Part 2 - The Russian Mafia Comes to Brooklyn
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Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast. I am your host, Danny Gold. This is part two of the Russian sort of Jewish Mafia's of Brighton Beach from the 1970s onward. And hopefully you're still interested after part one. We had run through the arrivals in the 1970s and how Brighton Beach built up. The man viewed as the first Russian mob boss, Evsey Agron, Marat Balagula and the fuel taxes. And my man, Boris Neyfeld, was taken over just as the Russians were taken over.

We're starting to make a name for themselves and get a lot of media and law enforcement attention. And that's where we are right now, somewhere in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And for this segment, I'm joined by my friend Michael Weiss, who is editor at large at The Daily Beast and the director of special investigations for the Free Russia Foundation. Hey, Danny. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, thanks for joining us, man. Were you able to... I can't tell if you had me at either Russian, Jewish, or Mafia, or probably all three, but any of those would have done for me to RVSVP to your invitation, so...

Yeah, I figured this would be of interest. I mean, were you able to catch up to speed on the first episode and everything going on and all the craziness? Yeah, and there was – I mean, I've forgotten a lot of this stuff. I did a piece a couple months ago for The Daily Beast with Casey Michelle, which was really about Trump's ties to some of the colorful characters you talked about in your first, now will do, your second episode. But yeah, it was sort of like a nice little refresher course on –

on my friend Semyon Mogilevich, who continues to be like kind of the Rosetta Stone of understanding Russian organized crime and its connections to the current Russian government and the past Russian government, I should say. But yeah, I'm excited to hear what you have in store for us today. Yeah, I mean, these guys, they're basically the originators of...

The, you know, quote unquote Russian mafia stories that you hear about New York and America and the expansion and all that. So it's, you know, they started off pretty small time. But I think as we'll see today, they caught up. So, yeah, Boris Neifeld, who at this point was the young up and coming Russian gangster in Brush and Beach. He comes up with an ingenious way to bring heroin into the U.S. through those. Some say Agrone is the one who sort of initiated it before he got killed.

But a lot of the heroin coming into the U.S. at this point is coming from the Golden Triangle, which is an area of land that is parts of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos. Now, obviously, flights from those areas are going to get thoroughly searched as much as airplanes did in those days, which was, I guess, not that much.

Um, but if you've ever flown from Columbia to JFK, you know, you like, they take that stuff pretty seriously. Like if you're coming from Columbia, they're going to suspect things. If you're, you know, if you have dreadlocks, if you, uh, if you have tattoos, if you look a little suspicious, like they're going to, they're going to get in there. They're going to, they're going to give you the full, the full body stuff. So that's kind of, I guess how things were working with flights coming from Southeast Asia. They were not fucking around.

But back then, say you had a flight coming in from Poland to the U.S., they weren't really getting checked that much. You know, no one's growing poppies in Poland. So Neyfeld, he routes heroin from Thailand to Singapore to Poland and then to New York.

From Singapore to Poland, the heroin is kept in TV sets. And then from Poland to the U.S., it's taken by mules on their person. So at some point, he starts bringing in 20 kilos a month and just wholesaling it, which is, you know, it's a fantastic amount of money. Neyfeld soon had a problem, and that was this guy named Monia Elson. So Elson was born in the early 1950s in the Jewish slums in Moldova before he moved to Brighton Beach in the late 1970s.

And he went the familiar route of pickpocket to fraudster to extortionist and everything else that covers. He also did the real life opening scene of Snatch. You know, he dressed up like Orthodox Jews, like Hasidic Jews with a partner. And they would go to diamond shops and switch the real diamonds out with cubic zirconia while distracting the shop clerks. You know, it's kind of this, it sounds almost like cutesy, right? Like Charlie Chaplin style. It's like small time crooks, you know, it's like a Woody Allen film.

Except it becomes narco-trafficking. It goes from Woody Allen to killing Pablo very quickly. Very quickly. But at first it was like almost slapstick in a way. And at some point later on, he gets arrested on cocaine charges in Israel and does six years in prison there. But he's back in Brighton Beach in 1990 to open up a nightclub, which of course is par for the course. If you're a gangster, that's what you do. You open up a nightclub.

By then he had a crew of vicious thugs and they called them Monio's Brigade. And he decides he wants to try to force his way into the heroin market that Neyfeld was dominating despite them being friends. And that leads to this war in Brighton Beach that sort of becomes the stuff of folklore now.

In 1991, one of his hitmen tries to kill Nafel with a car bomb. It's a dud, though, and Nafel survives. And in return, he puts out a contract on Elson. And these guys go back and forth, back and forth. You know, it's almost like itchy and scratchy, right? 1993, Elson gets shot five times in broad daylight in the stomach, but he survives. Both these guys were each shot numerous times, and it gets to the point where it's hard to keep track. I know Nafel was shot in 86 at one point.

