The Car Bomb Wars of the Israeli Mafias
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Yoni Alzam was only 22 years old, but he was already active in the most feared Israeli mafia operating in the country, also in Europe and America, the Abergio crime family. Unfortunately, his future wasn't looking too bright. He had just been convicted of the murder of another gangland figure in 2003, a crime boss that was allied with Zev Rosenstein, the main rival of his boss's.

Al-Zaum was staring down a life sentence, and he made the unfortunate decision to turn state's witness against one of the Abrazeel associates for the same murder he had already been convicted of. The Abrazeels weren't exactly lightweights. They weren't scared to kill witnesses, and Israeli mafia figures have a long history of targeting anyone who got in their way. Police, mayors, judges, prosecutors, it didn't matter.

Alzam, though, was said to testify not only against the associate, but against high up figures in the Abrazeel family, including some of the four brothers who ran it. It was December of 2005, and figures in the Israeli underworld had been fighting a costly war that shocked the country. Bodies were dropping all over as rival families made and broke alliances, trying to gain control of various gambling, extortion, drug, and waste management rackets. The families were no joke and punched well above their weight.

They controlled the global ecstasy trade, were active on five continents, and killed people all over the world, sometimes using high-tech car bombs. One had even aligned with a Latino street gang in Los Angeles to take on La M.A., the Mexican mafia. It's like something out of a grand theft auto plot line. And law enforcement couldn't really do anything about it at the moment.

The rival families were vicious, but they were also sophisticated and smart, especially the Abrajeels, led by Yitzhak, aka Big Friend, which is just like a really solid mafia nickname. Possibly one of the greatest criminal prodigies to ever operate.

They had slid under the radar for a bit, but a 2003 bombing in December outside a money change booth in the cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv that killed three civilians, but failed to take out Zev Rosenstein, the other top mafioso in the country, made for a lot of pissed off news reports and pissed off statements from politicians. As the government decided it was time to do something about all the mafia guys just running wild.

Rosenstein actually survived the bombing, earning him the name "the wolf with the seven lives" for all the assassination attempts against him that failed. Osam's testimony was going to help strike a major blow against the Aborigines. He was set to testify in a few hours when he started coughing and wheezing in his cell. Something was clearly wrong and he was taken to a hospital nearby. Right before midnight on the same day, he was pronounced dead.

Cyanide was eventually found to be the culprit. And somehow, despite being isolated in a maximum security prison, he had been poisoned. It was a clear message from the Israeli mafia dons. They were the ones in control.

Boom, cold open. That's how we're doing it. Welcome to another episode of the Underworld Podcast. I'm your host, Danny Gold. Sean is sitting this one out, and I'm joined here by Ben Hartman, who has covered organized crime in Israel for years, to tell the story of the Israeli mafia wars of the last few decades. And let me tell you, these Israeli mafia guys are wild. So welcome, Ben. I know you covered this for a few years. Tell us a bit about it and kind of what you're doing now.

So these days I write about cannabis for a living, full-time marijuana reporter, I guess you'd put it, cannabis research, science, legislation, and culture for a website called canigma.com. And we also have a podcast, the Cannabis Enigma podcast. But prior to doing this, the world of cannabis, which is a little bit of a nicer world, I covered organized crime and crime in general at the Jerusalem Post for about

about seven years. And then before that, I was a report. I was a editor and reporter at hearts.com in English for about three years. The, the Israeli world of crime prior to me being a journalist, being reporter and covering, it was always pretty fascinating. Um, you know, in the same way, obviously that you're interested in organized crime and the people who listen to this are, and watch movies about crime are, but it's also, um,

beyond all that kind of lurid aspect of it, I think organized crime in Israel, the story of it here and how it plays out, it says a tremendous amount about this country and

and the story of the country and how these people got into that life and how we got where we are. So I'm sure we'll get more into that, but it's great to be on here. Yeah, thanks for coming, man. Thanks for doing this. I mean, half of the research I used, I think, was written by you, so it made sense to have you come on. Yeah, good call. Yeah, we're going to talk a bit about the luridness, too, because that, to me, I mean, the level of sophistication, the car bombs, the viciousness, the global reach...

the insane rivalries and the just absurd characters involved, like it kind of puts the New York mafia wars of the eighties to shame. Like the more research I did, the more shocked I was. It's funny about that in, in Israel with organized crime, because on the one hand,

