PART 4:RED MAFIYA: HOW THE RUSSIAN MOB HAS INVADED AMERICA...INVASION OF AMERICA & TARZAN

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INVASION OF AMERICA 

Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov’s arrival in America on March 8, 1992, was tantamount to the coming of a great white shark. He was met at JFK airport by an Armenian vor who handed him a suitcase packed with $1.5 million in cash. Swiftly setting up offices in Brighton Beach, Ivankov recruited two “combat brigades” led by an ex-KGB officer and composed of 250 former athletes and Special Forces veterans of the Afghanistan war. He put the combat brigades on a $20,000-a-month retainer to kill his enemies, collect tribute from legitimate businesses worldwide, “arbitrate” disputes among Russian businessmen, and establish “an international link closely connecting thieves-in-law to the United States,” according to a classified FBI document. 

“When Ivankov came into town, I never saw such fear,” remarked a Genovese wiseguy. 

Soon after Ivankov appeared in New York, Alex Zilber, still one of the most powerful forces in Brighton Beach, asked one of his Genovese partners to arrange a sit-down with him. The mobster offered to have the Italians kill Ivankov, but Alex pleaded with them not to go to war. “I’ll be okay here in Brighton Beach,” he said, “but they’ll take me out in Russia [where he had extensive business interests]. Let’s pay him.” Ivankov celebrated his new partnership in Rasputin by hosting a lavish champagne party there. 

The Old Guard of Russian Jewish gangsters had little choice but to cooperate with Ivankov. He was regarded as a prolific moneymaker, and many ranking members of the Brighton Beach mob were by then aging, quasi-legitimate businessmen who no longer had the fortitude for an extended gangland war. And as the Zilber brothers realized and hit man Moyna Elson soon discovered—resistance was futile. The “Streetsweeper” shooting, which precipitated Elson’s flight, “put the fear of God” into the Old Guard, commented Elson’s lawyer, James DiPietro. “We were amateurs compared to Ivankov and his men,” observed Brighton Beach–based Jewish gangster Vladimir Ginzberg. “We had a criminal past, but not so rich like them.” 

Indeed, much of the fear that Ivankov inspired was due to the fact that he came invested with the full backing of Moscow’s most powerful crime lords. Made affluent and powerful by the fall of communism, their gangs had grown unprecedentedly large and fierce, and enjoyed a wealth of resources in the corrupt former Soviet Union that dwarfed that of even the most significant Russian mob operations in the United States. Now, as perestroika bloomed, the Mafiyas based in the former Soviet Union began to reach across suddenly unrestricted national boundaries, sending their soldiers and bosses like Ivankov out around the globe to either reconnect with or conquer their comrades who had emigrated a generation earlier. 

In fact, in the post-perestroika years, thousands of Russian thugs were easily slipping into the country. The understaffed and ill-equipped Immigration and Naturalization Service seemed helpless to stop them. Ivankov landed in the United States traveling under his own name, with an official foreign-travel passport. His visa, good for two weeks, had been obtained directly from the U.S. embassy in Moscow. He was sponsored by Manhattan-based shipping magnate Leonard Lev, a fifty eight-year-old émigré who had started his career in time-honored fashion as a master pickpocket in Kiev before becoming a partner in Marat Balagula’s gasoline operations and the Odessa restaurant. 

Lev’s Park Avenue company controlled a massive fleet of deepwater ships in Panama, which the government suspected of smuggling everything from coke to the latest model Ford Bronco, and of obtaining American visas for any number of mafiosi. “Bullshit,” said Lev about the alleged smuggling. “I move chicken parts.” If a ship’s captain smuggled contraband, he was completely unaware of it, he told me. 

Lev had created a “film” company called Twelve-LA, and wrote the U.S. embassy requesting a visa for Ivankov, saying he was a film consultant. Then Lev helped the recently arrived Ivankov enter into a sham marriage so he could apply for a green card and, after that, U.S. citizenship. Over drinks at the Odessa, Lev introduced Ivankov to an aging Russian lounge singer. She agreed to marry the vor for $15,000, getting her first installment from Lev in a cigarette box stuffed with $5,000 in crumpled greenbacks. Part of the deal was to get a quickie divorce in the Dominican Republic after Ivankov got his Social Security card. 

Ivankov’s criminal domain in the New World rapidly expanded into gambling, prostitution, and arms sales, as well as participation in gasoline tax fraud. In Brighton Beach, he had shrewdly placed reliable members of the Jewish Organizatsiya’s Old Guard like Lev as prime facilitators, using their knowledge about the American banking and criminal justice systems to obtain crooked lawyers, government contacts, passports, visas, and green cards. 

“Ivankov brings with him the tradition of hard-core Russian criminals’ dedication to their own authority and their experience in deception and corruption practiced under Communism,” commented a classified FBI report. “While not abandoning extortion, intimidation and murder, Ivankov also incorporates more subtle and sophisticated modern methods which enable cooperation with other groups, the exploitation of weaknesses in legal and financial procedures, and the use of current Eastern European and Eurasian political and economic instability to further his empire.” 

In Miami, Ivankov allegedly took over a hidden share of Porky’s, a strip club where he “was shown great homage” by the club’s owner, Ludwig “Tarzan” Fainberg, a Russian crime lord, said U.S. intelligence sources, and also entered into a deal to provide heroin and money laundering services to the Cali cartel in exchange for cocaine, which was earmarked for Russia. In Denver, he obtained a hidden interest in a sprawling Russian restaurant from Vatchagan Petrossov, an Armenian vor, who was Ivankov’s international drug adviser, asserts the FBI. Ivankov also bought large parcels of real estate in the Rocky Mountains. In Houston, he purchased a used car dealership for money laundering. In New Jersey, he met with Russian bankers about possible deals in Thailand, Brazil, and Sierra Leone, where he wanted to steal diamonds. Ivankov was fascinated with the complexities of Western banking, and listened intently as the bankers explained to him the intricacies of a financial instrument known as American depository receipts. In Manhattan, meanwhile, financial wizard Felix Komorov became his chief money launderer, according to the FBI. * 

Outside the borders of North America, the cagey vor constantly traversed Europe, the Middle East, and Eurasia as restlessly as a nomad, keeping close links to his own formidable organization in Russia, which the Circle of Brothers allowed him to maintain. “It seems like I go from meeting to meeting, flying around,” he wearily told an associate over a government wire. In the summer of 1994, Ivankov presided over two Appalachian-style sit-downs in Tel Aviv with his son Eduard, where dozens of gangsters gathered at the plush Dan Hotel to discuss their investments in the Jewish state, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources. During his global travels he also recruited the most intelligent, ruthless, and boldest young Russian criminals for his U.S. operations. Wooing them with promises of the “good life,” according to a classified FBI report, he opened bank accounts for them and provided credit cards and automobiles for their use. Ivankov himself “seems always able to reenter the United States undetected after each trip,” declared an FBI report. 

Ivankov also reinforced old relationships with leaders of various Eurasian criminal underworld groups, such as the Budapest-based Mogilevich organization and the Solnt-sevskaya family, Moscow’s mightiest criminal enterprise, which had more than 1,700 members. Its neighborhood stronghold in the suburbs of southern Moscow was where the communists released criminals when they were freed from the Gulag. These hoodlums and their offspring grew into tough mob leaders who flourished during perestroika when they seized more than eighty commercial companies, prime real estate, hotels, and other property. The Solntsevskaya organization is divided into ten- to twelve member combat brigades, which are headed by criminal avoritets. Each unit controls assigned banks and business concerns in Moscow and the suburbs. At the same time, the group has a shared fund, or an obshchak, to which all brigades allocate money on a regular basis. When friction arises, members of several brigades come together to negotiate. 

With other crime groups, however, Ivankov battled for territory. He was particularly determined to dominate the nascent Russian trade in cocaine, a drug that had quickly soared in popularity among the nation’s nouveaux riches. Two Russian criminals stood in his way. One was the Georgian vor Valeri “Globus” Glugech, the first gangster to set up large-scale drug importation to Moscow from suppliers in the United States, a venture that made him a wealthy man. Ivankov invited Globus to visit the United States in early 1993 and “offered” to buy out his operation, a proposal Globus refused. In March 1993, Globus was shot to death by a sniper outside a discotheque he owned in Moscow. Three days later, his principal lieutenant, Anatoly Semionov, was gunned down in front of his Moscow apartment. Two weeks after that, another top aide, Vladislav Wanner, was killed at an open-air gun range in Moscow. At a May 1994 sit-down in Vienna, the heads of several Russian organized crime groups officially awarded Ivankov the remnants of Globus’s drug business. 

The next Russian drug kingpin to fall was Elson’s friend Sergei “Sylvester” Timofeyev, who directed his mob’s activities from Cyprus. Timofeyev and Ivankov had had a long-standing beef. Ivankov had an illegitimate son, Viktor Nikiforov, also known as Kalina, who had become a thief-in law and a powerful figure in the Moscow underworld while his father was in prison. Just before Ivankov was released, Kalina was murdered. Most underworld figures believed Sylvester had ordered the hit, although no one could prove it. 

