The Elliot Briody Saga keeps getting worse.
During the early 2000s Second Intifada, foreign investment in Israel completely dried up due to high geopolitical risks.
Bucking global trends, American venture capitalist Elliott Broidy co-founded Markstone Capital Partners. He raised a massive $800M fund earmarked specifically for Israeli companies, making it the largest private equity fund in Israel at the time.
Benjamin Netanyahu—then serving as Israel's Finance Minister—personally and publicly welcomed the move, celebrating it as a profound vote of confidence in Israel’s economic resilience.
But the foundation of the fund was built on corruption.
In 2009, a major "pay-to-play" scandal erupted. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo revealed that Broidy had paid nearly $1M in illegal gifts, travel, and bribes to top officials in the NY State Comptroller’s office.
In exchange for those bribes, the NY State Common Retirement Fund had funneled a staggering $250M of public pension money into Markstone.
The fallout was catastrophic:
Broidy pleaded guilty to a felony, resigned from Markstone, and paid $18M in restitution.
Stripped of leadership and deeply toxic, Markstone suffered devastating losses on major Israeli acquisitions and entered insolvency by 2014.
Though Broidy later rebuilt his status as a top GOP fundraiser and secured a presidential pardon in 2021 for a separate lobbying scandal, the Markstone collapse remains one of the most infamous financial and political scandals bridging Wall Street and Jerusalem.