PART 3 :RED MAFIYA: HOW THE RUSSIAN MOB HAS INVADED AMERICA...OPERATION RED DAISY & RED TIDE

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OPERATION RED DAISY 

One after another, a parade of stretch limousines pulled up in front of an unremarkable two-story building squatting on the corner of a blighted stretch of Coney Island Avenue. Out of each stepped a massive Russian in a tuxedo, more often than not accompanied by a slender blonde in a low-cut gold lamé evening gown. As they entered the etched brown metal doors, they were ushered into another world, a world that resembled nothing so much as the set of a B movie made six thousand miles away. 

Black-and-brown imported Italian marble covered the floor of the foyer where a hand-painted mural of St. Petersburg’s skyline led arriving guests into a cavernous nightclub and to tables covered with rose-colored tablecloths laden with slabs of sable, skewers of beef, and ice-cold bottles of Stoly's. As multicolored lasers crisscrossed the room, Joseph Kobzon, a renowned Russian pop star, crooned Top 40 tunes from the motherland and, for the honored guests that evening, Sinatra ballads. 

This was Rasputin, the Winter Palace of Brooklyn. 

Off to the side stood two barrel-chested men, beaming, almost giddy. For the Zilber brothers, Vladimir, thirty-two, and Alex, thirty-four, everything had led up to this June 1992 gala opening. They had arrived in Brooklyn as penniless Jewish refugees from Odessa thirteen years earlier. Their father was a foreman in a New Jersey pillow factory, their mother a seamstress there. The boys, however, had quickly realized that the honest, hardworking immigrant was a chump game; they had made more than their parents ever dreamed possible from gasoline bootlegging, money laundering, and casinos and aluminum factories in the former Soviet Union. The Zilber brothers—Vladimir as informal head of U.S. operations, Alex as their Russian liaison—had become dons in the Brighton Beach mob; this was their Russian cotillion. 

When the Zilber's took their place at the head table where a row of dark-suited Italian-Americans, all members of the Genovese crime family, peered across nearly empty vodka bottles at an equal number of hard-faced Russians — it symbolized a new era in organized crime in America. The Russians had always loved films about the American Mafia and took great pains to emulate their predecessors’sense of sartorial style. But on this night, the two groups had more in common than a taste for heavy gold chains and open collars. The Russians had finally become powerful enough to sit at the same table with the Italians. No longer semi-comic Godfather pretenders, the Russians were now arguably just as ruthless and, by many accounts, considerably wealthier than their more long established counterparts. 

The Italians were not entirely flattered by the gaudy imitation; they had warned their Russian colleagues against indulging in glitzy nightclubs that might attract the attention of the FBI and the media. (Indeed, in November 1994, the New York Times featured Rasputin in its Living Section.) Not long after Rasputin’s grand opening, investigators examined its books. The ledgers showed the restaurant had been renovated for $800,000, but according to one Genovese crime family figure, the men’s bathroom alone cost half a million dollars. In fact, more than $4 million had been spent on upgrading Rasputin. “No legit guy is gonna invest that kind of money in a restaurant,” said the Genovese source. “The Zilbers wanted a place to sit with a big cigar, and then fuck the broads that come in there. 

“The restaurant is gonna be their downfall.” The Genovese's had good reason to be concerned about the Zilber brothers’ ostentatious lifestyle. They had staked Vladimir Zilber’s gasoline bootlegging operation in exchange for a percentage of the tens of millions of dollars he made evading state and federal excise taxes. But he had gotten reckless, shaking down a team of FBI/IRS undercover agents posing as gasoline distributors in Ewing Township, New Jersey, and then, in February 1992, allegedly ordering the torching of the undercover business when they refused to pay a “mob tax.” 

On November 20, 1992, Vladimir was summoned to a meeting in Manhattan with Genovese crime family figures, who accused him of jeopardizing the business A huge man with a trip-wire personality, Zilber was not cowed. “If I go down, you go, too,” Zilber told the Italians. “I’m not going to prison.” 

“Zilber had big balls,” said the Genovese associate. “Unfortunately, he used them for brains.” 

Zilber’s sour-tempered performance only stoked the Italians’ fears. If he talked, he could implicate, among others, Daniel Pagano, a forty-two-year-old Genovese capo who not only got a penny out of every 27 cents in gasoline taxes that the Russians stole, but was also involved in the record industry, loan sharking, and gambling. (An additional penny went to Gambino capo Anthony “Fat Tony” Morelli, who delivered a weekly cut to Gambino boss John Gotti at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Social Club. The cash reeked of gasoline.) Pagano was mob royalty. His late father, Joseph, a convicted narcotics trafficker, had been fingered by Mafia snitch Joseph Valachi as a hit man for the Genovese crime family in the 1950's. 

After the acrimonious Manhattan discussions, Zilber was supposed to go to a sit-down with representatives of Pagano in Brooklyn, says a well-placed Russian mob source. According to the Genovese figure, however, on the day of the meeting, Zilber was actually heading to Brooklyn to work out the details of a new gasoline scam, which he was concealing from Pagano and Morelli. Whatever version was true, this much is known: although he often traveled with four Genovese bodyguards, Zilber was alone when he steered his father-in-law’s battered 1989 Ford Taurus south toward the FDR Drive off-ramp onto the Brooklyn Bridge during rush hour. As he approached the ramp, a car braked in front of him. Another car with four Russians pulled up alongside. A shotgun blast hit Zilber in the side of the head, blowing away his optic nerve and filling his brain with bullet fragments. If his window had been open, doctors say, Zilber would have been killed.

After the shooting, Fat Tony Morelli materialized next to Zilber’s bed in Bellevue Hospital’s intensive care unit. Morelli whispered something to the wounded Russian, and Zilber subsequently refused to talk to the police, although sources say he had recognized the trigger man. Vladimir did rant to the staff that he had been the victim of a mob hit, although the police had initially told the doctors that he was the victim of road rage. His physician noted in his medical chart that Zilber was a “delusional, paranoid schizophrenic.” Knowing better, Alex Zilber surrounded his brother’s room with round-the-clock bodyguards.

The police found the shooters’ car abandoned at South Street Seaport, a popular tourist attraction in lower Manhattan. Inside was the shotgun used to shoot Zilber, as well as a rifle, a baseball cap, and a hair band of the type that Russian gangsters fancy for their flamboyant ponytails. 

Shortly after the incident, the real reason for Zilber’s hit became clear. Through informants in the New York Police Department, the Italian Mafia had learned that federal indictments were being prepared. Zilber would be a serious liability when they were issued. “He’s lucky his head wasn’t blown off,” said the Genovese figure. “Vladimir was a loose cannon. Shutting him up was an act of survival.” Indeed, the hit could not have taken place, Russian and Italian underworld sources, as well as federal authorities, agree, if Pagano and Morelli had not sanctioned it. “The shooters would need somebody’s permission on the Italian side to kill the primary goose that was laying the golden egg,” says a federal prosecutor. 

The attempt on Zilber’s life prodded the authorities into action. On November 22, 1992, two days after the ambush on the FDR, an army of federal agents, under the code name Operation Red Daisy, fanned out across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida, with more than two hundred search warrants, confiscating evidence and freezing assets of the alleged gasoline bootleggers. After years of neglect, law enforcement had finally begun to marshal its forces and pay serious attention to the Russian threat. Operation Red Daisy would be by far its most successful foray against the Russian mob to date. 

But in general, state and federal law enforcement agencies were loath to go after Russian mobsters, instead devoting their energies to bagging Italian wiseguys, a traditional route to promotion. And because the Russian mob was mostly Jewish, it was a political hot potato, especially in the New York area, where the vast majority of refugees were being resettled by Jewish welfare agencies. As for the New York City Police Department, it had almost no Russian-speaking cops, and even fewer reliable informants in the Russian émigré community. For years, the N.Y.P.D’s intelligence unit couldn’t find a single detective to monitor the Russian mob, because many cops were scared. “The Russians are just as crazy as the Jamaican drug gangs,” a Ukrainian-speaking detective, who declined to work the Russian beat, told me in 1992. “They won’t hesitate to go after a cop’s family.” 

The N.Y.P.D was apparently unaware of the existence of the Russian mob until December 7, 1982, when detectives were summoned to a luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s East 49th Street, near the United Nations. There they found a middle-aged man sprawled across a bed on his back—his arms outstretched, feet dangling over the edge and touching the floor, his eyes wide open. At first glance, lead detective Barry Drubin, a gruff police veteran, believed the deceased was a heart attack victim. The body lay in peaceful repose. There were no signs of a forced entry or struggle, and the dead man was still carrying his wallet and wearing an expensive gold watch and a black leather jacket. When Drubin looked more closely, however, he noticed that the vessels in one eye had burst, filling it with a dollop of blood. Drubin gently raised the man’s head and saw that blood had coagulated in the back of the man’s hair. There was no blood on the bed. The victim had been shot once, execution-style, at close range above the right ear at the hairline with a .25 caliber handgun. “We traced the bullet hole from the back of the head to the entry wound,” Drubin says. “It was a professional hit.” 

