Hynes lost the election, in November, 2013, by fifty percentage points. Minutes after he gave a concession speech, Aidala put his arm around him, walked him to his car, and held the door open for him, according to a privately recorded video.

During Hynes’s last weeks in office, Abe said, he got calls from the Lebovits sons, who were concerned that their civil agreement was no longer strong enough. They now requested a letter stating that Aron was not in good health. “They said they had some information from the higher guys in the D.A. that they need that letter to make the case go away,” Abe told me. In exchange for the letter, Abe said, Baruch Lebovits agreed to apologize to Aron in person—something that Aron had been asking for since the negotiations began. But on the morning of the meeting Aron refused to leave his house. “He was never convinced that they were not scheming,” Abe told me. “He didn’t want to fool around with these people anymore.”

For almost three years, as Kellner’s extortion case dragged on, the rabbis in his community urged him to take a plea deal. They warned him that, as a Hasid, he would never get a fair trial. “They say you are guilty just by having the big beard,” he said. His rabbi told him, “If you know you didn’t do it, what do you care? It’s between you and God.”

Kellner had a new attorney, Niall MacGiollabhuí, who began working on the case in the spring of 2013. An Irish immigrant, MacGiollabhuí was dismayed that the rackets bureau had relied on evidence with little regard for the culture from which it emerged. “They are lifting things out of that community, dropping it into the wider world, and stripping the things of context,” he said. MacGiollabhuí initially assumed that Kellner was exaggerating when he told stories about being followed and secretly recorded, but then audio recordings of Kellner’s private conversations surfaced on a new Web site called Sam Kellner—Alleged Jewish Mob Ringleader Revealed. MacGiollabhuí discovered that his own calls, too, were being recorded. He complained to the district attorney’s office that Kellner’s van was bugged, but no one investigated.

When the new district attorney, Ken Thompson, took office, last January, MacGiollabhuí warned two prosecutors in an e-mail, “At the moment, your office is being openly mocked in his community.”

Eric Gonzalez, the counsel to Thompson, told me that the new administration was skeptical of the Kellner indictment. Four prosecutors had asked to be removed from the case, because they didn’t believe in it. He said that it seemed as if “the decision had been made to prosecute Kellner, and they were going to go forward with that prosecution whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing to do. And here you had multiple senior people saying it was the wrong thing to do.”

A new prosecutor, Kevin O’Donnell, conducted a review of the case in early 2014 and determined that Meyer Lebovits was not credible and the recording of him talking to Kellner was “ambiguous at best.” “There are motives of certain witnesses that go beyond this case,” he said at a hearing in March. He told the judge that Joshua’s statements were “wildly inconsistent” and supported by “no credible evidence.” In one interview, Joshua said that Lebovits might have molested him, but he wasn’t sure. “Could be a different Lebovits,” he offered. A week later, he said that he’d never even seen Lebovits. Joshua had recently moved to Israel, and he acknowledged that whenever he wanted to return to the United States he requested permission from a man named Zalman Ashkenazi, who paid his airfare. Records obtained by the prosecution show that Ashkenazi, who is the brother of the defense witness at Aron’s trial, made monthly payments to Joshua’s father. (Ashkenazi denied that Joshua needed his permission to travel.)

When O’Donnell signalled that he would submit a motion to dismiss the case against Kellner, MacGiollabhuí said that he wanted to go to trial. He didn’t understand how a case had been brought against Kellner, and he wanted to put people on the witness stand. “The people in my client’s community are entitled to it,” he told the judge. “They are entitled to know why it is that victims of pedophiles in my client’s community don’t get the justice that victims in other communities get.”

MacGiollabhuí consented to have the case dismissed only after O’Donnell told him, last March, that the district attorney’s office would undertake an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Kellner’s indictment. But an investigation was never announced. Months later, MacGiollabhuí wrote to the prosecutor, “I now believe that I was lied to.” (A spokeswoman from the D.A.’s office said that an investigation was never promised.) Gonzalez would not acknowledge whether or not there was an ongoing investigation, but he did say that “this district attorney is very concerned about the amount of money and effort used to prevent the Baruch Lebovits case from seeing the courtroom.” He said that Aron’s civil settlement seemed to be a “very calculated way of buying the victim off.”

Two months after Kellner’s case was dismissed, Lebovits pleaded guilty to molesting Aron and avoided a second trial. The prosecution was severely compromised by the settlement. In May, Lebovits was sentenced to two years in prison. “You wanted to have it your way,” Aron said to Lebovits at the sentencing hearing. “He still won’t apologize to me in person,” he went on. “He never apologized to me. That’s it.” Lebovits was released after eighty-three days.

Supporters of both Lebovits and Kellner continue their efforts at intimidation. Two people told me they were afraid that I had been hired by the Lebovits family. Others alerted Kellner that I was a secret agent of the district attorney’s office. When I met Chaim Lebovits, in a suite at the Plaza, he told me that if I continued to work on this article I would make a fool out of myself and ruin my career. Chaim vacillated between lightheartedness—he played the shofar, a musical instrument made out of a ram’s horn, and encouraged me to have children immediately, before I was too old—and loud rants about Kellner’s evil strategic intelligence. He told me that I could not rely on the documents that the district attorney’s office had compiled, because Kellner “talked a smart language,” and when it was translated into English his criminal intentions weren’t as evident as they were in Yiddish.

Not long ago, Kellner and I met near the office in Crown Heights where Detective Litwin worked before moving to a new unit. Kellner wanted to talk to me only in public spaces, so that he did not violate the prohibition in his community against meeting with a woman alone. As officers walked in and out of the building, they stared at us, apparently confused that a Hasidic man was chatting with a secular woman.

Kellner was still consumed by the case. It was as though he believed that if he recited the details enough times he might figure out exactly what had happened. Since his case, he said, the rabbis had become even less willing to permit victims to go to the police. Recently, when a father whose daughter had been molested asked for advice, Kellner told him, “If you go to the police, you’re probably going to end up with zero.”

Three officers walked past us for the third time, and Kellner, who almost never turns down an opportunity for conversation, asked them if they knew Steve Litwin. “Steve and I worked together on a case,” he said. “Then the D.A. turned against me. And no one stood up for me.”

“Really,” one of the officers said, casually. He suddenly seemed less interested in us.

“Basically, the D.A. destroyed me.”

“Well, Steve doesn’t work here anymore,” the officer said.

“Yeah, but the question is, Who’s going to come here anymore?” Kellner asked.

“None of these guys work here anymore,” the officer said. “They’re all gone.”

“They ruined me,” Kellner went on. “This is what is left of me.”

“Well, keep fighting the fight,” the officer said, as he and his partners walked away. ♦