Israel is a country with, with crime and violence and murder and all that. It's nowhere near, um, places in the States. Certainly not, for instance, your, your episode about St. Louis. And there's, there's no comparison in terms of public safety and the murder rate and the gun violence, certainly. But at the same time, um,

the methods that you see with organized crime here, you often don't see in the States, you know, guys using shoulder fired missiles and remote controlled bombs and stuff like that. You don't, you, you're not going to see that in St. Louis or in other places in America that have other crime problems that you don't have here. So it's this kind of strange sort of dichotomy you have here with, um, Israeli organized crime and Israeli, you know, low lives in general. Yeah. It's, it's something else. I mean, the story is we're going to tell some of these stories. We're going to get into the various families and the wars that have been fought, uh,

And like I said, we're using a lot of Ben's work here, but there's been some great work in the Times of Israel, in Tablet from Asaf Ghor and Douglas Century, and a few others. And this is going to be a great episode because I think both Jews and anti-Semites are going to love it. Let me get this out of the way real quick too. We're not here to really talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You're in the wrong place. That's kind of not what we do. And I just –

I reported in Israel during the Gaza war and stuff in 2014, 2015. Everyone's going to hate you no matter what you do. So I think it's best just not to care. But if you want to be angry about that, go ahead. But we're just we're just not really going to going to talk about it. Definitely. I would say for anybody who is so inclined, who does care about about the conflict, perhaps something optimistic here, the world of crime in Israel and Palestine is

is one of the one of the places where you see the best cooperation and coexistence between jews and arabs uh there is obviously you know they feud from time to time but you know there's beef and there's bloodshed and whatnot but crime in the pursuit of money uh that's somewhere where jews and arabs can definitely work together and live together so through organized crime um we're working on coexistence so there you go and it's also you know and it's not because you know these guys don't care about religion or anything like that a lot of these guys are

They may be right-wing, they may be involved, and they may be religious and all that, but it's just not something that's going to get in the way of their business.

It's just, it's a beautiful thing when, when a Jewish guy and an Arab can unite and kill their enemies over controlling, uh, recycling bins, you know, like it's, it's what we really hope to see in the future of the world is people like that uniting, uh, over their differences, maybe not murdering people over, over a bottle recycling, but you know, it is what it is. Yeah. And if you can do it while helping the environment, I think that's, that's also, uh, that's also, yeah. Why not? Um, I,

Little side note too, there's been a lot of talks about the Russian oligarch mafiosos that have moved through Israel. We actually talked about it a bit in the Brighton Beach episode. When the Soviet Union fell and Russia opened up, you had a lot of these Russian mafiosos, some Jewish, some kind of faking it.

who would later try to get a foothold in Israel and use it as a big place to transfer and launder money. They mixed in some human trafficking, but for the most part, they didn't get too involved in Israel itself. Apparently, according to Misha Glennie's McMafia, a fantastic book we've mentioned a number of times, they also struck a deal to not let things get messy in Israel. I think it's one of the funny things writing about organized crime in Israel over the years. I would say whenever I talk to American journalists,

reader and that that's what i do that's what i write about probably nine times out of ten the first thing they would say was oh is it the russians the the assumption was that it's you know there's mafia in israel it must be the russians and that was always a really curious thing to me because they're not the ones who run it they're not the ones who are in charge of that and i think if somebody you know somebody hears organized crime and they don't you know they assume it must not be the jews uh here who's doing it then i think it just you know it says more about them than than the country it says um

Well, it says you must be new here. You must not have been here for long if you think it's not our guys doing this. Right. We're going to talk about what I guess you would call the homegrown Israeli mafias. And they definitely had no such sort of peace deal going on. In a WikiLeaks cable from May 2009, the U.S. ambassador to Israel wrote a message titled Israel, the promised land of organized crime.

And this is a quote. Five or six families have traditionally controlled organized crime in Israel. The Abrazil, the Abudbol, the Alperon, and Rosenstein families are among the best known. But recent arrests and assassinations have created a vacuum at the top. And I believe that newcomers like Molnar, Shirazi, Cohen, and Domrani are closing the gap.