Typically, however, Russian gangsters do not let their personal animosities stand in the way of their business, and the two men continued to make deals. In July 1994, Sylvester and Ivankov completed a drug transaction, after which Sylvester complained that he had been shortchanged by $300,000. A few weeks later Sylvester traveled to New York to work out the dispute with Ivankov. The meeting ended with the two cursing and shouting at each other, Ivankov accusing Timofeyev of having murdered Kalina, as well as assassinating his friend Otari Kvantrishvili outside a Moscow bathhouse. One month after the altercation, Sylvester was blown apart in Moscow by a car bomb placed in his Mercedes, and he had to be identified by his dental records. 

Ivankov also nurtured his high-level contacts with corrupt Russian government leaders, as well as with former leaders of Russian intelligence and military services. He employed high-profile former foreign government officials as his international “diplomats.” One such figure was Tofik Azimov, the former principal representative of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the European Economic Community. Azimov was handpicked by Ivankov to provide a “legitimate” front for Atkom, a “consulting firm” that allegedly laundered tens of millions of dollars out of a $10,000-a-month office suite in Vienna. The city is popular with Russian mobsters because of its strict banking secrecy laws, its three-hour flight time from Moscow, and its abundance of corrupt state bureaucrats. The money laundering operation was, in fact, directed by Ivankov’s son Eduard, who “conducts a wide array of financial and banking transactions throughout Central and Western Europe (including England) in an effort to launder proceeds of Ivankov’s illegal activities,” according to the FBI. Atkom employed two female secretaries, a former member of the Austrian Special Forces who worked as an armed bodyguard, and a Russian emigrant and an Austrian citizen who did nothing but process banking transactions and money transfers, according to a classified Austrian police document. Azimov came in handy when two Solntsevskaya crime lords had to leave Russia because of attempts on their lives; it was he who arranged for the mobsters’ visas through Atkom. As stunned FBI officials later learned, the Russian gangsters were even welcomed into the country by Viennese police officers with gifts of semiautomatic Glock pistols “for self-defense.” 

Within just a year after he arrived in the “New Land,” Ivankov had succeeded in extending his insidious influence from Austria to Denver to the icy Baltic republics. His organization was visionary, well managed, efficient, wealthy, merciless, and expanding. He muscled into Russia’s oil, aluminum, and arms businesses. Tens of millions of dollars of illicit proceeds was laundered through the U.S. banking system. He frequently used front companies, through cooperation or extortion, to facilitate money laundering and the sponsorship of “business associates” for visas to enter the United States. It was said by his associates that he could provide millions of dollars in credit to finance a deal with a single phone call. His vast power was “propelled by a network of influential contacts and seemingly unlimited funds,” said a classified FBI report. “Ivankov is a shrewd and respected leader over a group of ruthless members knowledgeable in business, financial, legal, and government operations. In addition to extortion, money laundering, drug trafficking, Ivankov is suspected of not only arranging numerous murders but bragging about them.” 

By January 1995, Ivankov and the Russian mob had grown so bold that they even convened a summit in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico, at the San Juan Hotel and Casino. Shortly before the rendezvous, Toronto-based Russian crime figure Joseph Sigalov was overheard on a Royal Canadian Mounted Police wiretap boasting that he was going to Puerto Rico “with Yaponchick [Ivankov]… to discuss who we will kill, fuck!” Known by his gangland friends as Mr. Tomato because of his oversized head, Sigalov was the publisher of Exodus, an influential Orthodox Jewish newspaper in Toronto sponsored by the Chabad movement, which was active in resettling Russian Jewish refugees. Sigalov also owned a bakery and was a venture capitalist. 

Robert Kaplan, Canada’s solicitor general in charge of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (the nation’s CIA) from 1980 to 1984, and a member of Parliament for twenty-five years until he stepped down in 1993, was Sigalov’s business adviser for thirteen months beginning sometime in 1994. Kaplan said that charges that Sigalov was a mobster were “ridiculous… and hard to believe…. It was never an issue for me while I was working for him… because there was nothing reported about it then or said about it. No one in the community said this is someone to stay away from and no one did say that. He was very active in the Russian Jewish community in Toronto, which was rapidly growing,” adding that Sigalov helped the émigrés join synagogues and rediscover their religion. 

But Sigalov’s good deeds and legitimate business affairs were little more than a cover for international heroin smuggling, arms trafficking, and extortion. In one incident, Ivankov ordered Sigalov and Vyacheslav Sliva, the godfather of Russian organized crime in Canada, to have their henchmen visit the mayor of Kharkov in Ukraine. The thugs not only strong-armed the mayor into paying protection money to operate the city-run casino, but for good measure also took over control of Ukraine’s state-sponsored lottery, according to the RCMP. 

Sigalov and Ivankov were joined at the Puerto Rican conclave by the elite of the Russian underworld: along with Joseph Kobzon and mob leaders from Georgia, St. Petersburg, Miami, and Brighton Beach were Viktor Averin and Sergei Mikhailov, heads of the Solntsevskaya organization. Although the Puerto Rican meeting was supposed to be a discussion about “who we will kill, fuck,” the mob bosses seized the occasion to express their ire at Ivankov. They were incensed over his reckless behavior, accusing him of gratuitously murdering dozens of Russian cops, customs officers, and tax police in his unbridled quest to dominate Russia’s drug trade. The violence was attracting too much attention from the law and ruining everybody’s business, they complained. When they patiently tried to work out an equitable division of the drug spoils, an implacable Ivankov simply refused. Miraculously, the mobsters did manage to agree on several mutually beneficial rubouts without a quarrel. 

Not surprisingly, Kobzon offered a far different version of the events in Puerto Rico to a Russian newspaper. He claimed that he had traveled to the Caribbean to enjoy an old-fashioned vacation with several family members and close friends, including Valery Weinberg, publisher of the Manhattan based Novoye Russkoye Slovo, the largest and most influential Russian-language daily newspaper in America. With a circulation of some 180,000, it reaches nearly every Russian émigré home in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut, where more than 300,000 now live. The paper is unique among the dozens of Russian publications in America for its routine glorification of the Russian mob and its vilification of U.S. law enforcement, especially the FBI, further contributing to the alienation of an émigré group that has bountiful enough reasons to suspect authority. The paper’s editorial slant has helped to keep the émigré community insular and suspicious. Nevertheless, in March 1999, Weinberg received the prestigious “outstanding leadership” award for his work on behalf of Soviet Jewry from the UJA-Federation, a large, nationwide Jewish philanthropic organization. Weinberg’s wife, Lilly, is the UJA’s New York Russian division chairwoman. The awards dinner was held at Manhattan’s luxurious Plaza Hotel and the featured speaker was Senator Charles Schumer, the junior Democratic senator from New York, who said that “as you better yourselves, you better America. Those who say you should close the doors to immigration should come into this ballroom.” The ballroom included Weinberg’s friends, some of whom have used business success and philanthropy to, in effect, launder their questionable pasts, and rub shoulders with the unwitting elite of the American Jewish community. 

Weinberg’s philanthropy extended to writing character references for Kobzon after the United States State Department revoked Kobzon’s visa and banned him from entering the country in June 1995 because of his Mafiya ties. Although Weinberg says he never met Ivankov or any other mobster while vacationing in Puerto Rico, Kobzon recalled socializing with the engaging vor. “When he recited [Russian poet Sergei] Yesenin by heart, I thought, ‘well, this is a swell guy.’”  

“We spent a wonderful time with our families,” Kobzon went on. “I have a photograph where we are all together in Puerto Rico,” recounted the singer, who favors pancake makeup, eyeliner, and a thick black toupee shaped into a pompadour. “We spent days on the beach. In the evenings we relaxed. We had a daily regimen. We went to restaurants—then to the casino…. This was all in one hotel. And that’s how it lasted for several days straight. Then Slava Fetisov [the former NHL superstar and now a coach for the New Jersey Devils] came to see us for two days. Then Anzor Kikalishvili [who succeeded Otari Kvantrishvili as president of the mobbed-up Twenty First Century Association, which helped Ivankov win his early release from the Gulag] called from Miami and said: ‘Guys, it’s very dull here. How is it where you are? Can I join you for a day?’ 

“’Come, Come.’ So he came for a day.” 

FBI agents monitoring the summit loitered around the hotel wearing paisley shirts, trying to look inconspicuous, and filming as much as they could from behind potted plants. After the Russians departed, agents scoured Kobzon’s hotel room for incriminating evidence and retrieved a matchbook in a wastepaper basket with Ivankov’s name and Brooklyn phone number on it. They also discovered that calls had been placed to Ivankov’s cell phone from Kobzon’s hotel room.  

This is what the FBI was reduced to. Scrounging around Kobzon’s room, looking for clues, and picking up matchbooks out of garbage cans. The FBI had inaugurated its Russian organized crime unit only some eight months earlier. Already playing a bad game of catch-up, it was ill prepared for the tidal wave of Russian criminals unleashed on the world by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Apart from what it learned from a few scattered prosecutions, the bureau was still largely in the dark about how this new Red Menace operated, who controlled it, and steps that might be taken to stop it. The FBI did realize, however, that it had to act fast. 

Unfortunately, the chronically turf-jealous FBI barely cooperated with the government’s other investigative bodies who were also investigating the Russians, such as the INS, the IRS, and the DEA. To make matters worse, local police forces were kept almost completely in the dark. (In 1999, relations between the influential FBI office in New York and the Manhattan district attorney’s office —which were conducting separate investigations into money laundering charges at the Bank of New York by the Russian mob—became so hostile that the bureau announced that any agency that got in its way would be slammed with obstruction-of-justice charges, according to the New York Times.) The FBI preferred to operate independently, poring over wiretap transcripts of suspected mobsters, tailing suspects, recruiting informants, and generally trying to gather intelligence on the burgeoning Russian Mafiya. 