Drubin’s men searched the three-room apartment, which was decorated with expensive artwork. Nothing appeared to be disturbed or missing and they turned up no shell casings or suspicious fingerprints. A large, open attache case in the living room was empty, save for a jeweler’s loupe, a magnifying lens used to examine gems. The briefcase was subsequently checked for trace elements of drugs, but the tests were negative. Inside a credenza in the den, the detectives found $50,000 wrapped in cellophane, tucked away next to a VCR and an extensive video porn collection. A small amount of recreational hash was nearby. 

The victim was soon identified as forty-nine-year-old Yuri Brokhin—the man with whom Monya Elson had first teamed up with when he arrived in Brighton Beach, and with whom he had enjoyed a great deal of success robbing and smuggling precious gems. But as Drubin soon discovered, Brokhin had been leading a paradoxical double life. Most of the world knew him as a prominent Russian Jewish dissident, author, and filmmaker, who had immigrated to the United States with his wife, Tanya, on November 16, 1972. He lived in an expensive apartment on Manhattan’s East Side, bought a small country home on Long Island, and frequently treated friends to dinner at Elaine’s, a famous hangout for the city’s literati, and evenings at jazz clubs in Greenwich Village. He also owned a black stretch limousine and a beat-up Mercedes-Benz that he spent thousands of dollars to refurbish. 

While Tanya took a job at Radio Liberty, earning $20,000 a year, Brokhin worked to maintain his reputation as a writer of import. He had published two books, which received mixed to poor reviews, including The Big Red Machine, an exposé of corruption inside the Soviet sports establishment, which was published by Random House in 1978. 

Brokhin’s anti-Soviet diatribes soon brought him to the attention of New York Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Brokhin was introduced to Moynihan by his chief of staff on the Intelligence Committee, Eric Breindel, an avid cold warrior. Brokhin supplied the committee with information about alleged Soviet agents who had penetrated America posing as Jewish refugees. Although Moynihan has no memory of having met Brokhin, Brokhin and Breindel developed an enthusiastic friendship, according to David Luchins, the senator’s longtime liaison to the Orthodox Jewish community. 

When Brokhin was discovered murdered, Breindel leaked a story to the press that he had been killed by the KGB because he was at work on a devastating exposé of the personal life of Yuri Andropov, the newly installed Soviet general secretary, and onetime KGB head. Breindel told Moynihan that Brokhin’s execution was reminiscent of the highly publicized assassination of a Bulgarian dissident and anti-Soviet writer in England, who was stabbed with the poisonous tip of an umbrella by communist agents and later succumbed to the lethal toxin. * “After he put a bee in Moynihan’s bonnet,” as Luchins recalls, Breindel encouraged the senator to publicly call on the FBI to probe whether the Russian émigré had been slain by a foreign intelligence agency. The bureau dutifully complied, assigning William Moschella, one of its counterintelligence agents, to help Drubin unravel Brokhin’s homicide. “Moschella was not one of their big brain trusts, I can tell you that,” observed Drubin dryly. The NYPD’s Peter Grinenko, a Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking cop, was transferred from an auto theft detail to work with Moschella. 

Brokhin’s body had been discovered at 4:15 P.M. by his girlfriend, Tina Ragsdale, who called 911 after returning home from her photo editor’s job. (Brokhin’s wife, Tanya, was found drowned in the bathtub in their apartment a year earlier. Brokhin had recently taken out a $150,000 insurance policy on her life. Police ruled the death an accident. He collected double indemnity.) Ragsdale, a waif of a girl from Little Rock, immediately aroused Drubin’s suspicion. “She was in her twenties and he was forty-nine,” recalled Drubin, a circumspect man with a careful memory. “You had to really wonder what’s wrong with this love-starved, overly romantic young woman. He wasn’t a particularly good-looking guy. In fact, he was quite ugly. He was hard and severe-looking. And she was relatively attractive.” 

“Yuri and I were interested in the same things: photography and art,” Ragsdale insisted when interviewed fifteen years after her boyfriend’s homicide. “That was our common meeting ground.” 

She had given Drubin precisely the same explanation, but he didn’t buy it. “We got bad vibes from Tina. We felt she was holding back. We found the cash, hashish by the television, and the pornography tapes, and we didn’t feel she was giving us information.” 

After hours of relentless grilling, a tearful Ragsdale finally surrendered what the police wanted: the names of Brokhin’s closest friends—people to whom she also had grown close and may have had reason to protect. Although Ragsdale had given him a long list of names, Drubin didn’t recognize any of them. “There was nobody to tell you who these people were like there would be with the Italians,” he explained. 

At this point in time, Russian crime was recognized by the authorities as a growing problem, but not an organized one, and Russian criminals, when they were caught in petty food stamp scams or even quite large Medicare frauds, were treated as isolated cases. However, the NYPD had become sufficiently concerned with the rise in Russian arrests to have recently authorized setting up a twoman intelligence unit under detective Joel Campanella to begin monitoring the phenomenon. Though he had only just begun his investigation, Campanella was at the time the closest thing to an expert on the subject, and when Drubin eventually turned to him for assistance, he helped confirm that Ragsdale’s list of names was a menacing collection of Russian underworld figures. 

Drubin hauled in dozens of these men for interrogation, all of whom were coarse, Gulag-hardened thugs whom Ragsdale knew from smoke-filled parties, high-stakes card games, and vodka-laced nights in Russian cabarets. One suspect sat across Drubin’s desk in the squad room, contemptuously chomping on a .22 caliber bullet. “He would remove the bullet from the shell and chew on it. I don’t know what kind of lead poisoning he has. And when I asked him if he had any more of those, he showed me a whole box of bullets. And my next question was the same question that you would have asked. Do you have a gun that goes with the bullets? The next thing on the desk is the gun.” 

Drubin quickly realized that the Russians held him in very low regard. “I had one suspect look me in the face and say, ‘I did time on the Arctic Circle. Do you think anything you’re going to do is going to bother me?’” 

Even the godfather of the Brighton Beach mob at the time, Evsei Agron, was brought in for questioning after one informant claimed that it had been he who had killed Brokhin. Agron, however, had an alibi: he had been playing cards with his friends. “They all had alibis,” Drubin complained. Before Agron exited the station house, Drubin did manage to relieve him of his favorite, ever-present electric cattle prod. 

Although Drubin was having little success in identifying the killer, he and Campanella were unearthing a huge amount of information about the workings of the Russian mob, and Campanella quickly set up a database in his unit. One of Campanella’s most shocking discoveries was that many of his fellow cops in Brighton Beach were on the Organizatsiya’s payroll. Employed as bodyguards, bag men, and chauffeurs for Russian godfathers, the dirty cops made $150 a night or more for special jobs. “Everyone knew, including Internal Affairs, that cops in cheap suits who looked like gangsters worked the door as bouncers and sat in the front tables at Russian mob joints,” said criminal defense attorney James DiPietro. In the late 1980's, Campanella wrote to Internal Affairs about the problem; his complaint was ignored. 

Unaddressed, the problem persisted. In the summer of 1994, New York State tax investigator Roger Berger, acting on a tip from an underworld source, likewise contacted Internal Affairs, telling them about police working at the Rasputin and Metropole nightclubs, as well as traffic cops participating in phony-car-accident scams with the Russians. Instead of investigating the complaint, however, IA tried to browbeat him into revealing his sources. “I said, ‘First of all, these cops are conduits of information between the precinct and the Russians,’” Berger recalls. “And that would be just perfect, to turn my informant over to you so he can get killed.’” 

“Russians [in Brighton Beach] still don’t trust the local cops because they see them work as bouncers at the local mobbed-up restaurants,” says Gregory Stasiuk, an investigator with the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. “The Task Force had me go out and do interviews with Russians rather than the N.Y.P.D. The Russian community thinks the cops are on the take. The 60th and 61st precincts are very corrupt. We can’t even do surveillance because the local cops make us in our vans. Every move we make is reported to the Russian gangsters by the dirty cops.” 

Barry Drubin was also warned “to be careful about whom I talked to and what I said”— in Brighton Beach— “because a lot of cops were on the mob’s payroll. Detectives were working as bodyguards, they were making collections, they were doing a little strong-arm shit, and I said forget about this stuff here. I’m not going near this with a ten-foot pole. These cops weren’t going to lead me to the guys that shot Yuri Brokhin.” 

The Moynihan-inspired investigation by the Moschella and Grinenko team wasn’t much help in Brighton Beach either. Drubin considered them buffoons, and recalled one incident in which he crashed a bar mitzvah with them just to show their faces and apply a little pressure to the mobsters. “It was at the Sadko restaurant,” Drubin recalled, an infamous mob joint. “Grinenko and Moschella got shit-faced, and Peter [Grinenko] starts dancing with all the Russian women, even breaking in on the husbands.” The situation was only exacerbated by the deep animosity between Grinenko and Drubin, which stemmed from Grinenko’s supposed anti-Semitism. Grinenko allegedly told Drubin that he believed Jews were “genetically inferior.” When Drubin countered that Grinenko was an antisemitic Cossack, the cops nearly came to blows. 

