In Orthodox tradition, a man and his wife enter wedlock by signing their names to the ketubah, the traditional prenuptial agreement, both knowing that only the man, the head of the household, is allowed to terminate the relationship. A husband’s refusal to do so creates an agunah out of his powerless wife—she becomes, literally, a "chained" woman.

Bryskman’s wife claimed to be just that. A few months earlier, she and her husband had found themselves embroiled in particularly acrimonious separation proceedings in an Israeli rabbinical court. She moved out of the house they shared, took the kids with her, and forbade her husband from seeing them. She claimed he was an unfit father. She insisted upon a divorce. He wouldn’t agree.

On the advice of his rabbis, Bryskman flew from Israel to America, where he had some family—only to find on this night in Lakewood that his marital problems, far from being left behind in Israel, had followed him across the Atlantic.

Peeking through a gap in the blindfold, he caught a glimpse of Wax in a cartoonishly large white cowboy hat. "Do you like my hat?" Wax asked before delivering a few kicks to the ribs. Bryskman raised his head, revealing a spreading pool of blood.

"You ruined my carpet!" Wax squealed. Adequately terrified, Bryskman agreed to his tormentor’s terms. He would grant the get—anything to save his life. Line by line, he was led through the process:

...Hereby I do release thee and send away and put thee aside that thou mayest have permission and control over thyself to go to be married to any man whom thou desirest and no man shall hinder you in my name...

At 3 A.M., Wax hustled Bryskman downstairs and into a waiting taxi. He ordered the driver to take them both toward Brooklyn. On the way, he phoned Bryskman’s father, Zalman, in Israel. Wax said he had a team on the ground there; as proof, he named a fast-food spot where Zalman had recently dined. If Zalman didn’t wire $100,000 to the family of Bryskman’s wife, Wax would have both Bryskman and Zalman murdered. "For you, there’s a special gift," he told Zalman. "It’s called a bullet...in your head."

Bryskman was deposited, bloody and aching, at the doorstep of his cousin’s apartment in central Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Wax turned back for Lakewood, apparently untroubled by the possibility that Bryskman might rat him out. After all, ultra-Orthodox Jews consider it blasphemous to involve secular authorities in a dispute that should be rightly settled in the community. But at this point Bryskman no longer cared.

Later that same day, lying in a bed at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, he told his story to several law-enforcement officials. A search warrant was issued; Wax was arrested; his Lakewood house was tossed. Upstairs, investigators found a large white cowboy hat and an invoice from Step on Me Carpet & Flooring for a $1,311.10 emergency carpet installation.

Wax, prosecutors would later allege, was part of a criminal syndicate "engaged in the business of kidnapping and torturing people, beating them up, tying them up, shocking them with Tasers and stun guns until they got what they wanted"—a group of hit men that had allegedly been abducting and assaulting recalcitrant husbands across the tristate area for decades, to the tune of one forced get every year.

In May, David Wax pleaded guilty to his role in the kidnapping of Meir Bryskman. But he told the court that he had done the hit on behalf of someone else, a man purported to be the mastermind of the forced-get ring, a man known as the Prodfather: a 69-year-old gray-bearded, frazzle-haired father of eight—and grandfather of forty-four—named Rabbi Mendel Epstein.