Swindler of Holocaust Survivors Leaves a Trail of Mystery

Is Lucian Ludwig Kozminski really dead? Or is the man once convicted of cheating thousands of his fellow Holocaust survivors of their government reparations getting away with the ultimate scam?

An official death certificate issued in Los Angeles County says Kozminski died Jan. 19, 1993, succumbing at age 76 to pneumonia after being admitted to Century City Hospital with stomach pains.

But was it really him?

Take a closer look, as a former federal prosecutor and two of the Holocaust survivors Kozminski cheated have, and you will find only more questions.

The Social Security number listed as Kozminski’s on the death certificate isn’t his. It belonged to Claire Cosmisky, a 58-year-old Alzheimer’s patient who was treated at the same hospital and died of lung cancer six days before Kozminski’s reported death. The document also falsely ages Kozminski by a good 10 years and lists his profession as banking, which it never was. The certificate says he lived in Los Angeles most of his life; in fact, he entered the United States--lying about his criminal past--in 1968.

The man who died seven years ago, the man whose remains were released to Heritage Mortuary for cremation, was a strapping 6-footer, hospital records show. Other documents, including booking photographs from his 1982 federal fraud indictment, reveal that the real Kozminski was 5 feet, 4 inches tall. Nowhere in the records about the body is any mention of Kozminski’s most convincing identifying mark--No. 11790 branded on his left forearm at Auschwitz, one of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camps.

As for Kozminski’s final residence, the address on the death certificate leads to Mail Boxes and Things, a postal drop in West Hollywood. Kozminski’s son rented a box there two months before the reported death, paying with a check. It bounced.

These facts have surfaced publicly because of the Holocaust survivors’ dogged--some might say obsessive--pursuit of a man they call the schwindler.

They recently obtained judgments against Kozminski in Los Angeles Superior Court after two judges took the unusual step of declaring Kozminski’s death certificate a fraud.

The civil cases also highlighted how easy it is to fake a death in a county where two-thirds of the 60,000 deaths each year slip under the coroner’s radar because the deceased are attended by private physicians and quickly buried or cremated.

Coroner’s officials say that in the past, people have come to the morgue to claim bodies of John or Jane Does to obtain death certificates. Some want to duck felony warrants. Others want to cash insurance checks. Most of them probably don’t get caught.

Kozminski’s faked death might have slipped through the cracks too, except that he had made some very bitter enemies. Always, they were watching.

During Kozminski’s life, house painter Jacob Weingarten hounded him--playing a key role in the prosecution that sent Kozminski to federal prison for cheating him and other Holocaust survivors. Now retired, Weingarten has continued to haunt Kozminski seven years after his supposed death led federal parole officers to close their file on him.

Century City lawyer Mark Kalmansohn, then in the U.S. attorney’s office, befriended Weingarten in 1981 as he prepared to prosecute Kozminski in federal court for stealing reparations money. Now an entertainment lawyer, Kalmansohn is representing Weingarten and another survivor, Mordka “Max” Wolman, gratis in their pursuit of Kozminski’s assets.

It was Kalmansohn who uncovered the suspicious circumstances of Kozminski’s supposed demise while researching a book about the case.

He filed separate lawsuits on Weingarten’s and Wolman’s behalf in Los Angeles Superior Court. With the suits, Kalmansohn submitted more than 300 pages of documents backing his argument that Kozminski faked his death to avoid paying back about 3,000 Holocaust survivors he allegedly swindled.

In March 1999, Judge John W. Ouderkirk determined that Kozminski’s death certificate was “false and/or fraudulent.” He ruled that Kozminski did not die on the day in question and most certainly was not cremated.

“Defendant Kozminski may be alive today at an unknown location,” Ouderkirk said, entering a $24,005.44 judgment against Kozminski in favor of the 72-year-old Wolman. This April, Judge Morris Jones concurred, entering a $36,564.61 judgment in favor of Weingarten, who is now 80.

All it takes to fake a death, said Craig Harvey, the coroner’s chief investigator, is a doctor’s signature on a blank death certificate. Many times, he said, the family or funeral home is left to fill in the details. No one checks to see if those details are accurate.

System Depends on People’s Honesty

In Los Angeles County, the coroner’s office does not need to be notified--much less perform an autopsy--if someone who dies of natural causes has been under a doctor’s care within the previous 20 days. Physicians fill out work sheets, which are passed on to the funeral parlor handling the remains, Harvey said.

“The system really hangs on everybody being honest,” he said. “If they’re not, then innocent people get hurt in the process. There’s all kinds of ways to pull scams out there. “

He added, “We try to discourage doctors from signing blank death certificates.” But on many occasions, he said, the physicians are rushed or trying to make things easier on bereaved relatives. They have no idea that they are being used to perpetrate a fraud.

In Kozminski’s case, no suspicions were raised until several years later, when Kalmansohn’s digging unearthed some odd details. He elaborated in the civil court documents:

Four witnesses swear that they saw Kozminski alive and well long after his supposed death, according to court documents. One of them, Molly Schimel, now 75 and still living in Los Angeles, says she confronted Kozminski on the sidewalk in front of a Beverly Hills bank in 1995. “What’s going on with the money you took from me?” she says she demanded. His response, she says, was to shoo her away with a dismissive wave and the comment “You always think about money.”

Then there’s the matter of the Social Security checks, issued in Kozminski’s name and containing his real Social Security number. Someone cashed them for 26 months after Kozminski was supposed to have died.

The civil cases have rekindled painful memories for the Holocaust survivors Kozminski cheated.

