave at least $45,000 to the prosecutor, under their own names as well as two entities, LV Petroleum LLC and Nevada Fuels, supposedly headquartered at a palatial 10,000-square-foot estate owned by a trust linked to their business partner Adrienne Moore.
Back in 2014, the pair owned 27 gas stations in New Jersey that purchased oil from suppliers with bad checks. When the checks bounced, Madmon and Amiel told the suppliers their bank accounts had been improperly frozen, and made plans to flee to … wait for it … Israel. Only Madmon made it to Tel Aviv; Amiel was stopped from leaving the country and charged on multiple counts of fraud, so Madmon returned and brushed off the trip as a family obligation. (It’s not clear what happened upon his return other than litigation and a reported bankruptcy filing.)
In 2001, Las Vegas prosecutors indicted Madmon along with a host of other alleged co-conspirators on charges of possession with intent to sell MDMA and controlled substances, and he was sentenced to 70 months; though much of the case is still sealed, a judge in 2003 described Madmon as a “trafficker” and high-ranking deputy in a Belgian-Israeli-American ecstasy organization accused of moving $80 million worth of drugs in Australia alone. Following his sentence, Madmon moved to New Jersey, where just two years out of prison prosecutors discovered that he, another recently released ex-con named John Paladino, and one Raphael Toledano, a famous former New York slumlord who was then an inmate at the famous federal prison camp in Otisville many call “Crime University,” had been running a loan-sharking scheme that offered predatory cash advances to restaurants, then siphoned funds off their customers’ credit cards if they couldn’t pay. Madmon was charged but never formally indicted in that incident, and he and Amiel decamped for Las Vegas, which turned out to be something of a boomtown for dubious energy ventures, at least judging from Chattah’s donor list.
Don Ahern, who along with his wife Carolyn Lee donated $20,000 to Chattah during the 2022 campaign cycle, was accused last year by a host of blue-chip banks and insurance companies of operating an $845 million Ponzi scheme under the guise of investing in solar energy supplies he never actually bought. (Ahern has also been accused of being a prolific user of the N-word, and his own lawyer admitted in a deposition that he’d used it in his presence.) Yakov Hefetz, who donated $1,800 to Chattah and co-owns a pair of daiquiri bars on the Strip with fellow Chattah donor Moshe Rosenblum, also invested in an elaborate Vegas-based criminal scheme to “import” phony biodiesel from Canada in order to generate lucrative renewable-energy credits between around 2009 and 2014. While Hefetz was never implicated in the scam, he was accused in 2017 by a male bartender at a bar he co-owned of assaulting and/or harassing such a staggering multitude of employees and customers that the state equal rights commission initiated an unusual disciplinary proceeding against him, which required him to refrain from day-to-day operations at the bar.
Finally, there’s David Chesnoff, a celebrity Las Vegas defense attorney who donated $5,000 to Chattah’s war chest and was appointed in June to serve on Trump’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, a meeting of which he recently used to identify Zohran Mamdani as a national-security threat. The former law partner of three-term Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman, Chesnoff has represented everyone from Lindsay Lohan to the Jackson family to the biodiesel con men. His latest client is Tom Alexandrovich, the Israeli cybersecurity official who was caught last month trying to have sex with a 15-year-old he met on a Swiss “dating” app.
Alexandrovich’s arrest was part of a multiagency sting that netted seven other sex offenders, including a former Las Vegas Metro police officer, a Baptist minister, and a 23-year-old polymer scientist from India. All but Alexandrovich appear to have been detained at least overnight in the Henderson Detention Center or the Clark County jail; all but Alexandrovich were given bail hearings in the days that followed. According to a report of the arrest obtained by Breaking Points anchor Saagar Enjeti, two federal agents interviewed the official for all of 31 minutes, during which he repeatedly invoked his family in Israel, his employers in Israel, his return flight to Israel, and his intention to inform the Israeli consulate of his whereabouts, along with the meetings he had attended, and others he had scheduled, with American federal law enforcement officials. (He also claimed that he thought the girl was 18.)
Chattah ceded Alexandrovich’s case, along with those of the other seven alleged sex criminals, to Clark County district attorney Steven Wolfson, who made national headlines in 2021 as one of the nation’s most prolific filers of applications to seek the death penalty against alleged perpetrators of violent crimes. But the “standard” bail guidelines for Alexandrovich were $10,000 with no special conditions, an amount the Israeli tech guru immediately produced with zero court involvement, as one might take care of an automatically generated camera speeding ticket, and returned home without incident. (The other offenders got similar bail conditions, though some were set as high as $25,000.) Chattah threw Wolfson under the bus with a statement blaming a liberal DA for the slipup; Wolfson countered that Chattah had been “very, very pleased that we were handling the case, because she said that she had no interest in handling it.”
That may have something to do with the tenuousness of her role as “interim” U.S. attorney, especially in the aftermath of the Pennsylvania judge’s ruling that Habba had been serving illegally. Two accused New Jersey real estate fraudsters have already argued that Habba’s illegitimacy renders their indictments null and void; even someone as shameless as Pam Bondi might feel a twinge of embarrassment about losing cases against eight accused pedophiles because her fake prosecutor had been illegally installed.
Chattah’s office did not return a request for comment.
Then, of course, there is the matter of Israeli impunity, and the ruling class insistence on codifying it at the most quotidian levels of government and society. As of 2022, Israel was home to some 2,152 individuals who were the subject of formal international extradition requests, according to a recent leak of an Israeli law enforcement spreadsheet dated that year; no small number of them concerned accused pedophiles. Following his arrest, a 2024 Israeli TV news clip quickly circulated of Alexandrovich boasting about his success rate at convincing Meta and other social media platforms to delete posts critical of Israel. It’s easy to forget how much impunity anyone with friends in high places enjoyed before Trump packed the administrative state with the likes of Sigal Chattah.
As we went to press, Alexandrovich was supposed to appear at a status hearing in Nevada scheduled for this morning. If you don’t hear anything about it, blame the mafiacracy.