So there's five or six of the main families in Israel just mentioned here. And they're definitely not like the five families of La Cosa Nostra, who, you know, at times had these sort of unity things and peace deals. In true Israeli family fashion, they all fight with each other. They all make alliances. They all fight their allies. And it's a bit hard to keep track, but I think we're going to start with the Alperones, if only because of their reality show.

which sounds either made up or like it was on Quibi, R.I.P. Quibi, you were too pure for this world. Yeah, it was a few years back. It was a while ago. Obviously, he's been dead for 12 years, but it was called Pan B'Chaim, which in Hebrew is once in life or once in a life. And it was one of these sorts of shows where you'd have different celebrities or different celebrity personality meeting with other different celebrities. So there was a model living with them at their home in Ranana, which is a very kind of like,

nerdy, perfect little Israeli middle-class suburb where kind of like dads who work in high-tech live. And, you know, it's a very nice place to grow up. So it's not the type of place they usually associate with organized crime. And, but that just kind of speaks to how much of a household name he was in Israel. And today also, if we could give her a shout out here, his widow, Ahuva Alperon is something of a

Instagram influencer these days. She does a lot of like cooking stuff on, uh, she's, she's pretty well known. So if you want to check it out, a lot of, uh, desserts and, uh, foods kind of like, you know, Moroccan style cooking, but also a lot of, uh, a lot of baked goods. So check out a who valperone on Instagram. Why not?

She's been through a lot. She's been through a lot. She's not responsible for the things her husband did, even if she may have benefited from it. Let's get her to add the episode. Let's get her to do some Patreon stuff. By the way, there's so much here that I think for the first time, we're actually going to do a special Patreon episode with some of the other gangsters that we're not going to have time to sort of mix into these four main families that we're talking about. But yeah, the TV show...

Alperone, like it wasn't, you know, America had grown up Gotti, but it wasn't like that because Alperone was still an active mafioso while the show was going on. And the model has this quote, you know, from afterwards where she says, quote, you see the Sopranos and it sounds sexy that some mafioso comes and charms you into the sunset.

But in reality, it is the opposite. It is very intimidating, scary, not kosher. She said that to Yediot Akronot, one of the local Israeli publications. Right. Well, I would say that most people who are in Israeli organized crime, I would say most of them probably do keep kosher. But beyond that, no, they do. It's the type of these guys, you know, they very often, more often than not, come from pretty traditional backgrounds. So

They might kill you, but they're not going to mix milk and meat. But I would say, even though these guys tend to be charming and have strong personalities in that way, like guys who are criminals very often do, as part of the psychology of that personality, I think what she said does hit on a point here. The Sicilian mob and other mobs in the U.S. also aren't actually glamorous, but with the Israeli mob, it's definitely true that

They don't have the same formalities and rituals and getting made in a ceremony with a sword and a dove and all that type of stuff you've seen in movies. They also their their aesthetic is much more, you know, Hugo Boss T-shirts and Lacoste and bad sneakers. So it's not a lot of three piece suits and, you know, thousand dollar shoes and whatnot. It's a lot more informal. And a lot of these guys kind of look like.

like scrubs and you wouldn't maybe what you would picture like a mafioso maybe coming from the from the states let's say that doesn't mean they won't they won't kill you all the same that they're not sophisticated they're very sophisticated a lot of these dudes but you know the uh like israelis in general with the informality a lot of you know israelis aren't going to put on a suit if it's not at their bar mitzvah so you know don't don't let that fool you you know

I was going to say, you go boss T-shirts and bad sneakers sounds like most Israelis I know. No disrespect. But yeah, Alperone, yeah, he had already developed a rep for being super accessible in the press and hence the TV show. They actually called him Israel's Tony Soprano. So Yaakov Alperone is the boss, was the boss. He was born in a suburb of Tel Aviv in 1955 to parents who immigrated from Egypt.

And this is actually something you'll see a lot of with Israeli mafiosos, that they're of North African descent. After 1948, when Israel was created, you had an exodus of Jews in countries from countries like Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, who were sort of forced to flee their homelands. Israel was generally a very poor country, but these Jews were among the most marginalized and downtrodden in the country after they came.

So they're a bit overrepresented in the crime families because as we've covered routinely in the past, poverty and marginalization lead to crime.

Israel had this post-1960s development boom, and people like Yaakov Oparon, they were left in the dark. Yeah, so I think that's one of the, I mentioned earlier about when looking at crime, it kind of tells the story of the country, and I think that's certainly the case in Israel. It looks a lot, as you mentioned, it hits upon the racial and ethnic divisions in the country, how the country was founded in those years afterwards, and the ways of immigration, and what happened, and where those people were put, and where they were put to live, and the types of jobs and opportunities that were open to them, and

And it's kind of organized crime in Israel. The story of it and the history of it kind of hits upon the question of in Israel, you know, who gets a seat at the table and who needs to kick the door in and grab a seat or just burn the house down. So that's when you look at a lot of these type of guys and the stories and how they came up. They were they were in tough spots and a lot of these guys were going to do what they had to to eat. It's also the fact that.