Despite Ivankov’s flagrant, multinational criminal activities, during his first years in America, the FBI had a hard time even locating him. “At first all we had was a name,” says the FBI’s James Moody. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around, and had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was in a luxury condo in Trump Towers” in Manhattan.  

But almost as soon as they found him, he disappeared again leaving nothing but vapor trails for the FBI to follow. “Ivankov,” explained an FBI agent, “didn’t come from a walk-and-talk culture,” like Italian gangsters who take walks to discuss family business so they can’t be bugged or overheard by the bureau. “As soon as he’d sniff out the feds, he’d go into hiding for days at a time,” a trait that made him harder to keep tabs on than Italian mobsters. 

“He was like a ghost to the FBI,” says Gregory Stasiuk, the New York State Organized Crime Task Force special investigator. Stasiuk picked up Ivankov’s trail at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the Trump-owned casino that the real estate magnate boasted was the “eighth wonder of the world.” The Taj Mahal had become the Russian mob’s favorite East Coast destination. As with other high rollers, scores of Russian hoodlums received “comps” for up to $100,000 a visit for free food, rooms, champagne, cartons of cigarettes, entertainment, and transportation in stretch limos and helicopters. “As long as these guys attract a lot of money or spend a lot of money, the casinos don’t care,” a federal agent asserted. Russian mobsters like Ivankov proved a windfall for the casinos, since they often lost hundreds of thousands of dollars a night in the “High-Roller Pit,” sometimes betting more than $5,000 on a single hand of blackjack. “They’re degenerate gamblers,” says Stasiuk. Although the FBI still couldn’t find Ivankov, Stasiuk managed to tail him from the Taj Mahal to shipping mogul Leonard Lev’s sprawling home on a dead-end street in Far Rockaway, Queens, and on another occasion, from the Taj to the Paradise Club, a notorious Russian mob haunt in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, then managed by godfather Marat Balagula’s youngest daughter, Aksana, the one time aspiring optometrist. 

So wily did Ivankov prove to be that the FBI couldn’t gather enough evidence against him to convince a federal judge to grant a wiretap. The Canadian Mounties eventually came to the bureau’s aid, for they had recorded numerous conversations between Sliva and Ivankov plotting various crimes. The grateful feds used the recordings to win a court-authorized wiretap to listen in on his multiple telephones, which provided the fullest picture yet of the vor’s world. 

In one monitored phone conversation, Ivankov was barely able to conceal his rage when a colleague in Russia described how several mob associates were shot to death in an ambush in downtown Moscow by a rival gang. In another transatlantic call, an accomplice told Ivankov that two deputy mayors in Moscow who were on Ivankov’s payroll were becoming too independent-minded. “They are trying to get involved in politics and they are fucking wanting to get rid of us,” complained Ivankov’s comrade. “These people are our tribe.” 

“I’m trying to solve the problem with the deputy mayor,” Ivankov brusquely replied. 

In another call, an underworld confidant told Ivankov that he had an Israeli gangster “beaten severely” for trying to cheat him on a diamond deal. 

“It’s not enough just to beat him… this fucking animal,” Ivankov growled. 

When Ivankov learned that a piece of property in Russia he had coveted was taken over by a rival mob, he screamed, “No fucking way! I’ll fuck them all, the living and the dead!” 

Ivankov had many prosaic conversations about the philosophy of the vors with Moucheg (aka Misha) Azatian, an imposing enforcer type who lived in Los Angeles. The code of the vor—which Ivankov called “human law”—was pure, honest, and uncorrupted by politics. He ridiculed the political pretensions that were the foundation of perestroika, declaring that it was merely a cynical plot devised by the ruling class to control the populace. After perestroika “they’ll invent something different, again and again, and this is an endless process,” he told Misha. “But in any case, everything is fine, brother. We live according to human law. And according to the law of our mini-state, everything is done in an honorable and honest way. And that’s it.” 

“Of course, brother,” Misha replied. “There is nothing better than human law, and that’s the only important thing in the world.” 

“Of course, conscience and honor—that’s the only law we keep,” Ivankov reminded him. 

The FBI got particularly lucky in the autumn of 1994 when Bank Chara in Moscow collapsed under suspicious circumstances, costing its depositors more than $30 million. Some $3.5 million of the money had been invested in Summit International, a New York investment house that had been founded by two of Chara’s Russian board members, Alexander Volkov and Vladimir Voloshin. The Summit executives were no strangers to organized crime. Volkov, Summit’s president, is a thin, wiry, chain-smoking ex-KGB officer with a noxious temper. Voloshin, Summit’s VP, is a member of the Lyubertskaya crime family in Moscow, where he had once mixed up a target’s address and torched the wrong apartment, as well as its female inhabitant. Their unlicensed Wall Street investment firm was actually a giant Ponzi scheme, preying mostly on Russian émigrés who were promised up to 120 percent per annum returns on phony companies with names like “Silicon Walley.” To cover itself in a cloak of fiscal respectability, Summit entered into a contract with Prudential Securities vice president Ronald Doria to serve as its financial adviser. (Doria was later terminated by Prudential, and took the Fifth, refusing to testify, during a National Association of Securities Dealers arbitration hearing.) Between 1993 and 1995, Volkov and Voloshin took in $8 million from investors, spending nearly the entire sum on their own lavish entertainment: beautiful women, long weekends in the Caribbean, and gambling junkets to Atlantic City. In one night alone, Voloshin lost $100,000 at Bally’s Hotel; he covered it with his investors’ money. 

In the spring of 1995 Bank Chara’s new president, Roustam Sadykov, flew to New York to ask Summit’s directors to return the bank’s missing funds. When the men refused, Sadykov turned to Ivankov to collect the debt. “This should be fairly simple,” Ivankov told an accomplice over a government wire. “If you call the men and use my name that makes people do what they are supposed to do.” When Ivankov and two henchmen paid a visit to Summit’s Wall Street offices, Volkov and Voloshin fled in terror to Miami. But Ivankov’s men caught up with them when they returned to Manhattan, kidnapping them at gunpoint from the bar of the Hilton Hotel and forcing them to sign a contract promising to pay one of Ivankov’s associates $3.5 million. “You understand who you are dealing with?” snarled Ivankov to the Summit officials. As an inducement to honor their commitment, Voloshin’s father was stomped to death in a Moscow train station. 

Unbeknownst to Ivankov, however, the pair had informed the FBI of the extortion. Voloshin had initially flown to San Francisco to implore members of the Moscow-based Lyubertskaya crime family, which had a modest contingent in California, to help him rid himself of Ivankov, but when they declined, Voloshin and Volkov were left with the FBI as their only recourse. 

On the morning of June 8, 1995, a squad of FBI agents yanked a sleepy-eyed Ivankov from his mistress’s bed in Brighton Beach. They found a gun in the bushes outside the apartment and $75,000 in cash on the kitchen table. One of the documents that was seized contained the name of a Russian banker who was hiding in the United States with his wife and children. Although the FBI would have preferred to arrest Ivankov on bigger charges, and had been trying to gather evidence to assemble a racketeering case against him, they had no choice but to arrest him for extortion before he could kill the Russian bankers. As he was being led into the FBI building, a defiant Ivankov kicked and spit at reporters. “I eat my enemies for dinner,” he sneered. 

Ivankov might actually have avoided conviction had he shown his six co-defendants that same degree of loyalty he demanded from them. Incarcerated at the Manhattan Correctional Center awaiting trial with his underlings, Ivankov tried to bully them, dictating which attorneys they should hire, and instructing them how to subordinate their defense strategy to his. He warned that anyone who did not follow his orders would be his “enemy for life.” 

Still, there were rebellions. One day, Ivankov and his cohorts gathered in a tobacco-filled day room at MCC to figure out how to spin incriminating wiretap conversations. According to FBI interviews with Ivankov’s gang, Yakov “Billy Bombs” Volovnik, a nervous cokehead, who had a prior conviction for his role in a Russian mob jewelry theft ring, pleaded with Ivankov for funds to hire a decent attorney. Ivankov refused, ordering him to get the money from Leonid Abelis, the man who had been in charge of the day-to-day operations of the extortion plot. 

“I have no money to spare,” complained the six-foot, 220-pound, thirty-seven-year-old Abelis, a former machinist in Russia. “I’m paying for my own lawyer. I have my own family to think about.” 

“What, I do not have a family?” Ivankov angrily replied. When the hulking Abelis started to rise from his chair, the 150-pound, five-foot-four-inch, fiftyseven-year-old vor grabbed him by the shoulders and growled, “Sit down, you whore! I will settle everything with you shitheads!” 

Billy Bombs pulled the men apart, warning them not to quarrel in prison where they were undoubtedly under surveillance. 