Despite the numerous obstacles, Drubin and Campanella were making some progress, at least in uncovering the truth about Yuri Brokhin. Beneath the facade of a Soviet critic and intellectual lay a mobbed-up international drug dealer, jewel thief, and confidence man. Brokhin was constantly in debt, and the paltry income from his writing career, which could amount to no more than a few thousand dollars a year, certainly did not account for his rather affluent lifestyle, which included frequent trips to Atlantic City gaming tables and the Aqueduct Race Track. A compulsive gambler, he also spent many evenings playing cards with his friends in the Russian mob—godfathers, future godfathers, hit men, and extortionists, who gathered to gamble in a fortified Brooklyn “social club.” “He made a lot and he played a lot,” said Ivan, a Russian mobster whose friendship with Brokhin dated back to Moscow, where Brokhin specialized in robbing copulating couples in public parks. “Yuri was very close with the godfather Evsei Agron,” explained Ivan, who remembered how happy Brokhin was when Agron invited him to Canada to attend the godfather’s younger sister’s wedding. 

But there was an even more duplicitous side to Brokhin, Drubin later learned from federal counterintelligence agents. Brokhin and his criminal cronies took frequent trips to Bulgaria. Its spas were a favorite hangout for Brighton Beach gangsters, KGB agents, and Soviet black marketeers. The spas were cheap, conducive to conducting business, and within close proximity to the U.S.S.R. A great deal of contraband, such as narcotics, flowed in and out of the Soviet Union through Bulgaria, as did intelligence information. Sofia was also a principal money laundering center for the KGB and the Brighton Beach mob. Brokhin was frequently observed by U.S. intelligence agents slipping in and out of the Soviet Union from Bulgaria and then returning to New York. U.S. counterintelligence officials believed that he was not only trading in contraband, but supplying the KGB with information about his new homeland. If he was a Soviet mole, as these officials believed, he could easily use his status as a dissident intellectual and friend of the Senate Intelligence Committee to provide valuable information he may have gleaned through his relationship with Breindel. 

But Brokhin was killed, not because of Cold War intrigue, but because of a dispute among thieves. On the morning of Brokhin’s homicide, he had had breakfast at the National restaurant in Brighton Beach with Ivan. Then the men drove into Manhattan, where Ivan dropped him off at his home. “Yuri did something wrong,” Ivan recalled. “Yuri told me that he was going to go and live in Europe. ‘I’m finished over here. Wednesday I’m going to get a lot of money, sell the apartment, and I’m going,’” 

Sometime that afternoon, two unidentified men entered Brokhin’s apartment. “He knew the people he let in,” Drubin said. “He did not know he was getting hit. Everything was laid out—the briefcase, the jeweler’s loupe—like he was doing business. He was a burly guy, about five ten. He would have put up a struggle if he knew he was about to get it. And he laid down so nicely on the bed after he was killed, he hardly rumpled the bed cover.” 

Drubin, who had interviewed more than a hundred suspects, concluded that Brokhin had probably been killed in a jewelry scam gone wrong, and that Balagula’s old nemesis, Vladimir Reznikov, had been the triggerman. “Yuri was pulling some con on West 47th Street and maybe there were some diamonds involved,” Drubin suggested. “Brokhin owed some money and pissed somebody off and he was killed.” 

Incredibly, in the years between Brokhin’s homicide and the launch of Operation Red Daisy, law enforcement did little to stem the rising red tide of the Russian mob. Despite the efforts of individuals like Drubin and Campanella, and despite the glaring evidence that came to light in a few scattered prosecutions, such as that of Marat Balagula, there were still few authorities who understood, or even believed, that the Russian mob was a deadly threat. “Nobody takes the Russian mob seriously,” the soft-spoken Campanella said a few years after the Brokhin incident. “The lack of interest of law enforcement has given the Russians time to grow.” [It is because they were Jews,and the Jews love to make every issue a political one DC]

A large part of the problem was political: the Russian mob was predominantly Jewish. It was for that reason, asserted Campanella and other New York State and federal law enforcement officials, that seven years after Campanella’s two-man Russian mob unit in the NYPD was inaugurated, it was shut down in a highly politicized, characteristically New York City type of reaction. The effort had come under considerable criticism from the Jewish establishment, which complained that the adverse publicity generated in the hunt for Russian Jewish criminals would foster antisemitism and jeopardize the continued emigration of Russian Jews to Israel and the West. [exactly what I said above DC]

In Germany, where the arrival of the Brighton Beach mob was quickly recognized as a serious problem, police formed a task force of one hundred specially trained investigators in the early 1990's to combat the Russians, according to a classified report prepared by the German Federal Police in Wiesbaden. The Russian crime wave, which included bloody rub outs in fashionable restaurants on Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse, forced authorities to overcome their “super sensitivity… to the Jewish aspect of emigre crime,” said the report. But in the United States, according to several top law enforcement officials, Jewish organizations continued to lobby the Justice Department to downplay the threat posed by the Russian mob. “The Russian Mafia has the lowest priority on the criminal pecking order,” admitted FBI spokesman Joe Valiquette during a 1992 interview. 

Some of Valiquette’s colleagues were harshly critical of the bureau’s lack of attention to the threat. They believed that the Organizatsiya had already developed into a new version of the Mafia; one that was just as ruthless as the Italian brand but potentially very much more difficult to tackle. “The Italian mobsters play boccie ball, the Russian gangsters play chess,” said one law enforcement source who marveled at their growing sophistication. And while the Russian mob may not have had the cumulative force of seventy years of tradition behind it, like La Cosa Nostra, by the early 1990's, some five thousand hard-core Russian criminals had already established themselves in the New York region, a criminal presence that was as large as all the Italian Mafia families combined. 

“The Russians are an emerging crime group,” Justice Department prosecutor Patrick J. Cotter, a member of the team that convicted John Gotti, said in 1992. “They make tons of money, they kill people, they are international, they are moving into drugs—but we don’t have a single unit of the FBI that’s devoted to going after them. We’ve got a Bonanno squad, we’ve got a Lucchese squad, but we don’t have a Russian squad—so there is your problem. If we don’t begin to address the problem now, we’ll be running around asking ourselves how the hell this Russian organized crime got so big and how we can get rid of them. 

“Money is power in crime as in everything else in this world,” Cotter continued. “If you ignore the fact that the Russians are reaping huge profits, you’re making a bad mistake. They’re not going to invest in IRAs. They’re going to buy businesses, they’re going to buy power. If we want to stop these guys, we better do it before they buy those things. If I’ve learned one thing from prosecuting the Mafia the last five years, I’ve learned that that’s the toughest kind of mob influence to rub out. It’s relatively easy to get the drug sellers, the gun sellers, the protection racketeers. It’s real tough to get the corporation that’s partly owned by the mob, or the union that’s been corrupted.” 

There was, in fact, one official at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., who did believe that if the government didn’t quickly launch a full-scale assault on the Russian mob, it would become untouchable. James Moody, a strapping six-foot-three organized crime expert, spent his youth in the backwoods of Oklahoma—a large, barefoot boy in overalls, hunting and fishing with his brothers. His great-grandfather was the first chief of police in Stroud, his tiny hometown. Moody joined the FBI at age twenty-nine in 1970 after a six-year stint in the military that included two tours in Vietnam. 

In August 1989, Moody was appointed chief of the FBI’s organized crime section. Examining the bureau’s past record, he realized that former director J. Edgar Hoover had not paid sufficient attention to the Italian Mafia, having instead devoted the majority of his resources to his corrosive obsession: combating domestic subversion and the perceived communist penetration of America. In the 1960's, when New York’s five Italian crime families controlled labor unions, the garment industry, and the docks, there was only one FBI field agent in Manhattan assigned to organized crime, whose very existence, Hoover had proclaimed, was “baloney.” The FBI had to wait until Hoover’s death in 1972 to undertake a serious investigation of La Cosa Nostra, but by then, it had become a criminal colossus. Moody didn’t want to repeat that error with the surging Russian mob.

Still, he was having trouble convincing colleagues of the seriousness of the threat; the FBI continued to be allowed to pursue individual Russian crimes only when it came across them. Then, in 1992, during the heady first days after the fall of communism, Moody received a visit from Mikhail Konstantinovich Yegorov, the first deputy minister of the interior for the Russian Federation. The Russian proposed an immediate cooperation agreement with American law enforcement to combat jointly the Russian mob. 

“I can’t do it because we have so much of a past history of being enemies,” Moody told Yegorov, after spending a day chauffeuring him around the American capital. “We’re going to have to kind of take it a step at a time.” 

But Yegorov would not be so easily dissuaded, and asked, “Okay, what can I do to improve the relationship and get it moving a little faster?” 

“I don’t know of a specific thing right now, but whenever I identify one, I’ll get back in touch with you,” Moody replied. 

It didn’t take Moody long to propose a specific plan. Two fugitives from Red Daisy—David Shuster and an accomplice—were known to be hiding out in Moscow. Moody wanted them, but Yegorov reminded him that the countries didn’t have an extradition treaty. 