With those communities, a lot of those guys came from, especially back then, but also now to a certain extent, and especially in Arab communities with Arab crime, a lot of this has to do with places where the state is not

at its most functional, you know, neighborhoods that are neglected, where the municipal authorities, where the social services, where if somebody gets shot, are the cops going to come? And if they do come, are they going to either be, you know, under policing or over policing? And so organized crime in Israel and the type of guys who have typically been at the forefront of it and also in the rank and file,

um, their ethnic background and the stories of their families and also the stories of their communities and how crime was able to flourish in them. It has a great deal to do with the story of this country as a whole. And I think that's something you see a lot in, in criminal groups that, that rise up, right? Is a lot of them tend to do so in places where the state is not exactly, uh, at their, at their most potent or, or at their most involved. Uh, it's something we saw in immigrant communities in the U S right. The Italians, the Eastern European Jews at the time, uh,

Even in the 80s and 90s, the Russians, we talk about that a lot. It's not just Israel that happens. It happens all over the world. It's a pretty well-worn phenomenon. Yeah, and where there's a vacuum of the state, it's going to get filled by organized crime. And if somebody gets shot in broad daylight in the middle of central Tel Aviv, it's going to be a big story. If they get shot in broad daylight in the middle of Jaljulia, it's probably not. So all these dynamics add up and help create this situation. Yeah.

According to the LA Times, this is a quote from an article they wrote too, organized crime blossomed here in the 1980s and 1990s while security forces were focused on Palestinian terrorist threats. By the time Israeli authorities truly began to grapple with the problem a few years ago, they faced a sophisticated global network of gambling, prostitution, and drug trafficking, with Los Angeles as one of its hubs. There was an assassination in Encino, alliances with violent LA gangs, and the establishment of an Israeli-directed drug pipeline from Europe straight to Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Alperone and his brothers started off, they were boxers, and they soon started demanding protection money, extorting people, that whole sort of commonplace origin story. Soon they were fighting for control of gambling rackets, extortion rackets, everything from sidewalk flower vendors to bottle recycling. All sorts of rackets. There's rackets all over the place. And the bottling recycling one is...

Interesting. Israel was actually a pretty socialist country and started to privatize in recent decades. And much like the sort of Russian oligarch grab in the 80s and 90s, once Israel started privatizing things like the bottle recycling stuff...

you know, the kind of powerful bully types were the ones who took over. Arie Alperon, who was one of Yakov's brothers, he sees the government privatizing the bottle recycling, so he forms a company called the Flaming Bottle. And this is in the late 1990s, and of course, you know, he's not going to play nice with the competition,

So he basically uses extortion and that sort of bullying method. Bullying sounds like such a weak word for this. You know what I mean. He fucking barges in there and he takes over. And now the other mob bosses, they see this.

Yeah, yeah. It was definitely, definitely, there should have been, like, he wasn't just yelling at people on Twitter. You know what I'm saying? Like, he was going in there and he was just mean about it, you know? And the other mob bosses see this, they see the easy money, and that's when one of the Israeli crime wars kick off. And I just, I love the waste management aspect of organized crime, like the simplest industries just being mobbed up, not even controlling unions, literally controlling, like, recycled aluminum cans.

becomes this mafioso business that's fought over. Yeah, look, it sounds funny when you picture it just as recycling, but there's a ton of money in it. And also, organized crime is well-situated to do that because you can deploy a whole lot of guys to go around to a whole lot of restaurants and other types of places, and they will give them their bottles quite quickly. And so you're going to have guys who are able to collect those quite effectively. I think...

the bottle thing on a personal level it's funny obviously when you read about it to me it was always kind of ironic or a little bit funny because not to generalize but i will israelis tend to be you know there's there's kind of a problem with littering here if you ever been to a park in israel after a holiday uh when people are barbecuing and all that i mean it's trash so

Really, for the most part, the only people who are really taking recycling seriously in Israel is organized crime and for good reason. So back in 2007, they were working to pass a law to change the bottle deposit return to where it would also apply to the big bottles of Coke, the 1.5 liter soft drinks. And this was to help poor families who drink a lot of Coke and all that.

