If you’re not deeply invested with the goings on in smallish Hasidic sects, you may not have heard that the Grand Rabbi of the Boro Park clan of the Spinka Hasidic dynasty, 59-year-old Naftali Zvi Weisz, was arrested in December and charged with defrauding the government out of almost $35 million.
The Blame Game: Like Monopoly, but with less losing

The Hasidic community freaked out in response to this arrest, but not because they’d been had by a rabbi who turned out to be an asshat. Instead, everyone was up in arms trying to figure out who had ratted the Rebbe out. The FBI leaked documents about the investigation on the internet, and an informant called only ‘RK’ was revealed to be the source of much of the damning information (the rest came from the work of Bureua’s Yiddish translation team—no lie). Eventually, Robert Kasirer, a Modern Orthodox businessman in LA was identified as the informant. According to the Forward, Kasirer provided state’s evidence against the Hasidic rebbe in exchange for a lighter sentence on previous fraud charges stemming from his health care business.

But who cares who the informant is, really? Thank God we got this fraud off the street, right? Not so much. Because being an informant, a moser, is among the biggest no-nos in the Hasidic community.

The Forward has an excellent article that explains a lot:

There has long been a violent hatred, especially within Hasidic culture, for informants. Almost from the moment of its inception as a religious revivalist movement in late 18th-century Poland, some of the greatest Hasidic leaders were jailed for a variety of bogus criminal allegations, most commonly sedition. As a matter of course, governments used Jewish informants to build false cases against these Rebbes.

Informants are classified in Jewish law as rodfim, or those who pursue Jewish lives and thus should be killed. And Kasirer was definitely an informant. But was he pursuing Jewish lives? I don’t think so.

This is what pisses me off about contemporary Hasidic life. No one seems to be even remotely interested in respecting the world they live in, they just want to close their eyes and pretend they’re back in the shtetl. But we don’t live in rural Rumania anymore. We really aren’t going to be deported tomorrow, and withholding money from the government, aside from being non-halachic, is wrong. It’s taking food off of someone else’s table, as far as I’m concerned.

Kasirer might be a jackass, but the Spinka Rebbe is a thief. Not being a jackass is a rabbinic prohibition, and not being a thief is a Biblical prohibition, so as far as I can tell, “His Honored Holiness our Master, Teacher and Rabbi of Spinka, Shlita” as he’s known by his followers, is the bad guy here.