Ivankov spared no expense for his own defense, hiring Barry Slotnick for a sum of $750,000. The fee was underwritten by the sale of property in upstate New York owned by shipping magnate Leonard Lev; the proceeds were routed through a company in Monrovia, Liberia, according to a U.S. Customs agent. (Lev denies that he had anything to do with the defense costs and, in fact, didn’t even control the property at that time.) Whatever the case, Ivankov left his co-defendants to fend for themselves. But Abelis— who had fought with Ivankov over money—believed that he was being set up by Slotnick and Ivankov as the fall guy, and turned state’s evidence. Billy Bombs Volovnik quickly followed suit. 

Still, the government’s case had holes. Ivankov had carefully insulated himself by generally staying on the sidelines while his henchmen made the extortion threats, invoking his name to induce terror. Furthermore, the Summit executives scarcely fit the role of sympathetic victims. Not only had they stolen millions of dollars from their Russian-American clients, but according to court testimony, they had also taken more than $30 million from Russian banks before coming to America. 

Slotnick, who had just concluded a long mental competency hearing for his client Genovese crime boss Vincent Gigante, seemed unprepared during the crucial opening stages of Ivankov’s trial. He unconvincingly tried to portray the Russian godfather as a kind of Robin Hood who was guilty of nothing more than defending Bank Chara from greedy career criminals. Indeed, Slotnick argued, Ivankov was a Russian national hero who had been defying communism since grade school, spending half his life in the Gulag rather than being forced to sing the “Internationale.” 

But Abelis’s testimony proved devastating. Not only did he establish Ivankov as the mastermind of the Summit extortion, but for good measure, he described Ivankov’s shakedown of the Rasputin nightclub. After a five-week trial, the jury took just three hours to convict Ivankov and his associates of extortion. Voloshin and Volkov went into the Federal Witness Protection Program. In a subsequent trial, Ivankov and Leonard Lev were convicted for conspiring to arrange the sham marriage that allowed Ivankov to stay in the United States. 

At the sentencing for the second case, Slotnick’s partner, Jay Shapiro, compared Ivankov to Soviet Jewish refuseniks, Jews in Nazi Germany, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (“To use his [Ivankov’s] name in the same sentence as Solzhenitsyn is a sacrilege,” the FBI’s Raymond Kerr later remarked.) Ivankov was nevertheless smacked with a nine-and-a-half-year jail term for the two convictions. “Let them put me on the chopping block—let them crucify me on a cross,” snarled Ivankov. “I’m tough. I will survive!” 

In many respects, Ivankov does survive. Not only did he pave the way for the Russian Mafiya’s second wave to invade America, putting in place a significant web of businesses and criminal relationships, a legacy that could later be exploited by other mobsters, but, according to several North American law enforcement agencies and Italian crime bosses, Ivankov continued to run a sophisticated crime empire from the federal prison in Lewisburg, giving orders in ancient dialects like Assyrian and using criminal codes the FBI has yet to master. “The FBI, the MVD, the FSB [the former KGB] have stolen my life from me,” he told a Russian newspaper. “I have a list of who committed these crimes—both on the side of Russia and on the side of the FBI…. I know who all these people are. And I warn them that they will answer for their crimes.” 

In the winter of 1999, Ivankov was found with heroin in his cell and traces of the narcotic were detected in his urine. He was transferred to a maximum-security wing at Allenwood Federal Penitentiary.

7 

TARZAN 

In the middle of Miami’s shabby warehouse district near Hialeah Race Track stood a squat, windowless one-story building. As its name implied, Porky’s was a strip club, though it was much seedier than its namesake in the movie of the same title. In its dimly lit corridors, working-class Cuban men from the nearby rough-and-tumble neighborhoods pawed topless dancers, or received jiffy blow jobs for a few dollars a pop. In a filthy, dungeon like office, away from the ear-splitting disco music and the smoky bar where strippers solicited lap dances, Rocky, the forty-two-year-old day manager, remembered better days, when Porky’s was run by a brawny Russian gangster known as Tarzan. “Ivankov was here surrounded by three goons,” Rocky told me. “I saw Ivankov with my own eyes. Did Ivankov and Tarzan know each other? Oh, yeah! Did they do business together? No question. The Russian mob came in all the time.” 

Porky’s was once a howling, hedonistic beacon for Russian wiseguys from Tashkent to Brighton Beach. Gangsters craving sultry young, $1,000-a-night Eurasian prostitutes, Colombian cocaine, and Soviet-era weapons knew Porky’s was the place to come to. Recreational drugs, bootlegged boxes of Philip Morris cigarettes, and stolen bottles of ice-cold Stolichnaya vodka could be procured just as easily. The club was abuzz with so much Russian mob activity that even local policemen jokingly referred to it as Redfellas South. 

Rocky pointed out a memento from Tarzan’s glory days: a framed photo of the club’s most famous stripper, mega porn star Amber Lynn, who charged $25,000 a week to perform. “The regular dancers [at Porky’s] didn’t get paid,” said Rocky, who was once a bodyguard for one of the biggest Colombian drug lords in Florida and had emptied a thirty-round Mac-10 clip into a nightclub during a gangland dispute. “They worked on tip money, much of which I suspect was kicked back to Tarzan.” Adorning the wall was also a promotional flyer for Porky’s fourth anniversary party, featuring a photo montage of Tarzan fondling a series of exotic dancers. In one shot, he leered directly into the camera, while two big-haired, blond strippers pressed their enormous bosoms into each side of his face. Rocky said the flyer used to hang in the office next to a photo of Tarzan’s four year-old daughter. “Tarzan doesn’t care about anyone except himself. He has no loyalty to anyone. One night he cut the commission's the girls get on drinks. They went ballistic. I said, ‘Wait till the end of the shift. They are threatening to go on strike.’ He backed off. I said, ‘Why do you always have to screw everything up?’ He was a piece of shit!” 

On a September day at the tail end of Hurricane Floyd, when rain was still soaking the blacktops, I took a taxi to the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami to interview Tarzan. His real name is Ludwig Fainberg, and he was, until the feds nabbed him, the flamboyant ringleader of the South Florida Russian mob. When I got to the prison, the guards relieved me of my passport, my keys, and a pack of chewing gum. “It’ll cost us $2,000 to unjam a lock from that gum if an inmate gets ahold of it,” I was told by way of explanation. After passing through a metal detector and two machines that monitored my hand, which had been coded with incandescent ink, I was led to a large, open rectangular room where prisoners in gray jumpsuits silently waited for their lawyers and guests. 

In a glass-walled cubicle at the back of the room, I spotted Tarzan, a huffy, thirty-eight-year-old man with a grim glare, slumped over a brown Formica table. He used to have wild, acid-rock-size hair, but it was shorn now; he once took pride in a steroid-enhanced, muscular physique, but when I saw him he looked like a deflated inner tube. He slammed a thick document down on the table. It was his indictment, and it was a heavy load. Conspiracy to distribute cocaine and heroin. Weapons trafficking. “It says, ‘The U.S.A. vs. Ludwig Fainberg,’” he griped. “Who can fight the U.S. government?” He sounded like an adolescent. “I already spent a million dollars on lawyers,” he said. 

Tarzan first became conspicuous in Miami in the early 1990s. He had all the makings of a successful mobster: he was greedy (he held numerous fund-raisers for various charities and the state of Israel, pocketing 85 cents of every dollar, according to the DEA; Tarzan is adamant that he never stole from Jewish charities); he was ruthless (he once forced a woman to eat gravel); and he was ambitious (he once brokered a complicated negotiation involving the transfer of a Russian military submarine to Colombian narco traffickers). 

In Russia, Tarzan told me, dishonesty is a trait that’s bred in the womb. Deprivation teaches Russians to be cunning predators—it’s the only way to survive, he said. Americans, on the other hand, are trusting souls. Their rules, Tarzan figured, were made to be broken. 

Ludwig Fainberg was born in Odessa in 1958. When he was three, his family moved to Chernovtsi, a small city in western Ukraine. He sang in a national boys choir, and was trained in a boxing program set up by the Soviet military. “When I was a kid everything that I did made people laugh,” he said. His inspiration was a Soviet comedy team that was similar in style to that of the Three Stooges. His stepfather, who manufactured Persian rugs and thick fur hats for a Soviet factory, was a dealer on the burgeoning black market. He’d trade rugs and fur caps for choice cuts of meat, some of which he’d barter for hard-to-get items, such as theater tickets. Then he’d trade the tickets for something more valuable—fresh vegetables. 

One day in 1972, when Ludwig was thirteen, his parents announced that they were moving the family to Israel, where they hoped to increase their already considerable wealth. Ludwig, who had never known the family to identify with Judaism in any way, was confused. “Jew” was just something stamped on their passport, he thought, signifying their ethnic group. To him, being Jewish simply meant having certain privileges. “Jews were the richest people in town,” he told me. “Jews had cars, Jews had money, Jews lived in nice apartments. We were comfortable. My mother had nice clothes and jewelry. We took a vacation once a year to Odessa, a stunning city with a boardwalk and gorgeous beaches. It was filled with mobsters and entertainers. It was a city with a Jewish flavor.” 

In Russia refuseniks—Jews who had denounced communism and were denied an exit visa—were sometimes accorded a touch of grudging respect. But in many cases Jews like the Fainbergs, who left for economic reasons, were despised. When Ludwig’s teachers learned that he was moving to Israel, he was forced to stand in front of the six-hundred-member student body and denounced as a traitor. On the way home, he says, he was beaten by classmates. “Why do we have to be Jewish,” Tarzan cried to his parents. 