a lot of people called it the al-peron law as a nickname um because obviously they were the ones to profit in a huge way um but regardless you know even if they're looking out for their own interests i think um we definitely got to give it up for the israeli uh the israeli underworld for being the arguably the country's greatest environmentalist even if only in one very specific way um but yeah it's a funny story it's definitely it's always earth day with the uh

With the Alperons, every day is Earth Day, you know? I mean, these guys are woke, you know? They're uniting with Arab families. They're caring about the environment. Like, they are for, you know, they're just really, they're progressive. Yeah, ahead of their time. Ahead of their time. Yaakov Alperon had very little online clout, though. I mean, he wasn't really on, you know, he wasn't... He wasn't there yet. Yeah.

So they fought this bottle recycling war. All these wars start kicking off in the late 90s and 2000s. And it seems as if every family at one time or another was fighting a war with every other family. The Alperones were originally in line with the Aborigiles. They fought with the Rosenstein family and the Abudbulz and Amir Molnar, who we'll talk about soon. Though soon enough, their alignment with Aborigiles turned sour. And I know this sounds like a lot, and that's because it really, really is. But we're going to get into all of it as much as we can.

All you need to know right now is that the Alperons had a habit of escaping assassination attempts. That's the other thing, too. Like, so many of these guys escaped multiple attempts on them. Seven, five, nine. Not just the Alperons, but all the other bosses, too. By some reports, Yakov had escaped three. Others had it at nine, but I think, Ben, you said that was his brother who escaped nine attempts? Right, so Nisim Alperon was pretty famous for that. He survived nine attempts, if not more attempts.

Two of these are covered. I was at the scene, obviously, afterwards, not involved in the planning. Not involved in the planning, Nisim, if you're out there. One of them was a bomb that blew up on his car, in his car, on Menachem Begin, one of the main streets in Tel Aviv, and the other very close to the courthouse. The other was a bomb in his Jeep in Ramat Gan on Rashi Street. And he's one of those mob guys who, whatever his actual status in the underworld was or how big he was or not,

He definitely photographed well and was on TV a lot because he partly he had a voice like one of those dudes who has their larynx taken out and just speaks through a voice box. It's like, you know, very like you never forget this dude's voice. And he also looked he very much looked the part of a middle aged Israeli guy who may or may not do extortion work. He also...

Their family really likes horses. That's a thing that's well known about them. He made actually the international press because he was in the Daily Beast. A colleague, a friend of mine, Nary Zilber, wrote about him because he some dudes in the West Bank and Palestinians stole one of his horses, a horse named Tony. I'm assuming that's

after tony soprano not tony bennett but i can't confirm tony tony loved horses too everyone knows yeah he definitely did so so basically he got stolen taken to west bank he made some phone calls whatever made some connections and they were able to go out there in the middle of the night and get the horse back uh which was a bizarre story but it's also again it's that cooperation and you know these guys are they're looking out for their bottom line and making money and helping each other out and also um

That's kind of a cliche thing to a certain extent. Like, you know, you get your car stolen, you can make a few phone calls and somebody can find where it is. In this case, it was a horse. It was Tony. One story goes that there was a hit team after one of the Alperone family members at one point.

But they ended up getting into a shootout with police because they were under surveillance. And I'm actually not sure if the shootout happened because the AP has a similar story about a 2004 hit that was supposedly targeting the Alperones with these hitmen who had been flown in from Belarus. And this is a quote from...

In the biggest catch, detectives last month arrested four men from Belarus and 14 Israelis. On suspicions, they tried to kill several mob bosses. In the apartment of the suspected hitman in a Tel Aviv suburb, officers found pistols, silencers, assault rifles, anti-tank missiles, explosives, night vision equipment, and hand grenades. They also seized disguises and makeup. Yeah, that's what, I mean, obviously that's, that's a bit, um, that all seems like a lot of hearsay, you know what I mean? Um, yeah.

Yeah, definitely. That would that would seem to implicate them. One of the really strange things about about that case, for those who are outside of the genre, one of the guys who was also being targeted was a man named Shoni Gavrili, who was known as an organized crime figure in Israel. His brother was involved in casinos in Turkey. More more notably, Shoni was the father of a woman named Inbal Gavrili, who served in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament on the Likud list.