There were some situations, too, where people next to him were killed and he got away. And Ellison is the same way. And, you know, Nathiel in this Nat Geo documentary about the Russian mafia in Brighton Beach, he describes it like it's an episode of Tom and Jerry. Like and he has, you know, he has that real thick Russian accent. So this is a direct quote. Honestly, I try kill him all the time. He very lucky guy. And that's like he says it in that tone where it's like a like a joke.

Which is great. I mean, like you can't ask for a better interview than that guy at this point. He even allegedly pays a Russian special forces guy $100,000 to kill Elson. But it's also not just them having a war either. From 1992 to 1994, there were 22 murders and 10 attempted murders connected to Russian organized crime in Brighton Beach, which is a small neighborhood.

You know, what was happening amongst the Russian diaspora in the United States at this point, because they were part of what, I guess, the second wave, or I forget how many waves there were of Soviet emigres, but it really replicates what was happening in Moscow itself amongst and between oligarchs who were fighting these sort of vicious clan feuds for control of energy companies, banks, TV stations. There was a notorious episode called Faces in the Snow, where

Basically, you had the armies, the private armies, which, of course, were staffed by former KGB officers who now had to make an income and the state had sort of given them their pension or retired them prematurely, essentially shooting themselves down.

to death in the streets of like the dead of winter in Moscow. I forget what year this was, but it was like early 2000s, I believe, maybe late 1990s. And so Putin comes to power vowing to clean up this sort of corruption to an extent he does. But then, of course, he just kind of incorporates so much of it into the state apparatus. So instead of, you know, mobsters shooting each other in Brighton Beach, you have,

former FSB officers getting irradiated in London or defectors from the GRU getting poisoned with a fucking nerve agent in Salisbury. So this is why I think, you know, the description of Russia as a virtual mafia state, which comes from that Spanish magistrate, a counterterrorism magistrate, it really, it does resonate because so much of the tactics have been kind of

hybridized refused between former soviet security apparatus and just organized crime the body as the russians call it yeah we get into that i think uh i think in a bit because they're they're confusing as well but uh yeah this is when i mean this early 1990s period is when the brighton beach crime wave just really starts going nuts and there's a quote from robert freeman again who i discussed in the last episode from a 1994 new york mag story which uh is a john gatti associate tells him which is

We Italians will kill you, but the Russians are crazy. They'll kill your whole family. Again, you can kind of see this lore being created, right? Where we have this, again, it feels like a stereotype in a way. Like obviously these guys were out there doing vicious things and they were vicious, but it creates this legendary Russian mafia, you know, hyper dangerous, super mafia story. You kind of see when you read these old stories, you kind of see that element being built.

And these guys, they all hung out at these big gaudy event hall restaurants in Brighton Beach. And by this point, they were just not these small-time hucksters and goons shaking down bakeries. They weren't just local thugs spreading out across the U.S., but they were becoming high-level international crime figures with contacts spreading out across the former Soviet Union, Thailand, Europe, and Israel. And theories started to appear about this global organized Russian supermafia.

Neyfeld at one point was running his heroine out of Poland with this guy, Ricardo Fanchini, who I want to do an episode on, who was half Italian, half Polish, who they called Poland's godfather. And he paled around with Viktor Bout, who is the weapons trafficker that Lord of War is based on. And like you mentioned, whose name I'll butcher, Semyon Mogilevich, who has this legendary status as the most powerful mafioso in the world for his role in Russian organized crime.

And Ellison, too, had allegedly had international connections with Mogilevich. According to Freeman, quote, in July 1993, after Ellison was grievously wounded, grievously, grievously wounded by Nafield in a bloody shootout outside his broken apartment building, Mogilevich speared him out of the country.

Mogilevich then set up his Russian Jewish refugee friend in an alleged massive money laundering scheme in Fano, Italy, where he was eventually arrested and extradited back to America. Victor Buttu, you should say, was a GRU officer who became an arms dealer.

So there you got your Soviet intelligence connections to, in this case, international gun running. So he was actually I was looking at his Wikipedia as you were talking before, before you mentioned him. And it says in his military career, the Soviet Armed Forces, he was a military translator, which is fantastic.

Essentially, they might as well just say GRU because that's what a lot of these guys were. They were always polyglots, fluent in multiple languages, and Booth learned fluently Portuguese, English, French, Arabic, Persian, and possibly even Esperanto at the age of 12, growing up in what was then Tajikistan, Soviet Tajikistan. I guess today is independent Tajikistan, but anyway, yeah.

Yeah. And he's the guy he's like in U.S. custody. Like we we got him at one point and the Russians always wanted him to be released. So before, like all the spy swaps of 2010 and thereafter happened, Victor Boot is the one they always wanted to have extradited. And the FBI is like, no fucking way.