Before leaving, the Fainbergs converted their money into gold and diamonds, stashing some in shoes with false bottoms and hiding the rest in secret compartments of specially built tables and chairs, which they shipped to Israel. There, Ludwig lived on a kibbutz. According to his friends, that’s where he got his nickname—he bestowed it upon himself after jumping off the fourth floor of a building to attract attention. 

Tarzan, who soon stood at six feet one, joined the Israeli navy and applied to the elite Navy SEALS commando unit. But he washed out during basic training, and served the remaining three years of his service in the main weapons room of a destroyer. He wanted to be an officer but failed the exam. “I did not have enough brains,” he told a reporter. “It was a very difficult exam.” 

In 1980, a restless Tarzan moved to East Berlin. He had one Russian friend in the city who had official-looking medical diplomas—just one of the many varieties of forged documents the Russian mob had for sale. The friend asked Tarzan if he wanted to be a doctor, too. “Are you crazy?” Tarzan said incredulously. “Do you think I want to kill patients?” He settled for a dental technician’s license, but his gross incompetence got him fired from seven jobs in a row. 

Like many young Russian émigrés in East Berlin, Tarzan joined a mob crew. He specialized in credit card fraud and counterfeiting. Then the brawny lad decided to try his hand at extortion. Working for a mob group run by the notorious Efim Laskin—who had sold weapons to the Red Brigades — Tarzan was ordered to nab a German banker. Tarzan and two accomplices accosted the banker as he ate lunch at an expensive restaurant and forced him into the trunk of their car. But when the man swore he could get no money until his bank opened after its lunch break, the hapless extortionists agreed to release him, and arranged to meet him at the bank at four o’clock. Moments before the rendezvous, Tarzan stepped out of the car and walked to a nearby pillar for a smoke. Suddenly, a group of rival gangsters in four Mercedes-Benzes pulled up in front of the bank and beat his accomplices severely. A terrified Tarzan fled all the way to Brighton Beach. 

Tarzan found Brighton Beach to be an unsavory haunt for murderers and thieves. “It was the Wild West,” he recalled. “I took my gun everywhere.” His fortunes improved markedly when, soon after arriving in Brooklyn, he married Maria Raichel, a wastrel Russian Mafiya princess. Her grandfather, her ex-husband, and her brother-in-law were all known by the same sobriquet— Psyk—the Russian word for “psycho.” Her grandfather earned the name after he cold-bloodedly stabbed a man to death in Russia. Her first husband, Semion, and his brother Naum eventually became big-time extortionists, and ran their own crew; but because of their irrational behavior they were shunned by other Russian gangsters. Semion, for instance, threw a Ukrainian prostitute into a bathtub and threatened to toss in an electric appliance until she promised him a share of her earnings. Then, for good measure, he forced her to give him a blow job. The woman subsequently told her tale to the cops and Semion was arrested. A few days later, she received a long-distance phone call from a deep-throated man who told her that someone wanted to speak to her. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, they will kill me!” a voice cried. It was the woman’s three-year-old child, who was living with relatives in Ukraine. The woman dropped the charges. “He’s an evil, horrible person,” says a New York City detective who worked on the case. 

Although Tarzan had married into mob royalty, the relationship had its downside. Maria wanted him to live off the fortune left behind by Semion, who was serving a seven-year prison sentence in Germany for extortion. She bought Tarzan $3,000 tuxedos for nights on the town, and expected him to stay home and watch game shows. He felt like a sissy and found refuge in the criminal exploits of Grecia Roizes. Their families had been close friends in Chernovtsi, and later in Israel. In Russia, Roizes had spent three years in a prison in Siberia for hitting someone so hard in the stomach that his guts came through a recent medical incision. Now he headed one of the most feared Russian crews in Brighton Beach and owned a wholesale furniture store with branches in Coney Island, Italy, and Russia. (The DEA and a knowledgeable figure in the Genovese underworld say that the store fronted a heroin business that involved the Gambinos, the Genoveses, and a host of Russian mobsters.) 

Tarzan helped Roizes’s crew with torch jobs and extortion, and soon developed an interest in furniture. After a young couple in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, refused to sell their wholesale furniture store to Roizes for a fire sale price, they permanently disappeared. Tarzan claims that he was shocked when they vanished, but he happily took over their business. 

Inevitably, the Russian mobsters crossed paths with their Italian counterparts. By intuition, or perhaps a sure knowledge of the territory, this happened to Tarzan on a day when an old woman walked into his new store and asked to buy a cheap bedroom set on credit. “This ain’t a bank, lady,” a clerk named Vinny curtly replied. Tarzan overheard the conversation and gave her the set for free. He even loaded it on his truck and drove it to her house. Tarzan said that he felt sorry for her, and that besides, he liked catering to old people and “kibitzing” with them. 

The following day, a powerfully built Italian man sauntered into a video store that Tarzan ran and introduced himself only as Frankie. “I’m the son of the old woman,” he said, offering Tarzan coffee and pastries. “I owe you. Anything you want is yours.” 

Tarzan says he was awestruck. “You could feel his power,” he recalled. “He was the kind of man who wouldn’t take no for an answer.” 

Over the next few years, if the rent at Tarzan’s video store was raised by the landlord, he’d call his friend Frankie, and it would be taken care of. When an Italian extortionist tried to shake down Tarzan, Frankie’s boys had him pistol-whipped in front of his wife. “They are going to find you in a car cut in little pieces,” the wife shrieked at Tarzan. 

Tarzan claimed he never knew the identity of his Italian patron until one day in 1987, when he saw a picture of him in the tabloids. The papers identified him as the late Frank Santora, a notable in the Colombo organized crime family, and reported that he had been shot twice at close range outside a dry-cleaning store on a quiet Brooklyn street. 

Soon, many of Tarzan’s friends were coming to grief: Vladimir Reznikov, one of Brighton Beach’s most successful professional killers, was shot to death in front of Marat Balagula’s popular restaurant and nightclub Odessa. Then Tarzan lost his crewmate Alexander Slepinin—the three hundred-pound, six-foot-five-inch tattooed hit man known as the Colonel who was brutally executed by Monya Elson. “My mother loved the Colonel,” Tarzan gloomily recalled. 

☭☭☭☭☭☭☭

Fainberg decided he should move to a safer neighborhood. In 1990, he left his wife and Brighton Beach behind, and headed south. In America, Miami had become the Russian mob’s second city. Like Brighton Beach, it had a large Russian immigrant population. In the early 1970s, the Miami Beach Police Department began to notice that an inordinate number of Russian émigré taxi drivers were committing criminal acts. These Russians didn’t fit the cops’ preconceived notion of crooks, however. “They were always neatly dressed and very clean-cut and gave the appearance of wanting to fit in and learn the American way of life,” says a federal law enforcement report, written in 1994. Gradually, the Miami police learned that these taxi drivers were involved in many of the same crimes that had made the Italian Mafia so powerful: extortion, narcotics, gambling, and prostitution. “They were a very tight group of criminals who had a code of silence that even the threat of arrest could not break,” the report added. 

By the 1980s, the Miami Beach police noted that crimes involving Russian criminals were growing craftier; their schemes, more involved—well-organized narcotics trafficking, burglary and counterfeiting rings, and sophisticated bank and jewelry frauds. Even as the Russian mobsters graduated to white-collar crime, a continuing influx of Russians allowed them to control the streets. “Russian Organized Crime is a new and serious threat to South Florida,” warned the 1994 report. “This is a well-educated group of active, young criminals.” 

By the time that Tarzan arrived in Florida, the Russians pouring in were not the taxi-driving sort. “Miami was a boomtown for the Russian mob, which came after perestroika with the hundreds of millions they had looted during privatization,” says Assistant U.S. Attorney Diana Fernandez. They used their vast war chest to buy row after row of pricey condominiums in North Beach, and paid tens of millions more for the gated mansions on Fisher Island, the city’s most fashionable residential area. Many of the buyers were high-ranking Russian military officers and ex-KGB officials. “These were the people who held together the Evil Empire,” one real estate agent said. “These were the assassins and the spies.” The Versace-clad Russians loved the balmy, palm-studded tropics, where each new day brought the potential for a multimillion-dollar score. Who needed a shvitz in a century-old, grime-encrusted Brighton Beach bathhouse when wiseguys could go for a steam and a sit-down at the dégagé Art Deco Hotel Delano’s rooftop spa, and maybe even spy a movie star? In Miami, the Russians found their ideal dacha: a base for money laundering that was also close to South American cocaine. “Porky’s became the focal point where Russian gangsters could get their bearings when they came to South Florida,” said Fernandez. 

Tarzan had opened Porky’s with the help of William Seidle, whom he latched on to shortly after arriving in Miami. Seidle, a seventy-one-year-old, longtime Floridian, owns a hugely profitable Nissan dealership, as well as the largest Suzuki dealership in America, and is said in Russian mob circles to have a criminal lineage that could be traced to Meyer Lansky, the mobster who once boasted that the Mafia was bigger than U.S. Steel. According to Brighton Beach gangster Vladimir Ginzberg, the Russian mobsters, out of deference, call the energetic, silver-haired Seidle Stariyk, the Russian word for “old man.” (Seidle denies that he knew Lansky or has ever done business with organized crime.) Brent Eaton, a veteran DEA agent, says that Seidle has been under investigation by numerous federal agencies for more than twenty years, although he has never been indicted. “Bill Seidle is a great guy,” William Lehman, a former Democratic congressman, told me. Lehman, who represented South Florida for twenty years, said Seidle “enjoyed Tarzan’s outrageousness. I’ve know Bill for fifty years and he’s always run a kosher business. There are no blemishes.” 