“That’s true,” Moody admitted. “We don’t have any treaties whatsoever. But expel those guys from your country as being bad,” he urged him, as a way to jump-start relations. 

“About two days later, maybe three,” Moody recalled, “I come walking into my office and there’s a handwritten fax on my desk.” 

“Mr. Moody, we’ve got them,” the note said. “Please come and get them.” 

The previous day, a Russian commando unit wearing sky blue ski masks and bulletproof vests had stormed Shuster’s “import-export” firm in downtown Moscow; a furious gun battle ensued. When the shooting stopped, Shuster was on his back, being pummeled by members of the Russian Special Forces, but putting up an impressive fight all the same. “My understanding is that Shuster broke two sets of Russian handcuffs,” Moody said. “He’s not a very tall guy, but he’s strong as hell.” 

At first, the Russians didn’t know what to do with him; Shuster was, in fact, being illegally detained. If they put him in jail, the Russian federal prosecutor’s office would learn that the Ministry of Interior was covertly working with the FBI and the event could spark a Cold War–style political firestorm. So in typically brutal Russian style, Shuster was transported to a dense forest outside of Moscow, dumped into a hole, and buried up to his neck in gravel. 

The Russians informed the FBI that they would have to retrieve Shuster within three days, at which point he would be released. The bureau scrambled, but obtaining a Russian visa on short notice wasn’t easy in those days, even for a U.S. government agency. Finally, Klaus C. Rohr, an old organized crime hand and the FBI’s assistant legate in Bonn, made it into Russia, and was taken directly to Shuster. “We don’t have any jurisdiction in Russia,” Rohr told him, after identifying himself as an agent of the FBI. “But we’re going to put you on a plane and take you back to the United States, and I’m going to arrest you once we get back to America. If you give me any problems, I’m going to leave you in the hole.” 

“No problem,” Shuster replied. 

Moody immediately took the fax from Yegorov relaying the news of Shuster’s capture to Larry Potts, the assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. He hoped to use the document to make a case for starting a Russian organized crime squad and for cooperating with Russian police and security officials—initiatives vociferously opposed by the foreign counterintelligence side of the FBI, which considered the Russians to be an everlasting threat to national security, perestroika or not. 

“You might say all of our obstacles suddenly disappeared” after the Shuster snatch, Moody explained. With the strong backing of Attorney General Janet Reno, the FBI set up a Russian organized crime subsection at its Washington, D.C., headquarters in early 1993, which would report directly to Moody, and which received full authority to investigate the Russian mob as an organized criminal cartel. 

Entrenched bureaucrats with Cold War hangovers continued to fight the new initiatives. It was only in May 1994 that the FBI office in New York, commanded by William A. Gavin, finally set up a squad specifically targeted to fighting Russian organized crime, and even then, he didn’t seem to realize just how late he had entered the battle. “I had a problem getting Gavin’s attention,” Moody explained, citing Gavin’s resistance to setting up a Russian force. “He said he liked to do his own thing. I said, ‘Okay, you go do your own thing, but you’re not going to do it with my manpower.’” It wasn’t until Moody started shifting personnel out of the New York office that Gavin capitulated. “I basically forced him into setting up the [Russian] squad,” Moody acknowledged. It was dubbed the C-24 squad. 

With few informants and only a superficial knowledge of New York’s 300,000-strong Russian emigre community, the FBI realized how handicapped it was in this effort. Based on its early reports, Raymond C. Kerr, the head of the new Russian unit under Gavin, believed that there were three or four major Russian crime families operating in Brighton Beach, with outposts in at least five other U.S. cities. The largest family consisted primarily of Jewish emigres, many of them from Odessa; a second family was from Tashkent, in Uzbekistan. The FBI had identified them as Muslim; people in the community insisted they were Jews. A third family was from Ekaterinburg, in Russia. As far as the FBI’s Gavin and Kerr could determine, each of the families had a Cosa Nostra–like pyramid structure with bosses or godfathers poised at the top, and beneath them the consiglieres, or advisers, and then the crews. 

But virtually everyone else in law enforcement with a knowledge of the Russian mob challenged the FBI model. “You can’t put them in a family,” one DEA official explained. “One day, two guys are trying to kill each other, and the next day they are doing a dope deal together.” He added that while Italian wiseguys often specialized in particular criminal enterprises, the Russians tended to be generalists. “Whatever opportunity affords itself—that’s what they do that day.” 

Meanwhile, with Shuster in hand, federal prosecutors moved forward with trying the Red Daisy case. Bootlegging czar Vladimir Zilber and six other Russians, as well as five Gambino crime family figures, had been indicted in Newark, New Jersey, for federal excise tax fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. But to solidify the case, the prosecutors still needed members of the criminal enterprise to cooperate and so they offered Shuster a deal he couldn’t refuse: if he agreed to testify against members of the massive bootlegging conspiracy, he would be given a letter that promises to petition the judge for leniency at sentencing as a reward for cooperation. 

As part of his proffer agreement, or deal with the government, which required him to confess to every crime he had ever committed, Shuster admitted that he was an international pickpocket, gasoline bootlegger, and had dabbled in dealing Turkish heroin. The government confiscated $6 million from him, as well as seventeen cars and real estate, then stashed him in a safe house until the trial. 

Local police were furious that Shuster had gotten a deal. They suspected that he had ordered a jewelry store heist in Lodi, New Jersey, that had led to the shooting death of an off-duty cop. The investigating officers had several witnesses, including gang members who were at the scene of the execution. The federal prosecutors were given the information, but chose to ignore it. As far as the police were concerned, Shuster—who vehemently denied his involvement in the affair—had lied to get his letter, and had gotten off the hook for killing a cop. 

Zilber’s case was severed from the others; his attorneys alleged that brain damage from his attack on the FDR left him incompetent to stand trial. Whether or not he went to court hardly mattered. The government seized $550,000 in cash from his safe deposit box, and his $1.2 million house in New Jersey was put in foreclosure. His wife walked out on him. His brother, Alex, fled with the family fortune, heading first for Brazil, and then to Moscow, where he eventually ran an aluminum factory and a casino for the Genovese crime family. Vladimir spends his days on a bench on the Coney Island boardwalk gazing absently out to sea, or holed up in his meager apartment, listening to CNN. He receives free meals at Rasputin and his old gang pitched in to buy him a live-in whore. “The one thing I hear that’s still functioning well without any inhibitions is a lust for women of all ages,” a federal prosecutor related. “Vladimir has no control over himself. If his grandmother was in the room, he’d go after her. I think, no pun intended, his brain is really shot.” Even with Zilber’s forced retirement, however, his crowning achievement, Rasputin, continued to be a magnet for wiseguys from Little Italy to the Volga. 

With Vladimir Zilber excused from testifying, Gambino capo Anthony “Fat Tony” Morelli became Red Daisy’s marquee defendant. Morelli was accused of directing subordinates to use intimidation and violence to collect the “mob tax” from the Russian bootleggers. A wealthy shylock and fence who was notoriously stingy, Morelli had retained high-priced attorney Barry Slotnick to represent his bag man Edward Dougherty, but then refused to pay his full fee. Slotnick’s enthusiasm for the case understandably waned, and when Dougherty deduced that Morelli was setting him up to be the fall guy, he joined the government’s growing cast of cooperating witnesses. 

Although Morelli could afford to hire the best criminal lawyer in New York for himself, he retained a second-string Gambino house attorney by the name of Richard Rehbock, who regularly annoyed juries with his constant, seemingly irrelevant objections and bombastic speeches. It hardly helped Morelli’s cause when, about one month into the Red Daisy trial, Rehbock was the subject of a humiliating, front page expose in the New York Post. Star gossip columnist Cindy Adams quoted Rehbock’s estranged wife, Sylvia DiPietro, as alleging that her husband had hidden $100,000 of mob cash in a suit in his clothes closet, and kept three sets of accounting books. 

Having already angered Morelli as a result of his wife’s vexatious accusations, Rehbock further put himself in disfavor with his questionable trial strategy. Early in the case, for example, he made a colossal blunder when the government introduced Colombo soldier Frankie “the Bug” Sciortino’s personal phone book into evidence. The book was valuable to the prosecution’s case in that it listed Morelli’s various private phone numbers, as well as the telephone numbers of numerous Russian bootleggers and Italian gangsters involved in the Red Daisy bootlegging scam, and therefore helped establish the web of relationships in the Russian-Italian bootleg combine about which Dougherty, Shuster, and others were going to testify. The FBI had arrested the Bug on September 29, 1989, initially for witness tampering; the agent responsible for his apprehension was called to the stand merely to place the confiscated phone book into evidence. 

In his cross-examination of the agent, however, Rehbock inadvertently helped prove the government’s case. Apparently unaware that the FBI agent was a well-known expert on organized crime and, moreover, had investigated every name in the Bug’s thick black book, Rehbock asked, “Agent, this doesn’t say, Phone Book of Frankie Sciortino’s Mob Friends, does it?” 

“No, it just says address book, or telephone book,” the agent replied. 

“Is the book entitled All My Gangster Friends?” 

“No.” 

