A well-connected kosher slaughterhouse king convicted of fraud at his Iowa plant has rustled up a herd of New York politicians to try to win him a reduced sentence

The prominent Lubavitcher Jew from Brooklyn, Sholom Rubashkin, has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for 86 counts of financial crimes as well as lying on the witness stand. Yet the disgraced Jewish businessman has friends in high places, including Reps. Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Eliot Engel, Carolyn McCarthy, Edolphus Towns, Carolyn Maloney, Steve Israel and Yvette Clarke, who have lobbied for a review of his case. Rubashkin has also enlisted more than 30 other lawmakers from New Jersey to California to voice outrage, along with several former U.S. attorneys general. The head of the Democratic National Committee, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, used part of her time at a recent hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder to remind him to review Rubashkin's sentence. Rubashkin is a member of a large and influential Hasidic Jewish family that ran the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse, Agriprocessor, sending turkey, chicken and beef across the country. The Brooklyn businessman was at the pinnacle of the lucrative kosher food world, and through business and marriage is connected to huge swaths of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish community, a reliable and sometimes pivotal voting bloc. Rubashkin was arrested in October 2008, five months after the Department of Justice and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raided his Iowa plant and arrested nearly 400 illegal immigrants. An Iowa federal jury found him guilty of a $26 million financial scheme of inflating accounts and laundering money.