Seidle took a shine to Tarzan the moment they met. “Tarzan was a boisterous, big-mouthed Yiddel,” Seidle told me in a Yiddish drawl, one hot, buggy day in Miami. “He’s a Jewboy, you know. Just a big-mouth kid, always bragging, boisterous, but very nice, very kind… I would describe him as a very, very dear friend. I was close to him. He was close to our family. They loved Tarzan. They think a lot of him. They still feel the same.” 

Seidle saw in Tarzan a younger version of himself: a bold risk-taker, not adverse to crossing the line. The men decided that there was a lot of money to be made in the “pussy” business so Seidle staked the young Russian to Porky’s for a hidden share of the off-the-book profits, assert court documents. Seidle admits only that he collected rent from the club as its landlord, and he denies receiving club profits. 

Tarzan’s criminal ambitions did not stop with Porky’s. According to government wiretap affidavits, Tarzan cultivated vast fields of hemp in the Everglades, with giant grow lights and a landing strip. Tarzan boasted to at least two government undercover agents that he was using aircraft to ferry in tons of marijuana from Jamaica. He allegedly even recruited his geeky-looking younger brother, Alex, to mule seven large, green garbage bags stuffed with marijuana from New York City to Porky’s. “Alex was so afraid of being robbed that immediately after receiving the drugs, he spent the night in a New York City hotel rather than at his own home; he then drove the entire trip without stopping for the night because he was convinced that he would be apprehended carrying the drugs,” asserts a federal wiretap affidavit. 

Marijuana was, for Tarzan, a gateway drug. Before long, he had moved on to cocaine. At the time, the Russian Mafiya had little contact with the Colombian drug cartels, though they were eager to remedy that failing. Tarzan helped forge a connection, brokering cocaine deals between the Colombians and the most powerful mob family in St. Petersburg. In one instance, according to the DEA, he smuggled more than one hundred kilos of cocaine in crates of freeze-dried shrimp that were flown from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to St. Petersburg. He also ran coke directly out of Miami, a charge he hotly denies. The street price for cocaine in Russia was $60,000 per kilo; for every kilo, Tarzan made a thousand dollars. 

Tarzan’s principal link to the Colombians came through two men, Juan Almeida and Fernando Birbragher. Almeida, thirty-seven years old and the son of a Portuguese-born Miami real estate and construction mogul, had been a major cocaine dealer since the mid-1980s. He supervised the tricky contacts with the Colombian drug cartels using his luxury car rental shops, a posh marina, and other businesses he owned as covers for his illicit activities. Birbragher, meanwhile, was a Colombian and a friend of Seidle, and had had excellent ties to the Cali cartel. In 1982, he admitted in a plea bargain that he had washed $54 million for them. “Birbragher was very close friends with Pablo Escobar,” says the DEA’s Brent Eaton. “He [Birbragher] used to buy him [Escobar] sports cars and luxury boats and do a lot of other things for him.” Top DEA officials assert that Birbragher also laundered drug money for Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian leader, who was convicted in 1992 of drug trafficking. 

Working closely with Almeida, who assured him that they wouldn’t run afoul of the law as long as they didn’t sell drugs in America, Tarzan vaulted, precociously, to the top tier of his profession. His cocaine business was doing so well that he found himself fending off hostile takeovers from other Russian mobsters eager to exploit the new cocaine trade with the Colombians. One of them was the man in charge of Ivankov’s street operations in the United States, who tried to move in on Tarzan’s thriving business shortly after the vor’s arrest. His name was Alexander Bor, otherwise known as Timoka. During a sit-down at the Russian banya, or bathhouse, at Miami’s Castle Beach Hotel, Tarzan turned the tables on Timoka, declaring that he wanted Timoka to pay him $15,000 a month in protection money to do business in Miami. “Get fucked,” Timoka sneered.

Luckily for Tarzan, Timoka made a grave error while in Miami when he put out the word that he was looking for professional hit men to rub out the two New York-based FBI agents who had captured Ivankov. A snitch passed the death threats on to the FBI, which put so much heat on Timoka that he abandoned his recently built $500,000 house in Massapequa, Long Island, and fled to Germany. 

Unchallenged, Tarzan proudly sat astride a dominion of crime, smugly holding court for visiting Russian dons, who often sought relief in Miami from the vicious mob wars raging at home. One of the most powerful dons was Anzor Kikalishvili, who bragged over an FBI wire that he had more than six hundred “soldiers” in South Florida. In May 1994, Tarzan introduced Kikalishvili to the owners of a local bagel shop and deli. Kikalishvili, flaunting gold chains, gold rings, and an Armani suit, bragged about his powerful Mafiya connections in Moscow. He then “persuaded” the couple to sell him 49 percent of the deli for a very low price, and to pay him $25,000 every month, for his protection. “That’s how it’s done in Russia,” he said. Terrified, the owners sold their share of the deli for $50,000, a fraction of its worth. Three months later, Kikalishvili visited the couple and ordered them to buy the restaurant back for $450,000. He assured them that if he left their home empty-handed, there would be an additional $100,000 penalty, and warned that he could “find them anywhere in the world and skin them like an animal.” The couple fled in terror to Canada with their children. Tarzan took over the deli with Kikalishvili as his silent partner. 

After extortion, Tarzan’s second favorite sport was degrading women. He once bound onto Porky’s stage during a burlesque show and dove into the muff of a blond stripper. He was arrested for performing a “lewd and lascivious” act, and fined $250. In his defense, Tarzan claimed that the stripper had opened her legs “a little more than the law allows.” In an incident filmed by the FBI from the roof of a building across the street from Porky’s, Tarzan chased a dancer out of the club and knocked her cold. On another occasion, he slammed a dancer to the ground in Porky’s parking lot, stomped on her face, and forced her to eat gravel. He once beat his mistress’s head against the steering wheel of his Mercedes until the space under the gas pedal pooled with blood. After he impregnated another woman, he ordered his cousin to threaten to slit her throat if she didn’t have an abortion. He also regularly abused his common-law wife, Faina, a frail, thirty-three-year-old beauty. When the police arrived at their home in response to 911 calls, she’d quiver in fear, sometimes huddled inside a locked car with her daughter. Faina never pressed charges, however. In 1997, a few minutes after dropping her daughter off at day care, Faina was killed when her car plowed into a tree traveling at a speed of more than 90 miles an hour in a 30-mile-per-hour zone. Her blood alcohol level was double the legal limit. The coroner’s office ruled that the death was an accident, although the feds initially suspected that Tarzan had murdered Faina and arranged her death to look like an accident. 

Tarzan denied that he killed Faina, but conceded that his behavior drove her to her death. If that behavior perturbed him, however, he didn’t show it, but rather bragged that he was a sex machine, and Faina couldn’t accommodate it. For instance, he claims he owned a “couples club” where he often spent evenings servicing wives in front of their voyeuristic husbands. He’d take out four or five buxom strippers at a time sailing on his thirty-four-foot yacht; while his baby daughter scooted around the galley, the adults orgied. He boasted that he could thumb through any adult magazine—Hustler, Playboy, Penthouse—“call my agent, get the girl to the club, and then take her out and fuck her brains out…. You can’t believe the ego boost this gives you. I was addicted to sex.” 

Meanwhile, Tarzan and Juan Almeida saw a way to get even tighter with the Colombians—by hooking them up with Russian gear. They had access to Russian military hardware, from aircraft to armored personnel carriers to submarines. Such goods were shockingly easy to come by in the armed forces of the former Soviet empire if you knew who to talk to. Russian armories, stored in physically deteriorating facilities, and guarded by indifferent, bribable soldiers, were easy pickings for the Mafiya.  

On Halloween day 1992, Tarzan traveled to Latvia, where he told the Colombians that he had Russian organized crime contacts who could help him procure six heavy-lift Russian military helicopters for Pablo Escobar, who wanted the machines to ferry chemicals to jungle labs that refined coke. Tarzan bragged to DEA undercover agents that Seidle financed 10 percent of the trip, an assertion Seidle denies. Tarzan was escorted by Almeida, Fernando Birbragher, and a host of Colombian and Cuban cutthroats. 

The trip was a bust, and Almeida and Birbragher blamed it on Tarzan. “Tarzan is an idiot,” Almeida told me with disgust. “He didn’t know anybody.” 

But in mid-1993 Tarzan scored in Moscow. According to the DEA, he and Almeida succeeded in purchasing up to six MI8 Russian military helicopters for $1 million each. Tarzan later boasted to government undercover agents that he had bought the helicopters to traffic coke for “Colombian drug barons” headed by Pablo Escobar, and, after the deal was completed, he stayed behind in Moscow to oversee the final details. At the request of the Colombians, the helicopters’seats were removed and fuel bladders were added to extend their range, Tarzan later told a government undercover agent. With everything set, Tarzan escorted the helicopters to an airport outside Moscow. But just as they were being loaded into the belly of a cargo plane bound for Bogotá, according to one of the key participants, half a dozen jeeps carrying men armed with automatic weapons roared onto the tarmac, encircling the transport. Tarzan was ordered to disgorge his precious shipment immediately. He had foolishly neglected to pay the local airport Mafiya for permission to purchase the helicopters. They threatened to kill him for it. He was hauled into a conference room at the airport to meet the two main mobsters. “They were like heavy weightlifters,” he told me. “Their shorts were small on them. They were incredible hulks. I was in deep shit.” But the Colombians held a certain mystique for the Russians, and by alluding to his close connections with them Tarzan was able to buy some valuable time. 