Yeah, I think I've still read stories about them trying to get deals on him as well. But my extent of knowledge about him is based on the awesome Nicolas Cage movie. So I can't really claim to be that well versed. But I know that right now Sean is working on an episode about him that we're probably going to do right after these episodes air. So I'm excited for that. Oh, me too.

So Nafield and Elson's war kind of fizzles because the feds are closing in and there was just too much heat. So Elson flees the U.S., like I said, after getting shot, but also because he was looking at an attempted murder charge from one of the botched hits on Nafield. Nafield went on the run because one of his guys got caught low level dealing and the feds are on him.

Nate Field eventually got caught and cooperated, which is interesting considering all the honor code lores you hear about Russian mafiosos. But that's kind of the case with mafiosos in general, right? There's always this honor code that all of a sudden goes away when somebody's facing 20 or 30 years half the time. The old Takashi69 story, you know?

But we need to backtrack just a bit to 1991 because that's when the Soviet Union obviously collapses. David Hasselhoff, winds of change, and a giant free-for-all that you talked about a bit, which sees organized crime connected to the former Soviet Union just going completely bonkers. Arsenals from these countries start getting moved around. There's all these stories, some might be exaggerated, of mafia selling nuclear weapons and KGB hitmen and Russian special forces guys just going to the highest bidder. The oligarchs emerge, and so do many gangs and gangsters.

Russia's interior minister in 1994 estimated that the country went from 785 to 5,700 organized crime groups. The downfall of communism and the state that was basically a mafia itself leaves this vacuum, which is filled by people taking control of all these industries and basically this birth of insane amounts of oligarchs and organized crime groups.

And that's when the second wave that we talked about starts coming into the U.S. and Brighton Beach, which is a whole new set of Russian former Soviet Empire immigrants. A 1999 New York Times article estimates the last big wave of Russian speaking immigrants arrived in the late 80s and early 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. More than 20,000 came to New York in 1992 alone.

But these new immigrants were different. They were better educated, had more money, and knew more about the United States. Not all of them were Jewish, and greater numbers of them were illegal immigrants coming in from their now open country on tourist visas and staying. I've seen roughly 250,000 quoted as the number that came over during this period, and yet not only were the immigrants who came somewhat different, but so were the criminals. The ones coming in now are more violent and better organized than the old-timers, said Jim E. Moody, chief of the FBI's organized crime section in the Times article.

They are maintaining links to gangs in Moscow and other places in the old Soviet Union with money flowing back and forth. Around this time, the Russian mob is hitting like the absolute height of a trend panic story. So in January 1994, the feds elevate the Russian mafia to the highest priority. And in May, they dedicate a whole unit to them. Because remember, before they were focused on Cold War stuff and didn't really pay attention to these guys. So the early 1990s also marks the arrival of a guy known as

And I'm going to butcher the name again. Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, also known as Yaponchik or Little Japanese, because he had Central Asian features. He was said to be a famed, how do I pronounce it? Vory Zakon? How do you say it, Mike? It's a thief in law, basically. Yeah. Yeah.

My pronunciation is almost as bad as yours. I'll take yours. I'll take yours over mine. But yeah, Thief in Law, of which there are actually very few left in Russia, maybe a couple hundred. But they're the legendary Russian criminal figures you've heard about with all the tattoos, telling the stories of their lives, who came up in the gulags and the prisons. They've existed for generations from before even the establishment of the Soviet Union.

They started up in prisons during the Tsar days, and they were professional criminals who lived by a code, which is way more brutal and serious than La Costa Nostra and the Italians. They basically weren't allowed to function in normal society, and they swore to have nothing to do with it.

They have their own laws and their own customs. They're also supposed to be the judges of the Russian underworld. They command respect from everyone. And again, not all mafia are vor, right? In fact, very few are. They're kind of a dying breed. There's only a few hundred left of them in Russia alone. And the feds estimated that at max there were five in the U.S. at once.

But some people even say that the days of the VOR are faded. And it's so much more now these gangster bureaucrat corporate oligarchs who run things in the last couple decades. You know, the guys who own basketball teams and run oil companies and things like that. Actually, you know, a really good film about the VOR is –

Eastern Promises with Viggo Mortensen. Did you ever see that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a badass movie. I think that actually captures it quite well, including the fact that, you know, Viggo's character was he was an FSB officer trying to infiltrate the Russian mafia. And then he gets his stars and becomes a Russian mobster under deep cover.

Um, but yeah, that, that just atmospherically, I think that really kind of explained it well. Yeah. There's, um, there's a book that I recently read. Uh, I wasn't able to reread it for this. Um,

What's the author's name? It came out. It was just about them and it goes through their whole history. Mark Gagliotti. Yeah. Yeah. Great book, which I definitely recommend reading if you if you're more interested in this stuff. I think we'll do an episode on that as well. Maybe try to get Mark on the podcast. You should. I mean, he's one of the foremost experts on Russian organized crime. When this guy, you punch it shows up. People are people are terrified.

