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Steven M. Zavidow, 51, a former member of the JCC on the Palisades who now lives in Hillsdale, has an afternoon court date before a federal magistrate judge in Newark.
Zavidow has been working with The Goldstein Group, a brokerage firm based in Glen Rock. His accounts included Red Robin motels, Fuddruckers, Famous Dave’s, Pizzeria Uno, TGI Friday’s, Brunchies Restaurants, Panang Restaurants and It’s Greek To Me.
Before that, he was responsible for the overall operations of a five-store Dunkin Donuts/Baskin-Robbins franchise, and also managed company operations as president of Exceptional Mortgage Brokers, Inc.
Zavidow was also the founder and president of the Burger King Cancer Foundation of Metropolitan New York, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local institutions that cared for cancer patients.
His wife, Stephanie Zwirn Zavidow, is an attorney specializing in residential real estate law, with an office in Demarest. She left the board of the Kaplen Jewish Community Center on the Palisades more than three years ago, according to CFO Daniel S. Rocke.
The couple made headlines after conceiving their first two children through frozen embryo transfers. They also were once involved in the JCC’s Camp Dream Street, a week-long day camp for children with cancer and other blood disorders.
Federal authorities said Zavidow previously owned and operated 11 Burger King restaurants in New York, each separately incorporated. More than 25 years ago, he and his father created Zavco Industries Retirement Trust to provide pensions for the various employees, they said.
Zavidow made himself the trust’s administrator and trustee, which, under federal law, required him “to act solely in the interest of the Trust’s participants,” said U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman.
Beginning more than four years ago, Zavidow skimmed $263,000 from the fund by issuing checks drawn on its account, leaving the fund bone-dry, federal authorities in Newark said. He deposited some of the checks directly into wife’s bank account and collected on others using a check-cashing store in Paterson, they said.
A day after the very first check, for $130,000, was deposited into her bank account in March 2006, she wrote a check for $95,777 “to pay for the costs associated with remodeling a residential home, located in Demarest… held solely in her name,” Fishman said.
Zavidow already had been found guilty of fraudulently transferring the title, through a handwritten agreement in late 2000/early 2001, of the Duane Lane home they once shared — after he borrowed $1.4 million for his business from a lending company, court papers show.
In another case, Fishman said, he issued a check from the trust to SLZ Processing Corp., a company with a business bank account in Zavidow’s mother’s name.
Neither of the women, nor is his father, accused criminally. That likely indicates that they may be willing to testify for the government.
Fishman credited investigators from the U.S. Department of Labor–Employee Benefits Security Administration; agents from the U.S. Department of Labor-Office of Labor Racketeering, and from the Internal Revenue Service‘s Criminal Investigation unit.
Prosecuting the case is Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Moscato of Fishman’s Organized Crime/Gangs Unit in Newark.
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