“The first entry, is he in the gas business?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Is he a gangster?” Rehbock asked, his confidence growing. 

“I can’t tell you.” 

“Is he a person that’s listed on the little charts that you have on the wall in the F.B.I. office as an Organized Crime member?” 

“I don’t know.” 

Emboldened even further, Rehbock ventured forth. “How about the next one, Artie Goldstein, do you know him?” 

“I believe he is in business on Long Island—a shylock victim.” 

“That’s what, a customer of Mr. Sciortino? Is that what you’re saying?” 

“He had a loan with Mr. Sciortino.” 

By asking the witness to characterize whether the people listed in Sciortino’s book were mobsters, Rehbock had opened the door for the government to do the same thing on redirect. 

“Let’s go through some of the names,” said prosecutor Robert Stahl. “Anthony in Florida.” 

“I believe that’s Anthony Trentascosta—a made member of the Gambino crime family,” replied the G-man. 

“Go to page forty-five. Benny A.” 

“That would be Benny Aloi. I believe he’s a Colombo made member.” 

After identifying a number of wiseguys, as well as Frankie “the Bug’s” loan shark victims, Stahl stopped just before Morelli’s name, by which point, “the jury was just laughing,” Stahl recalled. “We took a break, and Morelli says loud enough for us to hear, ‘Hey, Richie, whaddaya gonna do, the fuckin’ twenty years for me now?’” 

The gangster’s prediction proved to be all too accurate; he was convicted and sentenced to exactly twenty years. In addition, eleven defendants were also convicted. Shuster was released from custody not long after the trial and is living somewhere in Brooklyn. Since he only testified against Italians, he has nothing to fear from the Russians. 

However groundbreaking an effort the Red Daisy prosecutions— and several successful bootlegging prosecutions thereafter—they scarcely had any repercussions on the Russian mob, which continued to make tons of money as it spread across America. “The cancer is beyond the lymph nodes,” New York State taxman Berger glumly noted in 1994. Nevertheless, recognizing the severe destabilizing effect that organized crime was having on Russia’s tenuous democracy, FBI director Louis Freeh told a Senate subcommittee in May 1994 that the war against the Russian mob “is critical —not just for the Russians but for all of us, because the fall of democracy there poses a direct threat to our national security and to world peace.” Freeh traveled to Russia, where he proposed launching “a lawful, massive, and coordinated law enforcement response” against Russian organized crime. He suggested setting up an international databank and training Russian police in American investigative methods. That year, the FBI established such an academy for ex-Eastern bloc law enforcement officials in Budapest. 

The relationship Moody worked so hard to forge quickly foundered. “There is a great distrust on the American side of the integrity of Russian law enforcement,” says Rutgers criminologist James Fickenauer, who was awarded a grant from the Justice Department to study Russian organized crime. “They want to sell their information. They think if the information is valuable, it must be worth something. These are badly underpaid people who are looking for money from wherever they can get it.” And, as the Genovese crime figure who backed Rasputin says, “We’ll always be able to pay more than the FBI.” 

However short it fell of its goals, the Red Daisy campaign did mark the belated recognition by American law enforcement of how serious a threat the Russian mob actually posed. But although the FBI, along with other local and federal agencies like the DEA and Customs Bureau, could now focus some of its energies on penetrating the Mafiya’s extensive web of influence and corruption, the effort may have come too late. For looming just over the horizon was a force that dwarfed the Brighton Beach Mafiya in size and power, and it was headed directly for U.S. shores.

5 

RED TIDE 

In May 1991, while eating breakfast at the National restaurant in Brighton Beach, Emile Puzyretsky was shot nine times in the face and chest. Fifteen diners witnessed the execution. “Ya nechevo ne znayu,” they all told detectives, “I don’t know anything”—even though the killer had carefully rummaged around the restaurant floor on his hands and knees, looking for the spent cartridges, some of which had become lodged under their tables. The reason for their silence was simple: no one in the restaurant wanted to be branded a stukatch, snitch, and risk a surprise visit from the killer—Monya Elson. After a six-year absence, the fearsome hit man had returned to Brighton Beach to claim his warm spot in the Russian mob. 

“There are a lot of rumors in Brighton Beach that I killed Puzyretsky,” Elson said with a laugh. “You can say that I killed him to take care of business.” 

Elson had spent most of his years away stewing in filthy, oven like Israeli jails, to which he had been sentenced in 1984 after his effort to seek fame and fortune in the cocaine smuggling business had not gone as planned. Being marooned in an oppressive, flea-infested tent city for convicts in the barren, lunarlike Negev Desert was hardly what Elson had in mind when he set out to claim his place in the criminal hierarchy. To make matters worse, he heard stories about his contemporaries in Brighton Beach making big names for themselves in the Russian underworld. He yearned to return “home” to Brighton Beach and establish himself as one of the most respected men in the Russian mobs’ power structure. Prison did bestow on Elson one piece of good fortune: he became the cell mate and bodyguard for convicted spy Shabtai Kalmanovitch, cementing a criminal alliance that would pay big dividends for both men. 

On August 19, 1990, Elson was released from jail, bursting “with a lot of ideas” about bringing some order to the mobocracy that ruled Brighton Beach. But first, he had some unfinished business to attend to in Moscow. Elson had learned while in prison that a well-known Russian hood had been spreading word that Elson was a musor, a rat. Supposedly, Elson had exposed some Russians running an international gun ring, a charge that, though he vehemently denied it, had circulated rapidly throughout the criminal grapevine. Elson was furious that his reputation was being maligned. “If he doesn’t like one word that comes out of your mouth, you’re dead,” says an acquaintance of Elson’s. “I said, ‘Hey Monya, you can’t kill people for that.’ He said, ‘Yes I can! ‘” 

“He said I was a musor.” Elson recalled of the man who was bad-mouthing him. “I wanted to kill him. He thought that because I was a Jewish guy, and I had presumably left Russia forever, that it would be okay to play with Monya.” 

As soon as he arrived in Moscow Elson quickly tracked down the malefactor and, with a single swing of an ax, hacked off his arm, leaving him to bleed to death. “Half the criminals will think I killed for revenge,” Elson remarked. “The other half will think that maybe he knew something, and I killed [him] to shut his mouth.” Citing an old Russian proverb, Elson explained his motive as: “Revenge is the sweetest form of passion!” 

His business in Moscow complete, Elson, then thirty-nine, returned at last to Brighton Beach. This time, he knew precisely what he wanted to achieve, and he knew how to do so. He quickly assembled a team of experienced hit men, master thieves, and extortionists—a group the FBI dubbed “Monya’s Brigada”—and dispatched them to take over a large swath of Brighton Beach. He established his headquarters in Rasputin, where he received $15,000 a week from the Zilbers and a percentage of the raucous cabaret’s revenues. “I was the new epicenter for Russian organized crime,” Elson boasted. “Before, it was bullshit! It wasn’t fucking so tough.” 

Elson’s braggadocio had a deadly bite. One of his first deeds was to murder Puzyretsky, who had been employed to defend a large Russian bootlegging combine that competed with the Zilber brothers for dominance in the gasoline business. Elson then methodically slaughtered many of the Zilbers’ rivals, propelling the three men to the top of the Russian criminal pyramid. 

This was Monya’s golden age—a few short years between 1990 and 1993. With a small army and his savage determination, he seemed unstoppable, extorting and killing with impunity. “Monya was a nut,” said Gregory Stasiuk, the investigator for the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. “On one wire, Elson said to a tardy loan shark victim, ‘You are making me so crazy, I don’t know whether I should come over and kill you now or later.’” 

“Monya loves to kill,” said a Genovese wiseguy. “He was a goon on a short, hot leash.” 

Monya’s Brigada was soon becoming immensely wealthy, dealing in everything from coke to precious gems, which he allegedly smuggled from Manhattan’s jewelry district to Moscow. A December 1994 secret FBI intelligence report noted that “Elson is a principal player in the control of the export of diamonds, gold and other jewelry from the United States and other countries to Russia. A carat of diamonds can be obtained for $1,500 in New York, and sold for $10,000 in Moscow. Elson receives a kickback on every diamond and gold deal he brokers in Moscow. An unknown Austrian front company has been set up to receive the kickbacks. This concern has a permit from the Russian government to import these items. Elson believes this situation gives him ‘leverage’ with other O.C. [organized crime] players.” 

At least one rival Russian mobster, however, refused to accede to Elson’s growing power. Boris Nayfeld, once the underling of the Little Don Evsei Agron and of Marat Balagula, had emerged as an estimable force in his own right while Elson was still confined in his Israeli prison cell. By the time Elson resurfaced in Brooklyn, Nayfeld was shuttling between Antwerp, where he lived in a luxury apartment with his mistress, and Staten Island, where he resided with his wife and children in a sumptuous home on Nevada Avenue across from a nature preserve. 