Robert Friedman says he came in with an army of goons, just like former KGB and special forces guys, real killers. And he was there to oversee Russian organized crime in Brighton Beach in the U.S. and bring it under order to become the godfather of the U.S. faction of the Russian mafia. He started off as a brawler getting arrested in bar fights before he moved on to black market stuff and document forgery, burglary, all the basics. He got arrested and sent to Russian prison where in 1974 is when he got his star has got crowned is what they call it or made into a war.

He was arrested again in Russia in 1982 for drug trafficking and guns, and he got released in 1991 and by 1992 was in New York. The question is, why did he come to New York? Some say he was sent because he was killing too many people in Russia, others because he was wanted dead by too many people, but others said that he was the one decided on by the other top bosses in Russia to oversee things.

They say he was sent by Russian mobsters jealous of their Jewish compatriots. And he actually comes here and sets up a company that was literally called Slavic Incorporated, which is, I mean, like it doesn't get better than that. Yes, it does. Fraud guarantee. It does get better than that. The Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who, by the way, I mean, those two look like.

supporting cast members of The Sopranos. So I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to light in their court trial that they were connected in some way. That's the thing. A lot of these guys, man, they're sort of central casting. I know they're supposed to be these slick, organized gangsters who control businesses around the world. A lot of them are. But they do a lot of clumsy shit. Oh, yeah. And they always get arrested for the dumbest scams that are so low level that you kind of have to wonder, what is the reality? Are they...

This large, interconnected, hyper-sophisticated criminal elements, are they just a bunch of goons or is it a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B?

I think it is a combination of the two. I mean, some of the operations are pretty slick and sophisticated. I mean, I just did a big thing on this cocaine trafficking story out of Argentina where, I mean, the official version is this guy, Andrei Kolbachuk, was acting essentially by paying off a few low-level people, employees at the embassy in Buenos Aires, the Russian embassy in Buenos Aires. He was moving like 400 kilos of virtually uncut cocaine

I think from Columbia and it bore signs of originating with the Sinaloa cartel and trying to get it into European markets. And it's very clear this guy didn't act alone and just, you know, bribing low level flunkies at the embassy, but that Russian diplomats and probably also Russian intelligence officers in the embassy were his accomplices. Yeah.

And, you know, I mean, using military transport planes and then using, you know, Russian government aircraft to move this stuff. That's it's kind of clever, especially if the state is is in on it. And they're you're they're you're you're winning accomplice. I mean, you mentioned this other guy. I forget the name already, but I mean, that other movie, American Gangster with Denzel Washington, which based on a true story, that guy who was running stuff.

from laos i think or cambodia he's running heroin in the coffins of american servicemen coming back from vietnam it's like who's going to look in this inside a coffin of a dead american soldier and find you know smack just very clever um i mean the innovation of some of these guys and the way they bring stuff in uh is really like people sometimes talk about how you know some of these organized crime guys if they weren't in this in this world they would be

high-level business executives. And you kind of think it's partially true. I mean, the way they figure out logistics in general, you know, it is... Some of these are just really brilliant minds, especially when it comes to the financial crimes that are more popular now, but we'll get to that too. So Japonshik...

You know, again, all the Russian lore, his guys are supposed to be commanded by an ex-KGB guy. And that was actually a big thing, too. I think you talked about the oligarchs rising up. A lot of the guys who were their soldiers were former Afghanistan war vets who had no work when they returned home. So they were the hired hitman in the muscle for the oligarchs.

But the reign of this fearsome Yaponchik does not last long. He ends up getting arrested in 1995 for extortion, which, again, kind of lame, all things considered. He got pinched when a banking money laundering pot fell apart, and he tried to extort two Russian-Americans who went to the FBI. He's convicted in 1996 of extorting these two Russian-born Wall Street stockbrokers and then deported to Russia after a prison sentence in 2004 to face murder charges for killing two Turks after an argument in a restaurant.

He was acquitted on those charges and assassinated in 2009 in Moscow by someone with a sniper rifle who apparently he had pissed off the wrong Georgian crime boss. So things don't turn out too well for these guys, it seems like, most of the time. During his tenure in the mid-'90s, a U.S. Senate subcommittee is convened, and there's frightening testimony from a parade of experts on the growing power of the Russian crime syndicates.

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Now, no one trusts anyone else. The whole order has fallen down because there was no incentive to cooperate. If you want to kill a rival, all you have to do now is hire someone to come over from Moscow. For $2,000, they will fly in, do the job, and then fly out again, and no one knows who they are. The situation is very fluid and very dangerous right now. And here's the thing that I keep talking about is how much of this is actually true and how much is myth-making.

