Bar-Yohai

Hagai Felician’s lawyer, Moshe Yohai, sheds light on the Israel Police’s failures and how his client from the Bar Noar case was finally acquitted.

By AMIR ZOHAR
Hagai Felician’s lawyer, Moshe Yohai, sheds light on the Israel Police’s failures and how his client from the Bar Noar case was finally acquitted (photo credit: ARIEL BESOR)
Hagai Felician’s lawyer, Moshe Yohai, sheds light on the Israel Police’s failures and how his client from the Bar Noar case was finally acquitted
(photo credit: ARIEL BESOR)
"One night around 11, while I was sitting in my living room watching the Manchester derby, I heard three loud booms, then a different sound,” recalls Moshe Yohai.
“I thought it was probably kids setting off firecrackers. But then my wife’s car alarm began beeping, so I went outside to turn it off and then came back in the house. But something seemed odd, and I went back outside.
That’s when I noticed the three bullet holes in the front right side of my car.
I immediately called the police, and when they arrived, they also found a firecracker in my kids’ toy box. So my wife took the kids, left Hod Hasharon and went to live with her parents in Petah Tikva.”
Yohai, 40, is the attorney for Hagai Felician, the suspect in the 2009 Bar Noar double murder case. The shooting in Tel Aviv's Bar Noar gay youth center claimed the lives of 26-year-old Nir Katz of Givatayim and 17-year-old Liz Troubishi from Holon, and wounded 11 others. Yohai is a well-respected independent criminal defense attorney who over the past decade has represented numerous members of crime organizations.
In an effort to find the culprit who shot at Yohai’s car, the police focused on individuals connected to Zohar Hankishayev, the state’s witness in the Bar Noar case. A known offender, Hankishayev belongs to a group of homosexual partygoers who engage in criminal activity – a group the police have dubbed the First Pink Crime Organization.
However, the police decided to rule out this line of investigation after two juvenile delinquents from Lod were arrested last week. According to a senior official in the police’s Central District, Yohai knows who the culprit is, but is not making an official complaint due to his business relationships with individuals in the crime world.
“They think that since I’m a criminal lawyer with connections, I have a wild lifestyle and that I’m involved in shady deals with my clients,” Yohai says.
“The criminals respect me because I know how to talk with them and I treat them like regular clients. But I am always working with them as their lawyer, and I never cross the line. I am a family man with a wife and kids who lives in Hod Hasharon.”
He met the Felician family from Pardess Katz five years ago when he represented Hagai’s brother, Ya’acov, in a case involving extortion and fraud in the gambling industry, connected with the Avi Ruhan crime organization. The case opened when Eyal Salhov – a former underworld figure who became a police informant – was murdered.
Hankishayev was a neighbor and extremely close friend of the Felician family. Shortly before the wave of arrests of Ruhan associates, Ya’acov Felician introduced Yohai to Hankishayev, who had been arrested on a property felony. The attorney was successful at getting Hankishayev off the hook, so he hired Yohai to represent his crime organization. Yohai and Ya’acov Felician never imagined that Hankishayev would attempt to sell investigators evidence that proved Felician had killed Salhov.
The relationship between Hankishayev and the police came to light in two segments on the TV show Uvda (Fact) with Ilana Dayan. The first segment was broadcast in 2009. Hankishayev contacted Uvda from jail and told them that the police refused to believe him that Ya’acov Felician was the person who had murdered Salhov. This “anonymous” information helped corroborate the Uvda investigation of the police’s failure to uncover who had really committed the murder.
The second Uvda investigation took place in 2013, when Hagai Felician was charged with murder in the Bar Noar incident. The show’s Omri Assenheim asked a question that hadn’t been asked yet: How was it that Hankishayev’s testimony against Ya’acov Felician in the Salhov case had been rejected due to his being an unreliable witness, but his testimony against Hagai Felician in the Bar Noar case was deemed acceptable? The police and the prosecution ignored that paradox, which cast a shadow of doubt on the charges against Hagai Felician, but the Felician family was optimistic when these findings came to light.