Nayfeld came to prominence by running a heroin ring of French Connection proportions. He obtained the drugs in Thailand, smuggled them into Singapore, and then stashed them in TV picture tubes and shipped them to Poland through a Belgium-based import-export company, M&S International. From there, Russian couriers from Brighton Beach with valid U.S. passports “bodied” the heroin into the United States through New York’s Kennedy Airport. “Customs never looked,” said a DEA official. “Poland wasn’t an obvious transshipment point for drugs. It’s not Bogotá or Bangkok. They shotgunned each plane with three, four, or five couriers, all unknown to each other. They moved eight to ten kilos per flight, and it went on a good year before we caught on to it.” Eventually, the couriers expanded their operations to Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere, while the drug smugglers continued to make millions of dollars a planeload. 

In New York, part of the drugs was sold to Sicilian mobsters out of a dive in Coney Island, while another faction of the ring dealt the heroin to Hispanic customers out of the S&S Hot Bagel Shop, next to Katz’s Delicatessen on East Houston Street in Manhattan. The DEA was impressed with the sophistication of the mobsters’ business. “What’s unique,” said one official admiringly, “is that these guys were actually controlling it from the source to the street.” 

Elson, however, viewed his rival’s expanding empire with displeasure. “I knew when I got out of jail that Biba [Boris Nayfeld’s nickname] would still be in the ballpark. He would be a fucking problem,” Elson said derisively. “Everybody said Biba, Biba. Biba Shmeeba. I said he was a piece of ass. He’s a fucking nobody. And somebody sent word to Biba that I’m cursing him. And I said yes, I want to meet the motherfucker. He was a piece of shit! For this reason, I declared the war! I said, he cannot be what he wants to be! He’s a musor in his heart. He wanted to be somebody. He was never nobody. You know to be a godfather you have to have leadership qualities. He don’t have any qualities.” 

Nayfeld responded to these taunts with a $100,000 contract on Elson, setting the stage for a massive gangland war. “They were like two gunslingers,” said Stasiuk, “who had to prove themselves top gun.” 

On a frigid night shortly before the Russian New Year in January 1991, Elson’s men taped a powerful bomb under the muffler of Nayfeld’s car. The following afternoon, Nayfeld drove the car to Brooklyn to pick up his children at school. As the engine idled, the youngsters piled into the backseat. Just then, a maintenance man pointed to an object hanging from the chassis. The bomb, which was designed to have been activated by heat from the muffler, had become dislodged and failed to explode. “It could have taken out a city block,” said an assistant U.S. attorney. 

Nayfeld wasted no time in seeking revenge. On May 14, 1991, Elson was speaking with some friends on the corner of Brighton Beach Avenue and Sixth Street in front of the Cafe Arabat, a Russian mob haunt. At exactly 3:00 P.M., a hit man sauntered up and pumped five dumdum bullets into Elson’s belly. “I never lost consciousness,” Elson insisted. “I wanted to shoot this guy. You can’t imagine how hot and painful the wound was. But I saw the guy, a black man, run away. I was going to shoot him. I didn’t have the strength to shoot him.” A friend rushed Elson to Coney Island Hospital. “The bullets made two holes in my stomach. My liver was severed. My pancreas was shattered. One bullet lodged in my left kidney and exploded.” Doctors removed the kidney, along with twenty feet of intestine. “If I had gotten there twenty seconds later, I would have been on a slab. They put me on a stretcher and I lost consciousness.” 

Elson developed peritonitis. “There was a lot of puss in my pancreas, which was abscessed. There was a lot of puss in my stomach. And the doctors said to my wife: ‘He’s going to die now.’ And they put a tube into my heart.” Elson claims he was pronounced dead and wheeled into the morgue, but when “I heard ‘morgue,’somehow I reacted. I twitched my toe as if to say I’m alive. They put me back in ICU. Then I had an operation. They told my wife I had a fifty-fifty chance; if I survived the first forty-eight hours, I might live…. I spent twenty-eight days in intensive care; my wife was advised to say her farewell to me.” 

Elson recovered and quickly made another attempt at getting even with Nayfeld  paid assassins, Alexander Slepinin, was a three-hundred-pound, six-foot-five-inch veteran of Russia’s Special Forces, who had served in Afghanistan during the war against the Mujahedeen, the Islamic fundamentalist rebels. Nicknamed the “Colonel,” he had tattoos of a panther and a dragon on his upper torso, signs that he was a veteran of the Gulag. He was an expert in a variety of martial arts, and kept a large collection of swords and knives, which he used to dismember his victims in his bathtub before disposing of the body parts. He carried a business card that said he specialized in the techniques of mortal combat. 

On a June morning, three shooters, including Elson, according to eyewitnesses and police officials, ambushed Slepinin as he sat in his 1985 Cadillac Seville on a residential street in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. “He started crying, the big motherfucker, and admitted that Nayfeld had paid him to kill me,” Elson snorted gleefully. Breathing convulsively, Slepinin “asked for forgiveness.” 

“We are not in the church,” growled one of the hit men. 

The enormous man tried to squeeze his bulk through the passenger door, but was shot three times in the back, the bullets carefully aimed to ensure that his death would be agonizing. Thrashing and moaning, he continued to beg for his life, but two bullets to the back of the head finished off the Colonel. “He was huge, big, and mean,” Elson said. “He was a monster, a cold-blooded killer. The FBI has to give me an award.” 

A few months after the Colonel was butchered, Elson received a tip that Nayfeld was planning to attend a meeting in a trendy part of Moscow. Elson’s informant knew the exact time and location of the conclave, as well as Nayfeld’s route to and from the gathering. Elson gave the contract to kill Nayfeld to Sergei Timofeyev, who was nicknamed “Sylvester” because of his resemblance to film star Sylvester Stallone, and his lieutenant Sergei “the Beard” Kruglov, two of the most vicious gangsters in Moscow. According to Elson’s informant, Nayfeld’s car was supposed to pass a highrise apartment tower that was under renovation. Because its windows were covered with cardboard, an Olympic marksman, hired by Timofeyev and Kruglov, had to take aim at Nayfeld as his car approached the building by squinting through a peephole. But Nayfeld must have had a premonition, for at the last moment he pulled a hasty U-turn and disappeared into traffic. “It was Biba’s miraculous escape,” said a still bewildered Elson. “He had a lot of miracles.” 

As did Elson. On November 6, 1992, Elson arrived in Los Angeles’s Plummer Park, a meeting place for Russian émigrés who gambled their welfare checks and drank cheap vodka. Elson, who was there to meet a friend, suddenly decided to return to his car to retrieve something he had forgotten. As he walked back to the parking garage, a black man crept up behind him and shoved a pistol against the base of his skull. Elson heard the click of its trigger, but the weapon jammed. “Can you imagine if the gun went off?” Elson asked. “My brains would have been scrambled eggs.” Elson spun around and wrestled the man to the ground, kicking away the gun. The assassin grabbed it back and, this time, successfully fired it repeatedly, backpedaling until he was able to escape. Elson was hit in the left hand, severing a tendon. At the hospital, he gave a fictitious name, and told detectives that he had fought off a mugger who was trying to steal his $75,000 Rolex watch. He later slipped out of the hospital without paying his bill and traveled to Arizona for painful reconstructive surgery. Before he left Los Angeles, however, another would-be assassin attempted to place an explosive inside his car. “The shnook couldn’t figure out how to wire the bomb,” says a law enforcement source. “The device exploded in the man’s hands, blowing them off.” 

As the Elson-Nayfeld war raged on, dozens of gangsters were massacred. Some were gutted like sheep; others had their throats cut. Some were castrated with crescent-shaped knives; both the implements and the body parts became favorite gangster souvenirs. Though Elson and Nayfeld tried to enlist other influential gangsters to their respective sides, neither could gain a decisive advantage, and the bombs and bullets continued to explode from Brighton Beach to Moscow. 

At one point Rafik Bagdasaryan, nicknamed Svo, a mighty vor from Soviet Armenia, tried to intervene on Nayfeld’s behalf. Svo was known as the diplomat of the Russian underworld, and he was so highly respected that, when he was poisoned to death in prison some years later by Chechen gangsters, his body was flown from a secret military airstrip near Moscow to his native home in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia. Svo’s funeral was held with a degree of pomp usually reserved only for members of the Politburo. His countrymen thronged his coffin, and the streets were showered with rose petals. Mob bosses and politicians came to pay their last respects. Lights were turned on for forty-eight hours in Yerevan, where the power supply was erratic at best. 

Seeking to put an end to the deadly struggle, Svo telephoned Elson’s vaunted ally, the Beard. “I love you like a son,” said Svo. “I know you had a meeting with Monya in Yerevan, and I had a meeting with him in Yerevan. And Monya spoke about killing Biba. I’m asking you like my son, I like Biba, and please don’t get involved in this.” 

The plea went unheeded. Elson learned from another informant about the impending arrival in Moscow of Shlava Ukleba, who worked for Nayfeld as an international heroin trafficker. On a blistering cold day, Ukleba’s hotel room was rocked by a thunderous explosion, which obliterated five adjoining rooms. “But nobody was hurt. It was wintertime, and Ukleba ran out of the rubble in his underwear. He ran all the way to Austria,” chortled Elson. 

