דער ארעסטאנט "דרייליך"

Kosher Meat and the bodies in the Harlem River
I heard about muders in the 1950s-1970s over the certifying of kosher meat. Soon after, the kosher meat industry moved out of New York and the reach of organized crime.

XXX writes: According to the NYTimes (Mar 11, 1979): ''Martin Paretzky, a 71-year-old diamond dealer, who has been missing since last Wednesday and was believed to be carrying up to $500,000 worth of precious stones when he disappeared.'' On March 12, 1979, the NYTimes reported: ''A 27-year-old gem dealer carrying as much as $250,000 in precious stones to a customer was reported to have disappeared on Friday, just two days after another New York City dealer was reported missing with up to $500,000 in diamonds.''

In the initial days after the kidnappings, the police did not link the two cases. However, on March 13, 1979, the NYTimes reported that Satya Narian Gupta's body was identified in the poconos where he was found dead bound and gagged in a sleeping bag along a road in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. However, the police did find a link (NYTimes, April 6, 1979) between the murder of Miriam Drelich and the kidnapping of Martin Paretzky – Drelich's husband, Philip Drelich was a suspect in both cases.

Finally, on May 26, 1979, the NYTimes reported that ''the body of a man tentatively identified as Martin Paretzky, a 71-year-old diamond dealer who disappeared nearly four months ago when he was believed to have been carrying as much as $500,000 in diamonds, was found floating in the Hudson River yesterday afternoon, the police said… With the rising temperatures in the last month, a dozen bodies have been floating in the rivers flanking Manhattan.''

An autopsy conducted showed that Martin Paretzky was strangled. Still, no connection between the Paretzky and Gupta kidnappings (NYTimes May 27, 1979).

On May 19, 1980, a State Supreme Court in Brooklyn found Philip Drelich guilty of fatally stabbing his pregnant wife. The NYTimes (May 20, 1980) reported that Drelich was ''recently convicted of murdering an elderly diamond dealer in March 1979, was convicted yesterday of slaying his own wife one month later.''

Final note: the NYTimes (December 20, 1982) reported that Raymond Paretzky, son of Martin Paretzky, became the first student from the City University of New York to be named a recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship. Raymond spent two years studying at Oxford University in England.