Obviously, bodies are turning up. People are getting killed. These guys are the real deal for sure. But was the breadth of the whole thing as big and scary as was reported? Anderson, in this piece in Harper's he wrote back then where he writes about Yaponchuk, he kind of hints that he thinks it's all exaggerated. There's this veteran NYPD detective, a Russian speaker, Peter Grinenko, who you'll see quoted in reports from this time, who basically calls bullshit on the whole thing.

Here's a quote from him.

And again, like I can't suss it out, man. Like it's hard to make heads or tails of the whole thing. Well, it also – I mean it kind of reflects the broader conversation we're all having about Russia since 2016. Are they really that sophisticated that they could –

sway or influence an American election, these active measures, whether it's trolls on social media or hack and leak operations via WikiLeaks, you know, seemingly superficially look quite complicated or sophisticated. But when you get to the end results, it seems a bit weird and crude and ineffectual. Like, I mean, I'm sure you read this thing about peace data, this left wing

online magazine that was founded by Prigozhin's IRA, Internet Research Agency. And they ended up like hiring a bunch of freelance journalists thinking they were writing, you know, pieces on anti-war activism and so on. And the whole thing turned out to be a Russian front. And nobody had heard of this website until it was exposed by Grafika. And the question is, well, if nobody heard of it, how effective was this operation? But I mean, if you look at the kind of guts of it,

They were using AI generated photographs to pose as American editors and hacks to recruit other Americans, real Americans to join their operation. So even though it didn't have much of a cultural impact, there was a lot of ingenuity that went into it. Right. So it's kind of weird. And I mean, I'm writing a book on the GRU and this is one of the things I'm having to grapple with, you know, trying to kill a defector with Novichok.

Getting caught or getting your picture taken all over CCTV, having your agents or your operatives actually completely exposed and burnt internationally, ratcheting up sanctions as a result of it, and then you don't even kill the guy. Is that a success or is it a failure? Now, you and I would say immediately, probably that looks like a failure to me. But then again,

If you're working for one of the Russian intelligence services or you're working for the presidential administration in Moscow, you're going to now think twice about defecting or becoming an informant for CIA or MI6. You're going to be fearful of going to the West because this is the fate that awaits you, right?

Dying possibly an agonized death with WMD, not a bullet in the back of the brain or, you know, and also killing, in this case, potentially your own daughter. Yulia Skripal, we forget, was also one of the victims of this assassination attempt. So with these mobsters, it's like, yeah, they...

You know, they make these sensationalized headlines for the sheer brutality and the kind of boldness of their operation. But they're not geniuses. They're not strategic masterminds. It's clumsy. It's clumsy a lot, too. So Anderson writes about watching Yaponchik's legend grow. In February 1995, the Washington Post put his photograph on its front page and used his story to illustrate the extraordinary growth of Russian organized crime.

The following month, CNN joined with an alarming special assignment report on the newcomers to the American underworld, linking the Russians to extortion, prostitution, insurance fraud, guns, heroin, money laundering, murder for hire. At the climactic moment, the old familiar photograph of Yaponchik filled the television screen. Certainly, he's the biggest Russian mafia figure that we've seen or heard of yet here in the United States, DEA Administrator Thomas Constantine told CNN. An analysis reiterated by Alexandre Grant. Ivankov now is number one.

And again, Anderson is very skeptical and he talks about the media circus, but at the same time, they were doing all that stuff. Like it's documented extortion, prostitution, murder, fraud, guns, heroin, all that stuff is like legit. So it's kind of, yeah, man, it's, it's, uh, it's, you look at, I mean, if you look at the, uh, the FBI file on Mogilevich, um, going back now decades when he was still on the FBI's most wanted 10 most wanted list.

They accused him. I mean, he was convicted, I think, in absentia of a pump and dump stock fraud in Pennsylvania. They accused him of trafficking in weapons, drugs, I think prostitution, but also nuclear materials. Right. People forget the Soviet Union collapsed and there was a kind of free for all. I mean, that's what Victor Boot was was was engaged in. Right. Selling not just light arms to to conflict zones, but heavy weaponry. I mean, like, yeah.

you know, submarines, frigates on the black market for sale to the highest bidder. And, you know, a lot of that too is mythologized and kind of overcooked and becomes lore through popular culture, like the Lord of War, or even the early Pierce Brosnan, James Bond movies. But there is a kernel of truth to this stuff, right? And I mean, look, to my mind, it's like what's interesting about a guy like Miljevic, who really is the sort of the

What do they call it? The capo de tutti capi of the whole operation and lives freely in Moscow now, even though he's, you know, the top Russian mobster is the connections he made along the way. So, like, you know, we have this investigation into Ukrainian based crimes.

interference in the forthcoming U.S. election, or rather Russian agents in Ukraine selling shit to Giuliani and to Chuck Grassley and all the rest of it. And a lot of this looks to be somewhat staged, managed, or choreographed by Dmitry Firtash, who's a Ukrainian oligarch very close to Moscow. And if you look at the indictment of him, because he's wanted for extradition back to America, he was once part of Mogilevich's crime family.

