'FAUX FIR IS IN
Christmas-tree fraud at big stores: suit
The fir is flying in federal court. Evergreen East, a Wisconsinbased Christmas tree cooperative that bills itself as “New York’s finest Christmas tree sellers,” alleges Home Depot, Whole Foods and their supplier conspired to scam Big Apple tree buyers by labeling cheaper Canadian Balsam firs as pricey Fraser firs — the Cadillac of conifers, according to court papers.
Fraser firs are famous for the two-tone color of their needles, which are dark green on top with a silver underside.
The Manhattan federal court complaint alleges that during the 2019 Christmas season, the retailers “sold potentially hundreds of thousands of Balsam Fir trees which they intentionally mislabeled and falsely advertised as Fraser Fir trees.”
The Frasers are sold on Manhattan sidewalks by Evergreen’s mom-and-pop-shop clients for upwards of $179 for a 6-footer and $699 for a 12-footer.
The firs being sold by the big retailers — which came from North Carolina-based supplier Bottomley Evergreen — start at just $80 for a 6-footer, said Evergreen East president Kevin Hammer, 64.
He said the faux firs crippled the competition — and cheated unsuspecting tree shoppers.
“I’ve been doing this for 47 years. We are not a pimple on Bottomley’s ass,” the Bensonhurst-bred Hammer raged to The Post. “We are a cooperative that has been selling trees retail exclusively in New York City since 1974.”
Hammer said New Yorkers want what they pay for.
“Home Depot is not Canal Street where you buy a fake Gucci bag. People go in there and see a tree from Canada and [don’t realize] it’s second- or third-rate,” he said.
Bottomley Evergreen boasts that its farms are located “in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina and western part of Virginia” and they have been “providing top-quality Fraser Fir Christmas trees” since 1990.
But the complaint claims Bottomley imported 100,000 or more Canadian Balsams in 2019 “and laundered those trees via its retail partners. The defendants had knowledge that they were labeling, marketing, advertising and selling Balsam Fir trees which were falsely designated Fraser Fir.”
Hammer says Bottomley made Home Depot and Whole Foods an “accomplice to a scam.”
The lawsuit, filed in January, alleges that on Dec. 16, 2019, Home Depot “was put on written notice that it was selling falsely labeled Bottomley Christmas Trees.”
Home Depot “took no prompt remediative efforts” to stop the fir fraud, the suit charges, and “continued selling counterfeit trees for days, and likely for the entire selling season.”
The “willful false advertising” suit seeks unspecified damages and for the defendants to “account for every Christmas tree they sold in 2019 labeled or sold as a Fraser Fir.” Evergreen wants whatever profit was made “for each tree sold which the defendants cannot prove was actually a Fraser Fir.”
Home Depot corporate spokeswoman Margaret Watters Smith called the Christmas kerfuffle “an isolated labeling error.”
“Once we learned of it, we worked with the supplier to verify proper tagging on future deliveries,” she said.
Attorneys for Whole Foods and Bottomley have filed motions to dismiss, arguing there’s no proof “that the purported mislabeling of trees influenced the purchasing decision of the public in any way.”
When Elie Abadie was in his Upper East Side home watching the signing of the Abraham Accords — the peace treaty between the United Arab Emirates and Israel — on TV in September, he had no idea he’d be living in the UAE two months later. After all, the country had historically been so hostile to Jews that Israelis were once barred from even visiting.
But last week, he moved with his wife, Estie, to Dubai, where he is now the senior rabbi for the Jewish Council of the Emirates.
“I realized this is the place to be,” Abadie, 59, told The Post from his Dubai penthouse overlooking the Palm Jumeirah, a glitzy artificial island studded with luxury skyscrapers.
The peace treaty with Israel has paved the way for the UAE’s known Jews — numbering around 300 or so, according to Abadie — to “come out of the shadows and proudly display their Jewishness.”
Now, said the former rabbi of the Edmond J. Safra Synagogue on the Upper East Side, who proudly wears his kippah and traditional black rabbinical hat on the streets of Dubai, “There’s definitely curiosity and interest in Jews: who they are, what they are. Someone [recently] wanted to take a picture with a friend who had a kippah.”
He predicts an influx of 5,000 Jewish newcomers in the next three years.
It’s a long way from what Jean Candiotte and her husband, Barry Greenberg, experienced when they first moved to Dubai in 2014 for her media job.
“Being Jewish was something we kept extremely private,” said Candiotte, adding that they worshipped in a secret location out of fear of anti-Semitism and intolerance. “We were very much in the shadows.”
They left in 2017, moving to London and then New York City with no intention of going back to the Emirates, but when His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE, announced 2019 as the Year of Tolerance — encouraging citizens to be accepting of other cultures — the couple decided to return to Dubai.
“We saw a historic opportunity here,” said Greenberg, a lawyer.
Before the accords, he was prohibited from doing business with anyone in Israel — even dialing direct was impossible.
“At the bookstore, you wouldn’t find books about Israel. It was as if the country didn’t exist,” he said. “Things are changing and changing for the better.”
Abadie, who is Orthodox and lived in New York City for 40 years, said Dubai also offers welcome changes from his hometown.
“You don’t see a cigarette butt or garbage bag on the street or a bubble gum stuck to the pavement,” he said, noting there’s no homeless on the streets of Dubai. “The situation in NYChas been dismal in the last several months.
“Many of my community members told me, ‘Keep us in mind, and if there’s a need for us to escape where we are, please make a beachhead for us,’ ” he added. “That’s very revealing for members of my community, who in their wildest dreams wouldn’t [have thought] it possible to come to the Middle East.”
Now Abadie, who’s also a gastroenterologist, enjoys kosher food at a restaurant in the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and eagerly awaits 2022’s much-heralded Abrahamic Family House, a compound in Abu Dhabi that will include places of worship for followers of Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Candiotte noted that some Emirati policies, like not getting drunk in public or insulting others on social media, took her aback when she first arrived.
“As an American, it’s weird, but on the other side, we see the benefits,” she said. “Maybe it’s good not to get so angry [on social media]. It’s a waste of time.”
Besides, she said, “having a front-row seat to the tolerance movement is a privilege.”