Newsday
November 5, 2011
John Riley
Eugene Goldstein went for a wedding and ended up at a funeral.
It was June 2003. Goldstein and his wife, Lorraine, lifelong residents of Merrick and Plainview, had gone to Israel for their grandson’s wedding. But on the road to a wedding dinner in Jerusalem, two gunmen — Hamas would later take credit — opened fire with automatic weapons on their Volkswagen.
They were both badly wounded. But they were lucky. They survived. Their son, Howard, the father of the groom, was also in the car. He did not.
“It was a gruesome sight,” remembers Goldstein. “He was laying slumped over. . . . Blood was all over. He was dead.”
Eight years later, those emotional events have pushed Goldstein into a central role in a novel strategy for attacking terrorism. He is one of the original plaintiffs suing three international banks for allegedly providing financial services to Hamas and other groups responsible for violence in Israel and the West Bank.
The cases, filed in federal court in Brooklyn starting in 2004, now encompass hundreds of Americans seeking multimillion-dollar damages from Amman, Jordan-based Arab Bank, Britain’s NatWest and France’s Credit Lyonnais for the attacks. A key appeals court showdown in the Arab Bank case is scheduled for later this year, with a trial likely next year that could produce a precedent-setting verdict…
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