The reparations--in the form of lump sum payments or monthly pensions--were made possible in 1952 when the government of West Germany sought to compensate Holocaust victims for their suffering and losses. Since then, according to court records, $60 billion has been paid.

For Kozminski, Kalmansohn said, the agencies handling the reparations provided a golden opportunity. U.S. postal inspectors who searched his offices in 1982 uncovered about $250,000 in reparations checks and a file, containing about 40 names and marked “Erledigt, Aber Noch Nicht Bezahlt.” Translation from the German: finished, but not yet paid.

He stole the money in mean, petty amounts--$50 here, $100 there--fees for services never performed. But records in several languages uncovered during the search pointed to about 3,000 victims. There was further evidence that Kozminski maintained hidden bank accounts in Switzerland and Israel and that he was arranging a $1-million deal to invest in gold ingots.

Because the foreign governments would not cooperate, the U.S. Justice Department was never able to trace or freeze Kozminski’s foreign assets, Kalmansohn said.

Sentenced to Federal Prison for Fraud

Kozminski was indicted for mail and bankruptcy fraud in early 1982, pleaded guilty in October of that year and was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison. Federal Bureau of Prisons records indicate that he was released in 1989. But even those facts are suspect, Kalmansohn said.

It is not clear what Kozminski did during the four years between his release and his purported death. But there’s one thing he didn’t do: He never paid a penny of the court-ordered restitution.

Federal probation officials closed their files on Kozminski after receiving a copy of the death certificate.

“I am convinced that he would have had a strong incentive to feign his death in 1993,” Kalmansohn said. “Based on my interviews with many victims, Kozminski remained an outcast in the survivor community and was continually dogged by his victims. This scheme, as daring as it might seem, is entirely consistent with Kozminski’s five-decade record of fraud and deception.”

“Ein schwindler,” muttered Weingarten recently during an interview at the West Hollywood apartment he shares with his wife, Esther. “He stole my money. What? I should give him a present?”

At his ranchette north of Los Angeles, Wolman, a retired television repair shop owner, agreed. He said he trusted Kozminski as a fellow survivor and was betrayed.

“I am sad to see that a guy who went through the same situation as my father could do something like this to people for money,” he said.

Although the actual date of his birth is disputed, Kozminski probably was in his early teens when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and rounded up Jews. His parents, two sisters and a brother were killed, and Kozminski was held in the Lodz ghetto and then moved to a series of concentration camps.

He survived, court records say, by becoming a Nazi collaborator. One fellow survivor recalled seeing Kozminski, dressed in boots and a heavy sweater, at the Gross-Rosen camp, where the other prisoners wore striped, pajama-like uniforms and tattered shoes, or went barefoot.

A Nazi Collaborator at Infamous Auschwitz

“I tried to take sides with the Aryan side, because all the Jews were being taken away,” Kozminski said in his own 1949 reparations application. He acknowledged that he worked in the kitchen at Auschwitz, a plum assignment.

Kalmansohn tracked Kozminski’s background during the reparations fraud investigation. After the war, Kozminski settled near Munich, where he ran afoul of the law during the 1960s. Between 1963 and 1967, he was convicted of six crimes, including smuggling leather goods into Poland, bribing a German official to gain entry into the Social Democratic Party, which banned Jews at the time; showing Communist propaganda films at a theater he owned; providing false information for a loan; and running a business that took money to refurbish graves of Polish Holocaust victims but didn’t carry out the work.

Even Kozminski’s entry into the United States was fraudulent. He obtained a 90-day visitor’s visa, withholding information about his criminal convictions--and the fact that he was still on probation for the grave-refurbishing scam.

Kozminski opened his office in the Fairfax district, calling himself a reparations counselor, in 1969. He dubbed his business Wiedergutmachungs--in German, literally, “making something good again”--and took out advertisements in the Jewish press.

The ads brought Weingarten to Kozminski’s office during the summer of 1972, seeking restitution for damage to his health caused by four years of forced labor on a near-starvation diet of what he described as “bloody soup, not fit for a dog.”

During his meeting, Kozminski told him, “You have a good case,” said Weingarten, who signed over power of attorney, giving the counselor 15% of whatever money could be recovered and $100 for costs. In all, he would pay Kozminski $526 in cash for doing nothing, he said.

After Weingarten appeared on his own behalf, a court in Germany, awarded him reparations of 10,000 deutschmarks, or $3,747. The money was paid--to Kozminski--in 1975, but Weingarten said he didn’t learn about it until two years later, when he confronted the counselor.

By then, Weingarten said, Kozminski had tacked on an additional 25% in fees, plus 10% for a lawyer in Germany, laying claim to more than half the award. The counselor offered to pay his client $1,892--which Weingarten rejected. To this day, he said, he hasn’t seen a penny of it.

Wolman went to Kozminski in 1977, seeking reparations for the loss of his father and other family members. Wolman was a child during the war, and hid from the Nazis on a farm outside Paris.

He said he paid Kozminski $50 cash and signed over power of attorney plus 15% of his claim. He charges that Kozminski later altered the agreement to take 35%. Over the next couple of years, Wolman said, he paid Kozminski $545 in cash for fees.

Although $3,738 in reparations was deposited with Kozminski in 1978, Wolman said he never received any of the money.

The judgments entered in Los Angeles Superior Court are relatively small and for the most part symbolic. Although it might have been easier to let the matters go, neither Weingarten nor Wolman is willing to forgive or forget a man who turned on his own people.