“Ya’acov told me that his family approached Rabbi Alkrief from Bnei Brak and gave him a list of lawyers whom they were considering hiring to represent Hagai. [Attorney] Moshe Sherman’s and my name both appeared on the list. Ya’acov recalls the rabbi saying, ‘Moshe will save Hagai!’ and also, ‘One Moshe will leave, and a second one will come. Not the old Moshe, but the new one.’ That’s how I ended up working on the Bar Noar case.”
Over the years, Yohai has represented members of the Ruhan, Hariri-Ayat, Alperon, Miyara and Domrani families – all big names in Israeli organized crime. He is currently defending a client from the Musli family crime organization in a murder case.
In his younger days, Yohai served in a secret combat unit in the IDF.
“For three years, I moved between Lebanon, Gaza and Judea and Samaria. I only went home about once a month,” he says.
After he finished his military service, he studied criminology at Bar-Ilan University.
“Since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated by the world of crime. I’ve always been interested in understanding how criminals’ minds work. I loved reading about [underworld figure] Shmaya Angel and his gang.”
He says that he deliberated for a long time before accepting the Bar Noar case. “I saw that the entire country stood against Hagai Felician, and it looked like the case against Hagai was cut and dried. As a defense attorney, I was worried that losing the case would give me a bad name. On the other hand, I was excited by the challenge. I consulted with a few judges, lawyers and criminals. Until I made up my mind, all I could think about day and night was: Would I succeed in getting Hagai Felician acquitted?” In the end, he recalls, two things helped him decide to take the case.
“The first was that when I would meet with Hagai, he would tell me over and over, ‘Moshe, I can’t believe this is happening to me – I didn’t do it.’ If Hagai had admitted to me that he was guilty and had described to me what had happened, I don’t think I would have taken the case. Secondly something bothered me about how the police had arrested Hagai and the others so quickly, allegedly due to concern for the state’s witness’s safety. We now know that this was a complete fabrication – the state’s witness had never even been threatened. At one point, the investigators admitted to me that they hadn’t had time to gather the necessary evidence, and that they were far from having a solid case.
“I finally decided to take the case after I finished reading all the material and realized how many mistakes and oversights the police had made. I just couldn’t believe that this was the Israel Police’s flagship case. Even if at that point Hagai had broken down and confessed, I still wouldn’t have thought he did it.”
However, he continues, “a new concern began brewing in my mind – now that I knew this case wasn’t a lost cause, I began worrying what would happen if I didn’t win. Nonetheless, from the moment I took on the case, I decided to broadcast a feeling of confidence that we would prevail.”
Addressing the question of why the police ignored the state’s witness’s previous police dealings, Yohai states, “The answer is that we are living in dark times – the police know about all the lies, intrigues and manipulations, but decide to keep this information confidential. They don’t believe the public has a right to know anything.
The commander of the Central Unit, Gadi Eshed, told his staff and the prosecution: ‘We hit the jackpot! This is an incredible story about an underage boy who was raped and a group of gay punks from Pardess Katz who wanted revenge. Bingo!’ So without even bothering to verify any of the details, the public security minister automatically signed the certificate of confidentiality that hid the state’s witness’s past.
“So, tell me,” he goes on, “why do they think that the lawyer of a defendant in a murder case shouldn’t be shown these documents? Was Omri Assenheim of Uvda the correct person to inform me about this? What would have happened if Hankishayev hadn’t spoken with Assenheim? Why would they rely on such an unreliable witness in the first place, and then make it even worse by keeping this information from the defense and the court?” According to Yohai, “it’s exactly because of failures like those in the Bar Noar case that we must immediately put a stop to this confidential intelligence legislation. This is a disastrous law that would keep Israel in the dark ages. Hagai Felician is only 20 years old, and he was facing two life sentences plus 100 years. That’s not a short amount of time.”
Translated by Hannah Hochner.


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