But workforce and production losses were soon to be the least of Rubashkin’s problems. Days before the raid, an I.C.E. senior special agent filed an affidavit in a nearby Iowa federal district court. The affidavit, which was made public, painted a withering portrait of the Postville plant as a Dickensian enterprise that exploited vulnerable immigrant workers—cheating them out of fair wages, forcing them to work excessive hours and, worse, putting them under the supervision of overseers who verbally abused them. Other allegations in the affidavit—for instance, that workers were threatened with firing or arduous work schedules if they didn’t buy cars from supervisors—verged on the bizarre. More damning, however, was a suggestion in the affidavit that Agriprocessors had hired underage workers. Employees would later tell me that some plant workers were as young as 13 and had been exposed to dangerous machinery, were harassed by supervisors, and made to work inhumane hours.

Just before I visited Rubashkin, the Iowa Division of Labor Services announced the conclusion of its child-­labor investigation, which found that the company had employed 57 underage workers at the plant around the time of the raid. This finding was turned over to the Iowa attorney general for prosecution. Meanwhile, religious groups— including Jewish organizations—and immigrant-rights activists expressed outrage; one local Catholic priest accused the company of perpetrating a “systemic evil.” During a presidential campaign stop in Davenport, Iowa, Barack Obama even got into the act, wondering about the ethics of the company: “They have kids in there wielding buzz saws and cleavers? It’s ridiculous.”

Before I start to quiz Rubashkin about these matters, though, I ask him to fill me in on his history. He’s seated at his heavy wooden desk in what amounts to Agriprocessors’ corporate headquarters. Two secretaries share a one-room suite outside his office; save for a few family members puttering around filing cabinets, this is the extent of his Brooklyn support staff. On the walls all around him hang portraits of the last religious leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, a charismatic Ukrainian immigrant known to his followers as the Rebbe, who lived and preached in Brooklyn. Schneerson died in 1994 without a successor, but Lubavitchers—notable among Jewish sects for their aggressive proselytizing on behalf of Orthodox Judaism—believe that he continues to guide them spiritually.

Sharing the wall behind the desk is a picture of Rubashkin with a more secular leader, Iowa Senator Charles Grassley. Rubashkin makes no bones about his politics. He fled the Soviet Union just after World War II, settling in Paris for a time after sojourns in Poland and the former Czechoslovakia. But for Rubashkin, even Paris was too close to the Soviets’ “red paradise,” as he scornfully describes it, and he soon moved to the U.S.

His disdain for the U.S.S.R. seems to have left him wary of left-wing organizations. He is particularly critical of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which tried unsuccessfully to organize at Agriprocessors. He refers to it as “our enemy.” He and his family are regular contributors to Republican causes and have donated tens of thousands of dollars in the past decade to politicians like Senator Grassley and the Republican National Committee.

Talking to Rubashkin and those in his inner circle, an explanation of the recent unpleasant events slowly emerges: that Agriprocessors has grown exponentially while its management has remained rooted in a kind of naive, family-butcher-shop mentality, and that furthermore, the company never knowingly hired underage workers and had no interest in doing so. Rubashkin tells me that he is hardly the monster his critics make him out to be. He says his business life is inseparable from his religious one. “Divine providence wanted me to be a butcher,” he says. Founding Agriprocessors, he goes on, was as much a religious calling as a business one: “This is the belief of my Rebbe…the belief of my fellow Hasidim, that we are supposed to help any Jew be an observant Jew, in an honest and truthful way.”

Perhaps. But Agriprocessors, as it turns out, has a less than pristine record of regulatory compliance. And in early September, less than three weeks after I spoke with Rubashkin, Iowa’s attorney general filed charges alleging 9,311 violations of child-labor law against Rubashkin and his 48-year-old son Sholom—who, until the raid, oversaw the day-to-day operation of the Postville plant—as well as identical charges against three managers in Agriprocessors’ Postville human resources office. (All have entered pleas of not guilty.) On the same day, I.C.E. agents arrested two of those human-resources managers on felony charges: one for allegedly faking H.R. documents to cover up the hiring of undocumented workers and abetting identity theft, the other for harboring and aiding undocumented aliens, some of them minors. (The managers have pleaded not guilty to these charges also.)

Meanwhile, Agriprocessors faces an ongoing I.C.E. investigation, while the Orthodox Union, a Jewish group that is the country’s largest kosher-meat certifier, threatened to revoke the company’s kosher certification. And everywhere I went in Postville, former employees and their advocates described a corporate culture that they said seemed guided less by religion than by greed, deception, and hostility.

Postville, founded in 1873 by German and Norwegian pioneers, rises out of a sea of corn about 35 miles west-northwest of the Mississippi River. Lawler, a broad main street, cuts through the center of town, which is surrounded by neighborhoods of modest wood-frame houses, most with flagpoles, front porches, and small backyards. The downtown is anchored by the Postville Bakery, a reliable diner and gossip-trading post; John’s Hardware, owned by the same John who owns John’s Appliance, across the street; and a bar called Club 51.