He was sort of a lieutenant there, and he even admitted to a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in a State Department cable that was then leaked by WikiLeaks that, yeah, he was associated with Mogilevich in the 90s because you had to be associated to organized crime in some way in order to make money. But, of course, the allegation is he's still associated. I kind of buy that. Yeah. I kind of – you know?

Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, you could not become a billionaire in that period or even a multimillionaire without doing some shady illegal criminal shit. I mean, it just boils down to that. And we're still paying the price for this. I mean, look at the FinCEN files, right? All that money that was laundered. I mean, how much of it originated with organized crime and how much of that from the former Soviet Union?

I mean, I haven't tried to calculate, but I would wager that it's probably a lot. Everywhere, man, everywhere. Anderson goes on to say that there weren't many hard facts he could find on Yaponchik, just stories from the FBI and the Russian Ministry of Information. And yeah, we also have Robert Freeman's work. And honestly, again, who knows? These guys...

Definitely banged it out. There were 65 homicides linked to the Battle for Brighton Beach from the 80s throughout the early 90s, and that's a lot of gang murders. And there was that big paper commission, too, in the early 1990s that involved input from law enforcement groups in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania that concluded the Russian mob wasn't on the same level as the Italians or the cartels, but they could eventually get there, and they were more intelligent than the other crime groups.

So were they part of this interconnected global criminal racket, including, you know, the oligarchs and the Russian mob across continents? I mean, probably, but. Well, the other the other factor in this, too, unlike the Italian mafia and unlike the cartel, well, maybe not so much unlike the cartel, but, you know, it's the nexus with the state. Right. So if the state is sort of controlling you or allowing you to behave in a certain way, there's an element of, you know, control.

a give and take, right? So you can't really get too big for your britches that you then become autonomous and completely disconnected from your patron or your krisha in Russia, as they say. Yeah, but this was early 90s. So I think it was a little different with that. Like it was still people just trying to figure out. True. But you still had people connected to the Russian intelligence services that were kind of

you know, either turning a blind eye or getting paid under the table because they, they moonlighted as mobsters or as accomplices to mobsters. But yeah, trying to, trying to suss this stuff out. I mean, there was a lot of money floating around too. Sure. One of the best Brighton Beach Russian scams was health insurance fraud, which is unsexy, but profitable. Kind of like, like hosting a podcast. Um, yeah.

I'm just kidding. We don't have any money. Please support the Patreon if you can. In 2019, the FBI says Brooklynites lost. And this is 2019, by the way. They say in Brooklyn, there were $600 million lost.

Just that year, lost to Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which is the highest anywhere in New York State and one of the highest in the country. And there's plenty of examples of this sort of thing still. Like 2012, there were 36 Soviet immigrants who were arrested for trying to get $279 million through health insurance fraud. And it's pretty simple. They just bill them. They bill people for excessive and unnecessary medical treatments, and it's just like this straightforward hustle.

The New York Times says, quote, Brighton Beach has one of the highest rates of health care fraud in the nation, according to federal statistics. In fact, an analysis of data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that regulates those two programs, shows that more health care providers in the Brighton Beach zip code are currently barred from the programs for malfeasance than in almost any other zip code in the U.S.,

And the Times article gets a little hot and heavy with the whole Soviet mindset of scamming the system. But the truth is more that like to get through the bureaucracies of communism, you had to find workarounds. You know, episode one, the pilot episode of The Sopranos is about Tony discovering that he can make a fortune through HMO scams in the United States. And I guarantee you that the writers of that show were reading that Times article or reading about Brighton Beach as this hub of health care fraud.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, there's this no-fault insurance law in New York where drivers and passengers of vehicles who are registered in the state can get benefits of up to $50,000 per person for injuries they suffer in accidents, you know, regardless of fault. And I'm sure, like, it's very simple. You know, you find an old person on the corner in Brighton Beach. You give them $50. They go to a doctor. They complain about a bunch of things. They get a bunch of tests. The doctor's in on it. And you just completely scam the system and get paid tons of money.

You know, these people get hit with RICO charges eventually. And this one case who were the people doing the no-fault insurance scam, the ringleaders were two guys who went by Fat Mike and Russian Mike, which were both Ukrainian-born Americans. But, I mean, those are basic but solid mob nicknames. Russian Mike. Yeah. And he's Ukrainian. Yeah. Well, Fat Mike must have been skinny, and Russian Mike clearly is Ukrainian. So there you go.

You can't beat that. By the way, Tony Soprano, now that you got me on that kick, he laundered his money in Moscow. Remember that episode where they end up killing or not killing necessarily Pauly and Christopher in Pine Barrens?