Then, on July 26, 1993, as Elson, his wife, and his twenty-five-year-old bodyguard, Oleg Zapivakmine, were emerging from a black Lexus in front of the couple’s Brooklyn apartment, a car careened toward the curb. The trio was sprayed with a “Streetsweeper” shotgun and Uzi submachine gunfire. Elson, who was carrying a briefcase with $300,000 in watches and jewelry from New York’s diamond district, was shot in the back and thigh. His wife, Marina, bolted from the Lexus and hid in a crawlspace, behind two garbage cans. A masked man leapt from the attacker’s vehicle and pumped two shotgun blasts into the cowering woman from several yards away. Seventeen pellets tore through her face, throat, chest, and shoulder. 

An all-out gun battle ensued with shotgun pellets peppering the entire length of the seventy-five foot apartment house, penetrating neighbors’ cabinets and walls. “It was like the Persian Gulf War,” Elson recalls. More than a hundred rounds were exchanged between the hit team and Elson and Zapivakmine, who was only lightly grazed in the stomach.

Incredibly, the two men managed to fend off their assailants. “You missed me. “You missed me! You missed me!” Marina shrieked all the way to the hospital. “She had seventy stitches,” Elson says. “You won’t believe how many bullets and pellets she has in her chest.” To this day, Marina has so many bullet fragments lodged in her body that she sets off metal detectors at airports. 

Marina had been deliberately targeted. “We know she joined Monya on killing sprees,” observed the DEA’s Louis Cardenelli. “Our C.I's [confidential informants] said that’s the only way you could hit a woman.” Moreover, if she had survived her husband, Cardenelli added, Marina had the authority to order Monya’s Brigada to exact a swift and terrible revenge. (Mrs. Elson refused to comment.) 

Having learned of the shootout, Major Case Squad detective Ralph Cefarello raced to the hospital. “Elson was laying there waiting for the docs to work on him, and I’m trying to question him,” Cefarello recalled. “He played his usual game. He said politely, ‘I’ll tell you anything. I want to know who did this to me. But I didn’t see the shooters.’" Before exiting the room, Cefarello brushed by Elson’s bed, intentionally pulling off the bed sheets. The gangster was stark naked. The word MONYA, framed by two green bands, was emblazoned around Elson’s penis. 

“I had a kid in uniform who spoke Russian standing guard. They had no way of knowing he was Russian-speaking. As soon as I left the room, Elson turned to his wife and said, ‘Don’t tell these pigs a thing!’” 

A short time after the incident, the FBI visited their bullet-marred apartment complex. Zapivakmine was sitting on their front porch, carefully surveying the street. In a confidential report of the meeting, the FBI wrote, “Elson indicated that he knew who was behind the shootings. Elson was particularly angry because of the shooting of his wife, and he stated that he would not rest until he gets his revenge. He said that his revenge will not occur in the United States but will happen somewhere overseas.” 

Unbeknownst to Elson, his bodyguard had been warned in advance of the shooting. A representative of the People’s Court—the authoritative group of Russian organized crime leaders in Brighton Beach—told Zapivakime that Elson was going to be killed because he had committed too many unauthorized murders and extortion's. They cautioned him not to interfere, according to a classified FBI report, but Zapivakmine ignored the admonition and had seriously injured a member of the “Streetsweeper” hit team who was brought to the same Coney Island hospital that was treating the Elsons. Two weeks later, Zapivakmine was shot in the back of the head while changing a flat tire in Brooklyn. 

With Zapivakmine’s execution, the balance of power began to shift. “Elson had very capable guys that he brought in as reinforcements from Israel and the former Soviet Union,” said a Russian wiseguy. “But every week, one of them would get their heads blown off by a shotgun blast. Even Monya realized it was time to get out.” 

However, it was not Boris Nayfeld who finally convinced Elson to flee to Europe in November 1994. The force behind the “Streetsweeper” incident, the man who posed the first serious challenge to Elson’s hegemony and had more resources than any other Russian gangster who had come before him, was Vyascheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, and the dreaded vor had come to the United States from Moscow to take over the Russian Jewish mob in America. 

Ivankov had begun his outlaw career in the back alleys of Moscow in the early 1960s. By age fifteen, he was a cocky, bare-knuckled street brawler who beat up people for the fun of it. His hooliganism eventually attracted the attention of a large criminal organization headed by a notorious gangster named Gennadiy “the Mongol” Korkov, who specialized in turning Soviet star athletes and martial arts masters into extortionists. Under Korkov’s tutelage, Ivankov was trained to shake down black marketeers, bribe taking bureaucrats, and thieving store managers—all of them underground millionaires who could hardly risk reporting thefts to the State. Ivankov’s crew invaded their homes, dressed as Soviet militiamen, armed with forged identification papers and search warrants. This “militia” would confiscate the victim’s valuables, inventory the goods, and order the owner to show up in court the next day for further questioning. Of course, the merchandise would disappear along with Ivankov. A sophisticated racketeer for his day, the Mongol also added intelligence and counterintelligence wings to his operations, a lesson Ivankov would not forget. 

With a taste for theatrics, the young Ivankov set out to build a mystique around himself. He expropriated the name of the legendary Russian bandit Yaponchick, which literally means “the little Japanese” in Russian. The original Yaponchick, whose given name was Mishka Vinnitsky, ran the seamy Jewish underworld in the pre-revolutionary Black Sea port of Odessa. Yaponchick and his gang became folk heroes when they joined the Red Army during the Revolution. Gang members tattooed their chests with the communist Red Star. Instead of being rewarded for their revolutionary zeal, however, they were imprisoned by the Bolsheviks soon after the war. (Yaponchick has since been the subject of many books and films, most notably Benya Kirk, a 1926 Soviet, Yiddish-language, silent film written by Isaac Babel.) 

Ivankov’s own career was temporarily derailed in 1974, when the manager of a Moscow café complained to the real militia about his extortion demands. An entire detachment of Soviet militiamen was dispatched to apprehend Ivankov, who was found hiding in his car in a Moscow suburb. A sensational gun battle ensued, and Ivankov made a daring getaway. The shoot-out only enhanced his growing legend as a social bandit who stole from the wealthy parasites living off the workers. Ivankov also distinguished himself for his bravado, for while the U.S.S.R. had plenty of common criminals, they virtually never used weapons against the authorities.

Ivankov quickly became the target of one of the biggest manhunts in Soviet history. After six months on the run, the weary brigand finally turned himself in, claiming that he was not a criminal at all, but a paranoid schizophrenic. The more serious charges against him were dropped, and he was sentenced to five years in a Soviet psychiatric detention hospital. Eventually wearying of feigning mental illness, Ivankov asked to be retested and was subsequently sent to a penal colony. There he was quickly inducted into the brotherhood of the vor v zakonye. 

After he was released from prison, Ivankov went back to work for the Mongol, becoming his senior associate. During the next two years, Ivankov committed hundreds of extortions and armed robberies, leaving behind him a long trail of mayhem and acts of mindless savagery. In 1981, for example, Ivankov and his crew broke into the apartment of a well-to-do black marketeer, brandishing their weapons. Handcuffing the terrified man to a bathroom radiator, Ivankov threatened to douse him with acid if he didn’t pay back an alleged debt. With a gun jammed to his forehead, he was forced to sign a promissory note for 100,000 rubles; Ivankov then stole a Dutch Masters painting, a stamp collection, and 3,000 rubles. Ivankov was arrested for the home invasion in 1982 and charged with robbery, aggravated assault, and extortion, for which he was sentenced to fourteen years in a maximum security prison camp in Siberia. Because several of those arrested with him were famous Soviet athletes who had turned to crime, the authorities saw to it that the case received no publicity. 

Back in prison, the despotic Ivankov once again became the top vor, enforcer, and kingpin. He stabbed one inmate in the back and clubbed a prison guard over the head with a metal stool. After several of his victims died, he was placed in a brutal punishment cell for a year. But the murders did not add time to Ivankov’s prison sentence, because in the code of the “Zone,” or the Gulag, the victims had brought their deaths on themselves by failing to obey the code of ethics of the thieves-in law. 

Even from prison, Ivankov was able to maintain control over the vast Vladivostok region in the Russian Far East, and increased his criminal power by establishing business enterprises as far away as Moscow, from which he received regular and substantial income. Once, with the help of two Russian accomplices from Toronto, he persuaded several major Russian banks and investors to buy $5 million worth of shares in a phony Siberian gold mining company. (One of the Russian banks sent a hit man to Toronto to terminate Ivankov’s co-conspirators, but the Mounties arrested him.) 

While Ivankov served out his sentence in the frigid wastelands of the U.S.S.R.’s vast penal colonies, major changes were taking place behind closed doors in Soviet crime and government. As early as the mid-1980s the KGB had notified the gray cardinals around Politburo boss Konstanin Chernenko that the Soviet Union’s socialist economy was doomed; chronic corruption, inefficiency, and the enormously expensive arms race with the United States had bankrupted Lenin’s revolution. The KGB recommended two options: one was a first-strike nuclear attack against the West, which was seriously considered by xenophobic elements who couldn’t bear the prospect of losing the Cold War. The second option was to loot the bountiful motherland of its remaining wealth. 

