Former Tea Partier says federal probe is act of ‘retaliation’
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Sam Zherka, whose Westchester Guardian has ripped Bharara's team, claims retaliation.Photo: The New York Times
A former state Tea Party organizer has become a target of a federal grand-jury investigation — after his newspaper ripped two prosecutors in Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bhahara’s office, The Post has learned.
A front-page story that appeared in the free, acid-tongued weekly Westchester Guardian on March 27 called the prosecutors “unethical and corrupt hypocrites.”
The paper’s owner, Tea Party honcho and strip-club mogul Selim “Sam’’ Zherka, even proudly admits to hiring a direct-mailing company, Promail USA, to tweak one of the prosecutors, Elliot Jacobson, by sending roughly 15,000 extra copies of the edition to registered Democrats in Jacobson’s hometown of Greenburgh. Bhahara is a Democrat.
Tens of thousands of other copies also were distributed through newspaper kiosks in Westchester.
Bhahara then signed off on a May 6 subpoena ordering reps from Promail of Yonkers to appear before a grand jury in White Plains federal court and “produce all documents, including all electronic data” related to dealings with the paper from March 15 to April 15.
It’s unclear what exactly the subpoena is going after — the feds refuse to comment.
But Zherka told The Post, “The timing is no coincidence. It’s obviously retaliation for printing a story that pissed the feds off.”
And “it is a clear attack on the First Amendment and free speech,’’ he said.
The Guardian article accused Jacobson and another White Plains-based federal prosecutor, Perry Carbone of assisting the Internal Revenue Service in an ongoing tax-fraud probe of Zherka.
The report said their help was a “favor” to Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore, a fellow Democrat who is also routinely verbally attacked by the Guardian.
When asked if the Promail subpoena might be related the tax probe, Zherka said, “Absolutely not.
“The subpoenas issued [by Jacobson and Carbone] in the tax case only dealt with my real-estate business dealings and Tea Party activities — and they never had anything to do with the Westchester Guardian,” he said.
Promail owner Anthony Santorelli, and his lawyer, Max DiFabio, declined comment.
But Zherka claims that Santorelli told him during a recent sit-down at a Yonkers diner that Promail was subpoenaed as a direct result of mailing out the issue.
Zherka — who owns the Flatiron’s VIP Club and the Times Square Cheetah’s Gentleman Club — says he plans to take legal action against Jacobson, Carbone and other federal authorities “for trying to intimidate free speech through the threat of prosecution.”
Lawsuits are nothing new for Zherka. His name pops up as a defendant or plaintiff in dozens of lawsuits – including 27 filed in Manhattan and White Plains federal courts since 2003.
Among them is a lawsuit he slapped against FBI and IRS agents last year alleging he’s being targeted in a tax investigation as political retaliation for prominent Tea Party activities.
The feds have denied these claims.
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