One of the greatest episodes of all time, if not the greatest episode of all time. That was a guy, Russian Interior Ministry, who fought in Chechnya. And Paulie's line to Tony on the phone is, he was an interior decorator from Czechoslovakia. But that whole thing started because they were collecting from that guy, the former Interior Ministry official or officer.

because Tony's connected to the Russian mob because he was sending bags of cash to Russian banks in Moscow to keep in reserve. That was his offshore accounts. So the timing is also perfect because that was like early 2000s. So right before, right at the tail end of the Yeltsin period, just as Putin is coming to power. You know, we should actually just do a podcast where it's every episode. I mean, people are doing that every episode of The Sopranos and connected to real life and what it was probably based off of. Yeah, Michael Imperioli is doing that, right?

Yeah. Oh, you can't beat that. I mean, him and I think Stephen Schripp are one of those guys. Right. But these insurance scams, I mean, they got popular in the 90s, but they kept going. You know, it wasn't like things come down in Brighton Beach when it comes to the violence, but...

One time the feds targeted this place called the Oceana, which is a luxury condo complex in Brighton Beach. And the Economist article from 2014 talks about how there's a garage full of Porsches and Aston Martins. And 500 people in the complex were claiming Medicaid. Six people there got caught and charged. And within weeks, that number was down to 150. Here's a quote from another scam.

Dozens of operators of ambulances and ambulettes, which were vans designed to take wheelchairs, have been caught offering kickbacks to patients to pretend they can't walk. This lets them qualify for emergency pickups for which the company can charge $400 per patient. New York has clamped down with roadside checks, but in one case, word that a checkpoint had been set up spread so quickly as drivers called each other and a local Russian-language radio station put out a warning that the number of ambulettes on the main street went from several to none in a few minutes as they rerouted down side streets.

So it's just like, I mean, you know, it's finding these little places to make money and why, why kill people and put guns in people's heads and move heroin if you can, you can scam it like this. Like you have, you know, rappers now and all these little street crews that are flipping credit cards because they got smart and realized why sell drugs and get a huge sentence or carry a gun where you can just do these, these scams that are just so much easier and so much more profitable.

New York Mag called it the Brighton Beach Swindle in 1998. And these guys, again, simple scams. Open storefront doctor offices, pay people 50 bucks to come in and claim all sorts of ailments, and just pretend they had them, refer them to other doctors, get tests they don't need, and just bill the hell out of the government. I mean, it's perfect, you know? Our taxpayer dollars at work. I mean, uh...

Medicare for all, man. If you could just shut these guys down, we have a lot more money in the system, I'm telling you. But that leads to our last Russian gangster of the night who isn't as well known as these other guys. He's not a kingpin, but I have to talk about him because he's just fucking hilarious. He has a no regrets tribal tattoo. And this is much later on, but he actually got to start working for Moni Elson in Monia's Brigades doing some Medicaid scams where he teamed up with the Lucchese family. His name is Moni Chilpayev.

He's a Bukharian Jew, which is like my barber and all good barbers in New York. And they're a type of Jew from Uzbekistan. He came over in 1989. So part of the second wave when he was 12 years old, settled in Regal Park in Queens. So not Brighton Beach. Right down the street from me. Oh, yeah. Like a neighbor. Great, great Bukharian food over there. Yeah. So he went to work for his father who owned several food carts. But hot dogs did not cut it.

Neither did Knish's. He started to follow the familiar path of extortion, racketeering, and scamming. So he had a Benz by the age of 16. So part of the, you know, new age Russian mafiosos. I had a Schwinn. What's that? I had a Schwinn at 16, just for comparison's sake. You got to get involved in the business, man. So these guys, they were running women over from Eastern Europe as well as prostitutes. And for some reason, extorting furniture stores, like for some reason, but I guess that's the whole thing, right? Get money wherever you can.

In 1998, the feds pick up on the furniture extortion and stick some rookie agents who start tailing him, and they notice they're actually living a pretty crazy lifestyle, pretty lavish, and they're into some other shit.

Then the brigade kidnaps a guy off Brighton Beach Avenue, but the man is a CI, a confidential informant for the FBI. So the feds go after them and start locking them up. Chupaev confesses and tries to find a deal. He flips and then turns over all these well-kept accounting books. They get him to wear a wire, and he helps lock up a lot of the brigade and some Lucchese's as well, which is not a good look because the Italians will generally kill you for that sort of thing. So he goes into witness protection, and that's all we ever hear of him except that

It's not that typical story of him disappearing. It gets so much better, like Sammy the Bull style.

He ends up appearing on this Nightline report in 2013. He's 35 now, running a club in Miami, driving sports cars, just making bank. And he's still a federal informant. The ABC reporter, the Nightline reporter, actually confronts him out of nowhere, which is amazing. They've been doing surveillance and they roll up on him in a parking lot and he freaks out, starts threatening them on camera, which is just not great PR. But then he doubles down and goes the full reverse, which is also terrible PR, which you see some people do sometimes.

