Kosher king Aaron Rubashkin, a man of biblical mien, almost never grants interviews. To find him, you must journey deep into the heart of Brooklyn to 14th Avenue, in a neighborhood called Borough Park. There, amid a sea of bearded men in dark hats and yarmulkes sauntering past synagogues, kosher restaurants, and storefronts lettered in Hebrew, you’ll come to a three-story beige-brick building. The bottom floor, marked by a low, worn awning, houses a compact butcher shop that at the moment is in the midst of an afternoon lull. Two butchers rattle around in the back; a cold case before me, bathed in fluorescent lights, is stuffed with shrink-wrapped kosher steaks, pastrami, and chicken. The place seems a planet or two away from Whole Foods.

Both shop and building belong to Rubashkin, the eightysomething family patriarch and a high-profile member of a sect of Hasidic Jews known as Chabad-Lubavitch. He is the founder of a meatpacking empire that sprawls from the streets of Brooklyn to the plains of the Midwest and beyond. Rubashkin’s kosher products retail all over America in chains like Wal-Mart and Trader Joe’s; they have made him rich, and within the cloistered world of the Hasidim, have brought him a kind of fame. Rubashkin, a Russian immigrant who fled Soviet totalitarianism in the early years of the cold war, is a pioneer, having done for American kosher meat and poultry in recent times what two German immigrants named Anheuser and Busch did for beer in the 19th century.

More than 20 years ago, Rubashkin began toying with the notion of taking the kosher butcher shop from the neighborhood to the nation by applying the strict rules of kosher slaughter to the methods of modern mass production. Kosher hot dogs and chicken had already found their way to the mass market, but nobody was producing steaks, lamb, or poultry in one place on a national scale. Outside of major urban centers, a Jew trying to keep kosher was pretty much out of luck. Thus Rubashkin, say his admirers, saw not only a lucrative business opportunity but also a chance to help all Jews be more observant. The word Hasid, from the Hebrew hasidh, translates as pious, and to those in Rubashkin’s religious circle, his business instincts had rendered him both a successful and a pious man.

It’s a nice story line, as far as it goes. To accomplish his dream, Rubashkin, himself a rabbi, in 1987 ventured far from Brooklyn to a shuttered meatpacking plant in a postcard-perfect Midwestern town called Postville, in the northeastern corner of Iowa. He retooled and refurbished the plant and, lacking sufficient local labor in those first years, recruited a large workforce, including Lubavitch Jews from Brooklyn and other urban centers. He helped save Postville from the big-box retail invasion that has killed off the Main Streets of so many American small towns. Rubashkin also provided jobs for immigrants of many stripes and gave his company a grand corporate name: Agriprocessors.

But when, on a day in early August, I head upstairs from the Brooklyn butcher shop and into the office that Rubashkin has occupied for more than 50 years, I catch the patriarch in an agitated mood. He has not talked much to the press recently, and especially not since the events of three months before, when Agriprocessors’ story took a dark and troubling turn. Physically, Rubashkin is imposing: heavyset, with a wizard’s white beard; dark, piercing eyes; and an imperious voice. We haven’t been talking long before he is pounding his desk, inveighing in a rising tone against those who have leveled all manner of allegations against Agriprocessors and criminal charges against some of its workers and managers. “It’s a shanda, a shame…what happened in Postville,” he says, leaning forward and mixing Yiddish with English, as he does throughout our conversation. “A hurricane came and destroyed everything.”

The hurricane blew through on May 12, and with it, Rubashkin’s critics say, went any notion that he is a pious man or that he runs an ethical company. Agriprocessors was subjected to one of the largest single-site immigration raids in U.S. history. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as a slew of other federal agencies, descended on the Postville facility with the fanfare of an organized-crime bust. I.C.E. rounded up 398 laborers, most of them Mexicans and Guatemalans possessing false documents. Within days, 297 of them had pleaded guilty to immigration violations and faced deportation and, in some cases, prison terms. The raid caused a temporary plant closure and, in the weeks that followed, shut down most of Agriprocessors’ kosher-beef production and half of its kosher-chicken output. Before I.C.E.’s foray, Agriprocessors had produced about 60 percent of America’s kosher beef and 40 percent of its kosher chicken for a market of 11 million customers—including large numbers of Muslims and health-conscious non-Jews—with sales of some $10.5 billion annually. The disruption caused by the raid had ominous implications for regional cattle producers, since Agriprocessors buys, wholesale, an estimated $100 million worth of beef a year.