Desperate, Tarzan called Anzor Kikalishvili in Miami. Kikalishvili said he’d make some calls and try to smooth things over, but Tarzan would have to explain why he hadn’t cut the “boys” in for a share. In another series of frantic transatlantic phone calls, Tarzan related the mess to a smoldering Almeida. Almeida advised Tarzan to tell the Russians that the helicopters were for the legendary head of the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar, and that no one had told him that he was required to pay a bribe to get the equipment. Tarzan and Almeida hoped that the Russians, who still had little direct experience with the Colombians and the cocaine trade, might make an exception for Escobar— especially since Tarzan had dangled the carrot of future cocaine deals. If Escobar wanted the choppers, they replied, he’d have to show his face in Moscow and recover them himself. 

Almeida decided that the only way to retrieve the helicopters—and save Tarzan—was to go to Moscow posing as Pablo Escobar. At Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, Almeida was welcomed by a motorcade of thick-necked men driving big black Mercedes. He was escorted like a head of state to a five-star hotel in the center of the city, and led into a dark-paneled room, where more thick-necked men sat around a long conference table. Almeida walked past them to the head of the table where the don presided. There was a nervous silence. Suddenly, the Russian seized him in a bear hug, and cried, “Pablo, Pablo Escobar. What took you so long? Let’s do some real shit. Cocaine.” 

To celebrate their new friendship, the Russians took Almeida and Tarzan out for a night on the town. They went to a dingy boxing ring called the Kamikaze Club, where chain-smoking mobsters and their girlfriends, dressed in American designer gowns, had gathered to watch a match. Young men dressed in street clothes were led into the ring. Mafiya rules: only one could walk out alive. Blood spattered the crowd as spectators placed bets on their favorite combatant, and swilled vodka. In order to show that he was a high roller, Almeida ordered Tarzan to bet $500 on every fight, which was a lot of money in Russia at the time. The spectacle went on through the night. There was no airconditioning in the club and the stench of blood, Tarzan says, nearly made him vomit. Mortally injured boxers, their mouths half open, their ribs broken, were dragged from the mat and dumped in a landfill somewhere outside the city. The following day, Tarzan was permitted to fly the valuable cargo out of Moscow. Tarzan claims that the helicopters were immediately delivered to the drug barons. 

Tarzan’s crime wave was not passing unnoticed back in the United States. Alarmed at the scale and rapid expansion of his and other Russian mobsters’ operations, the state of Florida and a slew of federal law enforcement agencies, working with liaison officers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the German Federal Police, and the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, set up a task force called Operation Odessa to try to stem the criminal red tide. 

Operation Odessa’s guiding force was a Russian-born sergeant on the Miami police force, who posed as a corrupt undercover narcotics cop. He had succeeded in winning the mob’s confidence, infiltrating some of its most closely guarded sit-downs. What he discovered horrified him. In a few short years the Russians, through an unprecedented combination of brains, brawn, and chutzpah, had replaced the Gambino family, which had been decimated by years of relentless prosecutions, as one of the top crime groups in South Florida. “Their obvious sophistication far exceeds that of the La Cosa Nostra at its infant stage,” the bearded, professorial Miami assistant U.S. attorney Richard Gregory, one of Operation Odessa’s founders, told me in Miami. “Tarzan was the original top Russian figure in Miami as far as law enforcement was concerned.” 

Operation Odessa’s agents had so far been unable to infiltrate Tarzan’s close-knit world. That assignment fell to Tarzan’s old friend from Brighton Beach, Grecia Roizes, who had by this time acquired his nickname “the Cannibal.” (A booking sergeant in Brooklyn had called him “a fucking dirty Jew,” and he’d bitten off the tip of the man’s nose.) 

Roizes had also acquired a debt to the DEA. In 1992, he was arrested in Romania for trafficking heroin for Boris Nayfeld’s French Connection-sized operation based in Antwerp. Rather than rot in a Romanian prison, where he claimed to have been beaten and denied his heart medication, the Cannibal made a deal with the DEA. First, he ratted on the members of the heroin-smuggling operation, helping the feds shut it down. After that, the DEA dispatched him to the Adriatic port town of Fano, Italy, where he became partners with his longtime friend Monya Elson. Elson was running a vast money laundering business out of a furniture store for Semion Mogilevich. Thanks to the Cannibal, Elson was arrested by Italian authorities in 1995. He was held for murder, money laundering, drug trafficking, and for having ties to the Italian mob. “They kept me in total isolation for eighteen months,” Elson bitterly complained. “Five times a day, seven days a week, they shook my cell. They drove me nuts. I never spoke on the phone. I never had an American or Russian newspaper. Psychologically, they destroyed me.” 

While Elson was incommunicado, the Cannibal’s next assignment was in Miami. He had no trouble getting close to Tarzan. “The Cannibal and I were like brothers,” Tarzan told me. “We grew up in the same town in the Ukraine and lived on the same street in Israel. Our families were close. He’s the one who helped me when I arrived in Brighton Beach. He loved me.” 

Using $72,000 in cash supplied by the DEA, the Cannibal bought a managing partnership in Tarzan’s restaurant Babushka. Situated in one of Miami’s many strip malls, Babushka had a loyal following among Russian émigrés who were homesick for borscht, caviar, and kabobs. A local reviewer once described Babushka’s staff as “direct from Petrograd central casting…. A man/bear who resembles a general. A Ural-sized cook. A Rasputin-look-alike waiter.” 

But even in this theme park of a Russian mob joint, the Cannibal’s conduct stood out as ostentatious and vulgar. Not only did he bring in his friends, flirt with the waitresses, and pay for everything on the house, but he seemed to be trying to bring Babushka down, according to Paul, a slender, Russian-born piano player and songwriter who performed at Babushka with his wife, Nelli, a singer. 

“On New Year’s Eve, he came in drunk and high on cocaine, and was crude and loud,” said Paul. “His behavior was unbelievably bad. New Year’s Eve is a big, big celebration for the Russians. They buy presents, new clothes, jewelry. He had nothing ready for the restaurant.” Babushka’s New Year’s Eve parties were renowned for generous spreads of seafood, caviar, grilled meats, plenty of champagne and vodka, and great Russian music. “For 250 people, we had fewer than a hundred lobsters, almost no shrimp, no bread. There was almost no food on the table. Some people left at 12:30, 1:00 A.M. I said to Tarzan, ‘You let him be partner for this?’ And Tarzan said, ‘I’m desperate for money.’ 

“Tarzan had a big boat,” Paul went on. “I’m the only one who knew how to use the fishing rod. One day the three of us”—Tarzan, Paul, and the Cannibal— “were going fishing, and I said we needed to buy lines and hooks. We went into a bait shop and the Cannibal didn’t buy too much. He got on the boat and he emptied his pockets, which were filled with lines, hooks, all kinds of things which he had stolen,” including a fisherman’s cap. “My face went red. He said, Ah, I always do it. It’s fun for me.’” 

Paul and Nelli weren’t the only ones who were disturbed by the Cannibal’s corrosive presence. The Brooklynite gangster Vladimir Ginzberg, who, according to court documents, was a key operative in Tarzan’s large-scale cigarette bootlegging operation on the East Coast, had repeatedly alerted Tarzan that the Cannibal was working for the feds. 

“I warned Tarzan about the rumors—that he did in Elson, and the others,” Ginzberg said. “Tarzan didn’t listen. So I asked Tarzan why he trusted him. He said they were both from the same town. He knew his father. He had his friends checked out. And he had a cruel criminal past. That counts for a lot. And Tarzan didn’t have a comparable past—and Tarzan wasn’t so smart. He had steroids for brains. He had a big-muscle peanut brain.” 

With Tarzan’s confidence secured, the Cannibal began his work. One day, a man named Alexander Yasevich walked into Babushka. The Cannibal embraced him like a long-lost comrade. “Hey, how ya doing?” he said over hugs and kisses. Tarzan, who was in the restaurant, sauntered over to meet the stranger. Tarzan recognized Yasevich from the old neighborhood in Brighton Beach. Yasevich had moved there from Odessa as a teen. But unbeknownst to Tarzan, Yasevich had joined the Marines, and then became an undercover agent for the DEA. 

“The agent’s cover was that he was an arms dealer and heroin dealer out of New York,” says Miami-based DEA spokesperson Pam Brown, who was once part of an elite squad that interdicted drugs in the jungles of Peru and Colombia. “Tarzan immediately started running his mouth, telling him what a big shot he was, that he and his associates had politicians in their pockets.” Many of their gab fests were on Tarzan’s boat or in upscale restaurants. The men consumed a prodigious amount of a volatile concoction of ice-cold vodka and Japanese saki poured over a raw quail’s egg. The first time Yasevich’s girlfriend, who was also an undercover agent, drank the potion, she puked. 

