PM's prison pizza provider paroled

During his incarceration for fraud, Oren Avraham once ordered a dinner of 40 pies for Netanyahu using a stolen credit card number

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When Israel’s “No. 1 con man,” Oren Avraham, was released from prison on Wednesday, three years ahead of schedule, he said that he would only buy pizza in person and only pay in cash.

No doubt this comes as a relief to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who once was the recipient of 40 pizzas ordered by Avraham and charged to a credit card number stolen from a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office.

“I spoiled them with olive toppings and Pepsis,” Avraham jokingly told the Yedioth Ahronoth daily upon his release.

Avraham, 40, was sent to jail in 1999 after being convicted of several counts of fraud. He had made a career of obtaining other peoples’ credit card numbers over the telephone from banks, including those of some of the judges who had sentenced him in the past.

During the 13 years that he was incarcerated, three fewer than his sentence, at the Hadarim Prison near Netanya, Avraham continued to put his telephone skills to use. In 2009, he called from his cell bloc the security investigator of one of the credit card companies that he had been accused of defrauding. He introduced himself as a police officer from the Tel Aviv fraud division and attempted to get details on the case against him.

He also apparently had some fun, sending pizzas to a number of officials, ambulance crews and fire trucks to judges’ homes, and escort girls to other targets.

In 2010 he was accused of making phone calls from the prison to the prime minister’s former housekeeper Lilian Peretz, threatening to kill her and her family if she continued her lawsuit against the prime minister’s wife, Sara. Peretz did not drop the charges.

Upon his release on Wednesday, Avraham promised that his life of crime was behind him. “I have stopped the nonsense,” he told reporters. “I intend to go straight and to get a job.” Avraham, who will live with his mother for now, also said that he regretted the crimes he committed in the past.