Couple Kidnapped Woman To Poland, Spent Her Saving

[Jaga]

Very strange story

PALM BEACH, Fla. -- A Palm Beach couple befriended their 93-year-old neighbor, then kidnapped her to a nursing home in Poland while they spent her life savings, according to a police report.

Police arrested Aron Bell, 80, and Henryka Bell, 59, and charged them with kidnapping, elderly exploitation, grand theft from a person older than 65 years of age and organized scheme to defraud.

...
According to the report, the Bells took Zaniewska to Poland on May 17 and returned without the 93-year-old on June 2. Police said that, with the help of the Polish-American Society Club in Lake Worth, officials located Zaniewska at a nursing home in a remote town in Poland. According to police, a detective called the nursing home and talked to Zaniewska, who told the officer, "Thank God, you found me."

more

www.wpbf.com/news/14302213/detail.html

[scatts]

There is a crime that is called "grand theft from a person older than 65 years of age"? You guys must have a very long list of possible crimes.

[Jaga]

This story is picked up by even more mass media. Today it was even posted in our Idaho Falls newspaper from AP. Below is a fragment of the story from UK since it has nice pictures, some still from the war:
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/21/wwarhero121.xml

There is a strange twist there also:

War hero 'stole from Holocaust survivor'By Tom Leonard in New York
Last Updated: 6:34pm GMT 21/11/2007

A Jewish wartime hero who helped save more than a thousand other Jews has been charged with swindling a Holocaust survivor out of her £125,000 retirement fund.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/21/wwarhero121.xml

A Jewish wartime hero who helped save more than a thousand other Jews has been charged with swindling a Holocaust survivor out of her £125,000 retirement fund.

Oxford don's wife 'sent war hero to his death'
In eastern Europe during the Second World War, Aron Bielski and his three brothers mounted what is widely regarded as the biggest armed rescue of Jews by other Jews.


Prosecutors have charged Bielski and his wife with scheming to defraud
The exploits of the four, who operated as partisans against the Nazi occupiers from the forests of what is now Belarus, have been chronicled in books, a documentary and a forthcoming Hollywood film.

The brothers’ encampment grew to include hundreds of armed fighters, families, children and elderly.

Historians say the Bielski brothers were different to other partisans in that they made it a priority to save Jews rather than to kill Germans.

No Jew was turned away and they ultimately rescued some 1,200 people.


Now however, Aron, aged 80 and the only surviving brother, has been arrested on charges of defrauding a 93-year-old Polish woman.

Prosecutors say Bielski – now called Bell – and his wife, Henryka, 58, befriended a neighbour, Janina Zaniewska, in Palm Beach, Florida.

They then allegedly tricked their victim, a Catholic who was herself imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, into giving them power of attorney and control of more than $250,000 held in various bank accounts.

Investigators say the couple then offered to take her on a holiday to her native Poland so she could visit old friends.

When they got there in May, they allegedly put her in a nursing home and returned to Palm Beach where they spent nearly all of her money.

Police were contacted in August by a bank manager who wondered why the Bells were withdrawing Ms Zaniewska’s money.