The actual processing plant is a stand-alone building about 100 yards downwind from Agriprocessors’ administrative offices. The stench is oppressive from 50 yards away. As we enter the slaughterhouse, Getzel is quick to point out some post-raid improvements, including a recently posted sign that displays an “employee tip line,” a phone number workers can call to anony­mously report safety and health violations or other abuses to an outside private contractor. “A corporate company would have had this sort of thing on day one,” Getzel says. “A butcher shop doesn’t think about these kinds of things.” Later, he tells me, Agriprocessors and its managers “didn’t and don’t have the level of sophistication of a corporation.”

No slaughterhouse is pleasant. Inside, this one is cold and deafening, full of the rumble and clank of hooks, conveyor belts, and other meat-moving machinery. But at least to my untrained eye, this one seems as clean as any operation that’s dedicated to killing, disemboweling, and processing animals can be. Blood and entrails are a given, but at the end of the day the entire plant is washed down with high-pressure water hoses and sanitized. In most slaughterhouses, the killing is mechanized with electric stunners and bolt guns; kosher law requires that it be done by hand, by a rabbi with a knife.

I’m taken into the inner sanctum of the beef line, then onto the kill floor. Here, cattle are herded one by one into a mechanical metal pen where their necks are secured in a holding device. The pen flips over, putting the cattle on their backs, their throats exposed. A rabbi in a protective smock, his face covered in what looks like a police riot mask, steps forward with a knife and makes a swift cut. Blood splatters everywhere. The pen rotates again, and the cattle are dumped out onto the floor. It seems to take them 30 seconds to a minute to die. A second rabbi inspects the blade of the ritual knife after each kill to make sure it remains unblemished. This is solemn, tedious, and, to all appearances, hellish work. At full capacity, 500 head of cattle pass through here each day.

The dead animals are then whisked, dangling from hooks, to the cutting department, where the real processing begins. While rabbis also oversee the curing of the beef and the inspections that certify it as kosher, Jews make up less than 10 percent of Agriprocessors’ total workforce; none of them have complained to authorities about poor treatment. The rest of the dirty work is mostly in the hands of predominantly immigrant workers. With turnover high even in well-run slaughterhouses, finding the right people to fill these low-wage, physically demanding jobs is a constant struggle. The pressure has steadily increased with the company’s growth: Its workforce, now about 800, has doubled since 2003.

Later, I meet with Chaim Abrahams, the plant’s purchasing manager, in his small, cluttered office in the administrative building. Abrahams, a stern man with reddish hair and a thick beard, is explaining to me why charges against the company don’t add up. “Think about what a miserable worker can do to your business,” he says. “If you keep on mistreating people, how can you plan your next stage of growth? Nobody’s going to come work for you.” He asserts that Agriprocessors never pressured employees to lie about their ages and that it would not be “normal” for employees to work more than 10 hours a day. I go to see Heshy, another of Rubashkin’s sons, who has been a vice president at Agriprocessors since 1989. He flatly denies that Agriprocessors was aware that it was hiring underage workers. “If you come with a document that says you’re 18, you’re qualified. And if you come with a document that says you’re 18, and you’re only 16, how are we to know? For heaven’s sake!”

Postville has had an intermittently uneasy relationship with Agriprocessors, which operates one other slaughterhouse, in Gordon, Nebraska (which, unlike Postville’s, has stayed out of the headlines). The influx of Orthodox Jews, who were criticized at first for being standoffish, along with large numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants, roiled this meat-and-potatoes town for a while, although tensions seem to have worked themselves out over time. Most area residents now accept that although the company has changed the character of Postville, it is an economic asset. After the raid, I spoke with Mayor Robert Penrod, who told me that Agriprocessors, as the town’s largest employer, is “very well appreciated.”

But many townspeople have been put off by the steady stream of negative headlines, and the company won no fans when, in 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency fined it $600,000 for dumping wastewater in the Postville sewer system. Moreover, that same year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture hit Agriprocessors with 250 health and safety violations—a number that rose to 389 in 2008, according to U.S.D.A. documents. (Some of the violations, the U.S.D.A. says, have been successfully appealed by the company.) Agriprocessors, one of its own managers told me, has also been subjected to 15 Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspections over a 15-year period, far above the industry average.

Those who serve the immigrant community consider the company a sweatshop that methodically takes advantage of its most vulnerable workers. Sonia Parras Konrad, an Iowa attorney representing many former Agriprocessors employees in their immigration cases—among them, she claims, 27 minors—says extensive discussions with her clients have convinced her that the company, even if it didn’t knowingly hire underage workers, saw the value of having juveniles on the payroll. “This, in my opinion, was a calculated cost. I think they absolutely knew what employees were going through. The children were oftentimes subjected to harsh conditions, and they didn’t complain as much as adults.”

If it was indeed a calculated cost, it may prove vastly expensive to Agriprocessors and its top managers. If convicted, Aaron and Sholom Rubashkin face fines of up to $625 and jail terms of up to 30 days for each of the 9,311 ­underage-worker violations alleged by the state. Meanwhile, the two Agriprocessors H.R. officials charged with federal felonies face both prison time and fines ranging from $250,000 to $500,000.

Back in Brooklyn, Rubashkin and his followers have been circling the wagons. They have moved on two fronts to try to quiet some of the criticism. First, just before the raid, they brought in a new head of safety, Trent Gorton, a former Lockheed Martin operations manager, who they say has been given wide authority to revamp the company’s health and safety programs. When I speak to Gorton, he acknowledges that when he arrived, “it was truly a troubled company from a health and safety level.” Since then, he says, Agriprocessors has aggressively pursued policies needed to bring the company up to industry “best practices” and not simply OSHA compliance.

Second, Agriprocessors announced that Aaron Rubashkin would be replaced as C.E.O.—a condition set forth by the Orthodox Union in order for the company to retain its kosher certification. Rubashkin remains defiant. “People don’t put in so much effort and so much money and the best years of their lives to do something of the stupidity that we are accused,” he tells me. “This plant is not run by myself, by one person. It’s a big place.” As for workers using false documents, he says, “Why don’t they go to any section in Manhattan, examine every restaurant? Who works in the restaurant? Everything is documented? With me, everything was documented! But they say the documents are not real. Did I make the documents? I’m selling documents?”