The leader of the Ground Zero mosque got hugely valuable tax-exempt status for a Muslim organization he founded after claiming as many as 500 of its members prayed daily in a small, one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment also listed as his wife's residence, The Post has learned.The Miniature Mayor of New York City has in the past gone out of his way to make an example of people who have broken the law. Plaxico Burress comes to mind as one example. Yet here we have people who obviously have misrepresented themselves yet the one man who champions them most is Bloomberg himself.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf sought "church status" -- an official IRS term for a house of worship of any religion -- for the American Sufi Muslim Association, or ASMA, in 1998. The feds granted the request.
"Church status" is more than just an exemption -- it means never having to pay taxes, file returns or reveal the sources of a congregation's money or how it's spent, according to the Washington-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, which discovered the group's startling claims on the IRS form it filed seeking the special status.
On that form, the organization said it held services at 201 W. 85th St.
That's a 17-story apartment building with no public space big enough to accommodate the 450 to 500 worshippers the group claimed regularly showed up five times a day to pray.
There's no indication ASMA or any of its officers rented space in the building other than the apartment, which the Investigative Project says is only 800 square feet.
A year earlier, the imam's wife, Daisy Kahn, had been named as an ASMA director in incorporation papers.
In those papers, she stated the 10th-floor apartment was her legal residence.
What have they got on him?
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