The drinking and kibitzing paid off. Yasevich learned that Tarzan was in the midst of executing his biggest caper yet: the purchase of a $100 million, Soviet-era, diesel-powered submarine for Pablo Escobar. 

When Tarzan was first asked to procure the submarine, it unnerved him. The Russian helicopters had nearly cost him his life. But this time, he made sure to clear the deal through Anzor Kikalishvili, and he traveled to the former Soviet Union with Almeida dozens of times, looking for a submarine. Finally, through the most powerful crime boss in St. Petersburg, they met corrupt, high-ranking Russian military officers who took them to the front gate of Kronstadt, a sprawling naval base in the Baltic, where numerous untended diesel submarines bobbed on their sides, spewing waste into the polluted ocean. Anything is available in Russia, former CIA official Richard Palmer told me. The Soviet fleet is rotting and the sailors haven’t been paid for months. 

Initially, the Miamians wanted to buy a huge attack submarine for the Colombians’ East Coast drug trade. But a retired Russian captain told them they should instead operate on the Pacific Coast, where America’s anti-submarine net was less effective. He suggested that they buy a small, diesel-powered Piranha-class submarine, which is made of titanium and is much quieter. The Piranhas, with a range of one thousand kilometers, are used to plant saboteurs, troops, and spies behind enemy lines. The captain told Tarzan that he had slipped the submarine past the Americans during the Cuban missile crisis. 

They finally agreed on a ninety-foot-long Foxtrot-class attack submarine that drug lords calculated could carry up to forty tons of cocaine. The Colombians planned to base the sub, which would be demilitarized and retrofitted to resemble an océanographie research vessel, in Panama. From there, it would transport the drugs underwater to a mother ship near San Diego and outside the United States’s territorial waters. The mother ship would then deliver the coke to ports along the Pacific coast. A consortium of St. Petersburg mobsters and two active-duty admirals wanted $20 million for the vessel, which was built in 1992 for $100 million. Tarzan negotiated its price down to $5.5 million, of which he was to take home $1 million. The Russians wanted the money passed through a dummy company in Europe in order to give the Russian politicians who okayed the purchase plausible deniability. Tarzan hired the retired captain for $500 a month and secured a crew of seventeen for a two-year contract. Tarzan even got permission to take several photographs of the vessel to send to the Colombians. At a party at a dacha, the godfather of St. Petersburg, a man called Misha, made a side deal with Tarzan to procure cocaine from Miami for $30,000 a kilo, far above Tarzan’s $4,000 cost. To Tarzan, everything looked good. 

On Tuesday, January 21, 1997, just after Tarzan dropped off his daughter at the William and Miriam Tauber Day Care Center, he was stopped in his gleaming white 1996 Jaguar convertible by a marked Metro-Dade Police Department vehicle in the Aventura area of Miami. As he spoke with the officers, DEA agent Brent Eaton and Detective Joseph McMahon, who had been trailing him in an unmarked car, approached. Eaton and McMahon introduced themselves and invited him to join them in their car. They told Tarzan that he was in trouble and would be arrested. They asked him to take a ride with them to a secure location, where they and a few other officers could speak with him confidentially about his predicament. Tarzan agreed, saying, “I’m a nicer person than you probably thought. I haven’t done anything wrong.” 

When they arrived at the interview site, a DEA training room near Miami International Airport, Tarzan was offered a seat at a table and given a cup of coffee. He was not handcuffed or restrained in any manner. Michael McShane, a DEA inspector, offered him a chance to work with the government rather than be arrested. Tarzan replied that he could be very useful to the government, but was not well acquainted with U.S. laws and preferred to consult with his attorney before making a decision. Eaton told Tarzan that wasn’t a wise decision since his lawyer represented other targets of the investigation. “I thought you would tell me what you have and ask me questions,” Tarzan said, according to a transcript of the interrogation. “I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what you think I have done.” 

McMahon asked Tarzan if he had ever bought liquor for Porky’s or for Babushka from any source other than a legitimate wholesaler or liquor store. “Never?” Tarzan declared emphatically. 

“What about your relationship with Anzor Kikalishvili?” the detective asked. 

“Anzor, I know nothing about what he does in Russia,” Tarzan claimed. “I met him at my club. He is a sex maniac, always looking for girls. I helped him once when he opened a bagel store in Aventura.” Tarzan did admit that he had once picnicked with Kikalishvili. 

“Tell us about your activities with Juan Almeida,” McMahon said. 

“I don’t know what he is up to,” Tarzan said. “He speaks Spanish most of the time.” 

“You mean you travel all over the world with Almeida and you don’t know what he’s up to?” 

“Yes,” Tarzan replied. 

“You know that those airplanes and helicopters you get go to Colombian drug traffickers,” McMahon said angrily. 

“They go to legitimate people,” Tarzan insisted. 

When the officers accused him of lying, Tarzan replied, “Maybe I should go to jail, then find out what you have.” The agents had had enough. They handcuffed him, placed him under arrest, and drove him to the DEA processing room, where he was fingerprinted, photographed, and allowed to call his attorney. 

Almeida surrendered to the authorities several days later. Not only had Tarzan talked about his activities with Almeida to various undercover agents, but he had even introduced Almeida to Yasevich, the DEA undercover agent, at La Carreta restaurant, in Miami. At the time, Almeida told the agent that he represented a client with unlimited funds who was interested in buying a Russian diesel submarine for illicit purposes, although he said with a laugh that the vessel was going to be used to transport stolen gold from the Philippines. Almeida, a suave man with a salesman’s charm, told me the sub was intended for an underwater museum in South Florida. After he was arrested, his lawyer, Roy Black, said that the sub was intended to carry tourists around the Galápagos Islands. As for the Russian helicopters, Almeida claimed the aircraft were actually contracted by Helitaxi, a legitimate Bogota-based company, to do heavy lifting at oil rigs in South America. Helitaxi’s president, Byron López, is banned from the United States by the State Department because he has allegedly laundered money for drug lords. 

The investigation produced 530 wiretapped conversations in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish. On the tapes and in conversations with the undercover agents, Tarzan constantly implicated himself and others in numerous crimes. “We caught Tarzan bragging to our undercover agent about how he was hooked up with the Colombian drug lords, and how everything he was doing was for Colombian drug lords, and that he was getting the submarine for the same people that he got the helicopters for,” DEA agent Eaton says. “A lot of that is on tape.” 

Louis Terminello, Tarzan’s civil lawyer, insists that the only thing that Tarzan is guilty of is having a big mouth. “It’s the high school kid who wants the high school girl to believe that he’s got the biggest dick in the world.” 

After months of sullen denial, Tarzan decided to cooperate. “He’s admitted to everything,” DEA agent Pam Brown told me several months after his arrest. “He keeps saying, ‘Well, this would have all been legal in Russia.’” For eleven months, Tarzan was kept in the snitch ward at Miami’s Federal Detention Center blabbing about Russian mobsters and Latino drug lords. After negotiating at least six proffer agreements, the galled feds cut him loose to stand trial. Not only couldn’t they corroborate much of his information, but he said that he would never testify unless he was released on bail. There was little likelihood of that happening. The feds had a good idea what Tarzan would do: a government wiretap picked up several powerful Israeli drug dealers in Miami discussing plans to help Tarzan flee to Israel, which does not extradite its nationals. 

Finally, Tarzan, who faced a possible life sentence, pleaded guilty to racketeering charges, including conspiracy to sell cocaine, heroin, and a submarine, and sundry other crimes. He testified against Almeida—who was convicted of importing and distributing cocaine and attempting to buy a Russian submarine for Colombian drug kingpins to further the drug conspiracy. (The charge of purchasing heavy-lift helicopters for the Colombians was dropped.) “Tarzan’s big mouth ruined my life,” Almeida says mournfully. According to a well-placed government source, Almeida, who is awaiting sentencing, has taken out contracts on the judge and the prosecution team. 

As for the man who helped the feds the most, Grecia Roizes, the Cannibal, looked as if he had not a care in the world as he stood erect, his Popeye-like arms bulging through a lime green knit polo shirt, calmly awaiting sentencing in the ornate marble courthouse in lower Manhattan. On July 8, 1998, Federal District Court Judge John Keenan waived his jail time as a reward for services rendered to the government, and Cannibal set up a furniture business outside Naples, Italy. 

About a year later, Roizes was in trouble again: he was arrested by the Italian police in Bologna for associating with the Italian Mafia, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, and smuggling. Most of his victims were small-time Russian entrepreneurs in Italy. Some of his illicit gains were allegedly passed through the Bank of New York. Apparently, while working for the DEA, the Cannibal had also been running a thriving criminal empire in Italy. 

The Russian mob in South Florida today is the hub of a sophisticated and ruthless operation. But Ludwig Fainberg is no longer a participant. On October 14, 1999, after living in America for seventeen years, Tarzan was deported to Israel, with $1,500 in his pocket. He had served a mere thirty-three month prison term. His light sentence was in return for his cooperation, which reportedly included providing intelligence on several alleged Russian mob heavyweights. 

Even as he awaited deportation, Tarzan’s enthusiasm was irrepressible. “I love this country!” he told me. “It’s so easy to steal here!” He was already cooking up a new scheme. “I’m going to Cuba,” he said. “A few of my Russian friends already own resorts there.” He said that with what he knows about the sex industry hell soon be rich again.