During Gorbachev’s reign, the KGB began to hide communist party funds abroad, according to top-level Western and U.S. intelligence sources. The KGB consequently set up some two thousand shell companies and false-flag bank accounts, some as far away as Nevada and Ireland. Over the next eleven years, perhaps as much as $600 billion was spirited out of the country, in the greatest looting of a nation in world history. No matter what happened to Russia during a political transition from communism to a quasi-market economy under perestroika, the party bosses had effectively guaranteed that they would continue to control key state resources and property. Stealing such a massive amount of wealth, however, turned out to be a larger job than anyone had expected. The KGB ran out of people to sequester assets, so they expanded their operation to the criminal Mafiya, explained Richard Palmer, a twenty-year veteran of the CIA, whose final assignment was as a station chief in the former Soviet Union from 1992 to 1994. 

In its haste to stash party funds, the KGB modernized the relatively small Soviet Mafiyas, which had previously been based along neighborhood, regional, and ethnic lines. They were outfitted with everything from the latest high-tech computers to sophisticated communications gear. After communism crumbled, many KGB men, military officers, and government officials went to work for the emerging Mafiya organizations. Young Russian entrepreneurs sporting M.B.A's from the best schools in Russia and the West also swelled their ranks. 

By the early 1990's, organized crime in the Soviet Union had evolved into a diabolical troika consisting of gun-wielding mobsters and vors; nomenklatura types and the black marketeers that tailed them like pilot fish; and many current and former members of the government, military, and security services. Nevertheless, vors like Ivankov still represented the pinnacle of organized crime. Like made guys in the American La Cosa Nostra, Russia’s eight hundred thieves-in-law held varying degrees of position and power depending on their abilities. A vor could reign over a region as vast as Siberia, with a representative or supervisor (smotryashchiy) accountable to him in every regional city in which he had influence. A vor might control many Mafiya groups simultaneously, head an association of gangs, or lead a single gang. Some thieves-in-law might be part of the supply group (obespechenie) or the security group (bezopasnosti) in a Mafiya organization. 

By the mid-1980's, there were nearly nine thousand criminal gangs in Russia with 35,000 members. During “privatization,” the period when the government put everything from the great oil and gas giants to hotels in downtown Moscow up for sale, organized crime and the Russian government continued their mutually beneficial relationship. The criminals needed export licenses, tax exemptions, below-market-rate loans, business visas, and freedom from arrest and prosecution for their crimes. All of this and more was available from corrupt bureaucrats, especially since inflation had wiped out the savings of everyone in Russia who wasn’t participating in the grab. A dozen or so “oligarchs” took over vast state properties and became among the wealthiest men in the world. As for law and order, police officers, for example, who didn’t steal or take bribes were unlikely to be able to feed their families. A survey of Muscovites conducted in September 1994 by the Russian Academy of Sciences revealed that 70 percent of the respondents would not ask a Moscow police officer for help when threatened by a crime. 

Soon nine leading Mafiya organizations controlled more than 40 percent of Moscow’s economy. (Some experts say the figure is at least 80 percent.) Practically every business, from curbside kiosks to multinational corporations, paid protection money. “In 1917 we had the Bolshevik revolution, and all the rules changed,” a Russian banker declared. “In the late 1980's, we had a Mafiya revolution, and the rules changed again. If you’re a businessman you can either pay the mob, leave the country, or get a bullet through your brain.” Russian criminal groups penetrated virtually every level of the government, from Russia’s parliament, the Duma, to President Yeltsin’s inner circle. Even the immense arsenals of the Soviet armed forces were plundered. 

But in the gold rush years of the late 1980's and early 1990's, competition for the Soviet Union’s booty inevitably led to gangland turf wars. The Chechen Mafiya, which had always been a powerful force in Moscow’s turbulent underworld, called in reinforcements from their mountain redoubt in the republic of Chechnya. Relentless as the Golden Horde that had thundered across the Russian steppes and sacked the city in the Middle Ages, the group came close to gaining control over the city’s rackets, leaving the formerly dominant Jewish, Georgian, Armenian, and Slavic mobs in disarray. Corrupt Soviet oligarchs started preparing their departure in order to avoid the carnage. 

Ivankov’s panicky colleagues desperately concluded that they, too, needed additional troops and that, more importantly, it was time to spring the powerful vor from jail. Ivankov’s release was scheduled for late 1995, but in early 1990 two of the nation’s most powerful mafiosi orchestrated a letter-writing campaign in support of his early parole. One of them, Otari Kvantrishvili, was a brawny, forty-six-year-old native of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. A national sports hero, Kvantrishvili had been a wrestler on the Soviet Olympic team, an all-European champion wrestler, and chairman of the prestigious Russian Athletes Association, a government-sponsored union. In the late 1980's, he set up the Twenty First Century Association, ostensibly as a charity to aid needy Russian athletes. Although the association also established banks, casinos, and other enterprises, in fact, “this notorious company has never had any legitimate business interests and was structured only as a front to conceal proceeds of extortions of Russian businessmen” and other crimes, as a secret FBI report revealed. 

Ivankov’s other powerful patron was Joseph Kobzon, the dapper, sixty-year-old Russian pop singer. A cultural icon, Kobzon was a household name to generations of Russian music lovers. He frequently brought Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to tears at public functions with his soulful renditions of patriotic ballads. But for decades, Kobzon had been using his star persona to hide a sinister criminal identity. According to the CIA, Kobzon was Russia’s “crime Czar”; a secret FBI document described him as the “spiritual leader” of the Russian Mafiya in Moscow, who was “highly respected… because of his intelligence, contacts, shrewdness and ability to help when organized crime groups get into trouble. Not just anyone can gain his assistance, however; only high-level [mobsters]. He settles disputes between groups and belongs to no particular organization.” 

“Kobzon,” says the FBI’s James Moody, “is definitely one of the most influential criminals in Russia. He is very, very high-ranking. And very dangerous.” 

In the crime-addled Soviet Union, Kobzon’s true status as a top crime boss didn’t dissuade the Soviet government from appointing him to the Russian Olympic Committee, making him the dean of the School of Popular Music at Moscow’s Music Academy, as well as Moscow’s minister of culture, among other prestigious positions. The singer has twice been elected to the Duma. During his first stint in the late 1980's, he was formally introduced to the U.S. Senate by New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg. Kobzon was elected to the Duma a second time in 1998 from a tiny, impoverished autonomous district in eastern Siberia near Russia’s border with Mongolia, despite never having lived there—or even campaigning there during the election. Vladimir Grishin, the rival candidate, claimed that Kobzon’s campaign manager doled out 100 million rubles in donations to local charities, 35 million rubles to a local hospital, and allegedly promised additional cash and a new fleet of buses for the district if he were victorious. Grishin filed fraud charges with the Central Election Commission, but nothing ever came of it. 

One of Kobzon’s most lucrative activities, however, was smuggling arms. For example, he was allegedly able to help maneuver a corrupt Russian Defense Ministry official, Viktor Atiolkin, into the top job at the Rossvoorvzheniya, the only government agency that can authorize the export of weapons from Russia. “This position can greatly assist O.C figures in arranging sales of tanks, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles and possibly even nuclear materials,” explains the FBI report. In one instance, Kobzon brokered the sale of surface-to-air missiles to Iran, according to a federal wiretap affidavit and a top investigator for U.S. Customs who specializes in the Russian mob. 

Thanks to the efforts of Kvantrishvili and Kobzon, President Gorbachev and Supreme Soviet Chairman Boris Yeltsin received hundreds of additional letters from famous Russian scientists, artists, and politicians asserting that Ivankov had been successfully rehabilitated. Even the warden of his Gulag prison grudgingly acknowledged that Ivankov “is not the worst inmate.” To assure his release, the judge handling Ivankov’s case was bribed by Semion Mogilevich, the Budapest-based don who has been implicated in laundering billions of dollars through the august Bank of New York; other payoffs went to a former Russian minister of internal affairs and an unidentified state prosecutor, according to classified FBI reports, U.S. court documents, State Department records, and interviews with senior U.S. and European law enforcement sources. 

The campaign succeeded and Ivankov was freed in February 1991. His liberators quickly put him to work at their most critical task: to destroy the barbarians at the gate, the Chechen Mafiya invaders. Ivankov duly mounted an awesome offensive, employing a brigade composed of hundreds of hardened criminals. In typical Ivankov fashion, he went above and beyond the call of duty, wantonly massacring rival gangsters. His methods were, as always, cruel. Car bombings rocked the capital, casualties mounted, and the bloodbath became so violent that it began frightening away Western investors. Ivankov’s excesses were infuriating the very politicians who had helped free him, for while stemming the Chechen tide, he had become a liability. “Ivankov had big problems,” says the DEA’s Cardenelli. “He had to leave. The Chechens were coming to kill him. Friends in the government told him that they wanted an end to the high-profile gangland war.” 

As a result, in early 1992 the Bratsky Krug, or the Circle of Brothers, the ruling council of the vors, is said to have ordered Ivankov to “Go to the New Land and invade America!”

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INVASION OF AMERICA