He invites them back to come for like a ride with him in his Maserati driving around Miami. He's got $2 million worth of luxury cars. And the reporter just keeps pretty much stating outright that he's gone back to the life of crime and he's protected by the feds. And...

A man he just keeps talking about how he's an honest businessman. It is the worst PR job I've ever seen. It's like the opposite of a double down. It's like, I'm going to freak out on you and then I'm going to give you entrance to my world where I kind of show you that I'm guilty without saying I'm guilty. At one point, the reporter is just like, you're a thug. Is that fair to say? And he says, I wasn't a thug. I was just not afraid, which is just like, I mean, that's classic. He should get that tattooed on him. It's a little longer than no regrets.

That's a t-shirt with Bugs Bunny holding two .44s guns up in the air with the smoke going. I'm not a thug. I'm just not afraid.

So Manny had been set free from his arrest in Brighton Beach in 2002. He moved to Atlanta and went as protection, and he was caught three years later running a luxury stolen car ring, where he again served less than three years because he agreed to testify again. And it looks like he was up to something similar in Miami. A few weeks after the interview airs, he gets raided by the feds for gang activity and the murder of an Atlanta rapper named Little Fat. Fat spelled P-H.

who was killed in June of 2012 outside of the hospital where his fiancée was about to give birth. And I went down like a deep wormhole researching this guy, and apparently there's all these stories of him now, all these Illuminati conspiracies involving the death of Nipsey Hussle. So if you're ever really, really bored, like you can dig into that. There's literally no evidence of it, but apparently something was stolen in luxury cars and, oh no, not Nipsey Hussle, I'm sorry, with pop smoke.

Because Pop Smoke was arrested for transporting a stolen, I think, Bentley, something along those lines. But if you go deep into like the wormhole message board conspiracies, Manny Chupayev and the Russian mob play a role in Pop Smoke's murder. So yeah, if you're bored, I'm going to dig into that. Yeah. But anyway.

Back to Brighton Beach. Sorry, that was a bit of a digression because it's just hilarious. And like, look up that Nightline interview. It's amazing. Things have mostly calmed down now in Brighton Beach and with the Russian mob in America, at least in terms of violence and headlines.

Everyone now just focuses on white-collar crime. Radio Free Europe in 2014 caught up with Alexandre Grant, the Russian journo from Brighton Beach who knew all the major players, and he says, So he seems a little bored by the lack of murders and violence and gangbangers. Not gangbangers, but gangsters that he's been interviewing.

All these guys kind of fade from memory.

And he expressed a longing to go home to the motherland, but he was still on probation. And the AP asked him if he had regrets and he goes, no, never. When I'm born again, I do it the same, which, you know, that's our kicker. I mean, that's the perfect end to the, to the Russian mafia and Brighton beach story right there. That's our episode. Mike's thanks. Thanks again for, for coming on. You have anything you want to, you want to plug at all or anything like that?

Nothing I want to plug. I mean, you can read, well, I mentioned the cocaine story, which took me a month to investigate. It was based on 10,000 forensic case file documents and wiretaps on the Russian and Argentinian side. And yeah, it's a crazy story. It's sort of like, you know, Mr. Nice, the Russian version or American made the Russian version. And it shows, you know, we've got to a point where organized crime is

is now so fused to state institutions, not just in Russia, but I mean, in loads of places that you really can't tell where law enforcement begins and law breaking, you know, ends. So it's a fascinating tale, but nice trip down memory lane with you, Danny. I've forgotten about all of these people really, except Mogilevich, because he's, like I said, he's sort of the center of gravity for everything.

So Naphil's the best. We got to get, when the Turkish-Russian baths open up again, we got to get over there, go eat kachapuri with him somewhere in Brighton Beach, because I'm sure he's down to have a good time. But we'll try to track him down. Thank you, Michael Weiss, again. Where can people find you? What's your Twitter again? At Michael D. Weiss? That's it. Yeah. And that's pretty much the only place they can find me. And I don't really engage much on Twitter these days, but they can also find my email there if they have any questions.

Thank you guys so much for tuning in. Again, this was part two. Part one is up on the

Podcast where you can find it on Spotify, iTunes, all that. I want to thank again, our audio producer, Dale Isinger. And again, guys, the Patreon, if you want to support us is patreon.com, the underworld podcast. You can get all sorts of bonus features and all that. It is a good time. I guess we're getting some interviews up there. We're getting the scripts up there. Yeah.

I just want to thank some of our Patreons who have hit the, I think we call it the co-defendant tier. Haley Prim, Dan Rosen, Jared Levy, Nasser Jabbar of the Migrant Kitchen, and Josh Gold. So thanks so much for contributing and your support. So please, yeah, come support us and join us. I'm out. Thanks again. Thanks for having us.