It was one of those kind of strange stories where she was the last person on the list. And it's always, you know, the last person just somehow gets in. She magically made it onto the list in the Likud primaries because of family connections, as it was described at the time. There was a good case a few years while after that where she used her parliamentary immunity to stop police from searching her house.

doing a search warrant on her dad. But like at Uva Alperon, in some extent, she also was on Israeli Survivor. She was also on the Israeli version of Kitchen Nightmares. She was also on another reality show. Basically, if you know Israel, there are varying reality TV shows. It's a small country, and there's only about 20 actors, and each one of them is on about six different shows at one time, all the same actors. So she, like with reality stars, in Balgavrieli, this kind of...

alleged you know organized crime uh child heiress um became a parliamentary and then a reality tv star but her you know where that they got a little bit famous with some of the wider public was after that hit or that attempted hit with the belarus guys

Yeah, we definitely have that in the U.S. too. I want to make fun of it, but we definitely have, I think there was like a Married to the Mob TV show and Growing Up Gotti and all that. So I guess it's a, it's a uniform. People, people love these stories. I mean, I watched Growing Up Gotti. I watched it. Yeah. And I liked it. Those haircuts, who could forget? I mean, I went to high school with kids like that, but yeah, people love these stories, which is why we're doing this and why you should pay us to keep doing this. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. We're going to have a bonus episode on all this stuff. So, so jump on there. Move on.

Moving on, November of 2008, Opron's luck runs out. He's killed in a car bombing after leaving a courthouse where one of his sons was on trial for extortion threats. He leaves behind seven kids and at his massive funeral, one of them is quoted as saying,

I will send back that person to God. He won't have a grave because I'll cut off his hands, head and body. It's really like a family affair with, with these really crime families as, as we'll see. Yeah. It's very heartwarming. Um, I was, I remember the day he was killed cause I was, I was at work and it was one of those types of things when, whenever there's a bomb or an explosion, um,

like that in Israel, the way they always describe it in Hebrew is it like, is it nationalist or criminal? So is it nationalist? That means that it's a terror attack. If it's criminal, obviously it's mobsters blowing each other up. So typically when it's in a specific car and the driver's side seat is blown up by a bomb placed there, obviously you know it's not a terror attack. Obviously it became very clear very quickly that it was Al-Burun. And it's, again, in the middle of Tel Aviv, one of the busiest junctions in the whole city on Namir Boulevard.

And he's right there. And I remember it was quite grisly. Like there was, there were pictures sent in by the photographers from the scene. And it's like, yeah, about as, about as grisly as you'd imagine a guy getting blown up in his car. Not, not the way you want to want to go. No, no, not at all. Clothes casket. Yeah.

And the question is, who killed him? And of course, because of all these wars, there's a laundry list of suspects. In fact, one day after he's killed, two members of the Abrazil family are sentenced to prison for conspiring to kill a different brother, Nisim, who we talked about just a minute ago.

Because obviously the Alperones have a feud with the Aboriginals over many things, but also because a member of the Aboriginal family was beaten by the Alperones under a security camera at a busy intersection. So that was one of the weirder ones. I always thought that was a weird story because it was – well, the spot it took place is right next to the diamond exchange in Ramadan, one of the larger diamond exchanges in the world.

And it's a giant tower called the Migdal Moshe Aviv, which was the tallest in Israel at the time. I think it may still be. It's a very phallic, giant building. And a lot of it's got luxury apartments in there. And so some some mob types live there. And a barge was living there at the time. And they were having some they were supposed to have some sort of talk outside and, you

Somebody exchanged words and then they just ran up on Yitzhak Abadjel and just started hitting him. And it was Arie Alperon apparently who was beating him up, who if anybody at home could look up a photo of Arie Alperon, at least in his prime, he very much looked like, I would say, the most goonish of the brothers. He had that face of a guy who does that line of work. Or let's say dresses for that job. You can see how...

Some kind of thing like a hotheaded instance who said something, y'all are talking shit or whatnot. And then next thing you know, you got to, you know, bombs and whatnot. Another main suspect is this crime boss, Amir Molnar, who happens to be an explosive expert. And when I say he's an explosive expert, I literally mean he was trained by the Israeli army as an explosive expert in the Golani Brigade, which is sort of, you know, this respected infantry brigade.

Molnar was also the son of a police officer. He came up in like a street gang of sorts and fought a blood war against others in the 90s. In the early 2000s, a member of his gang decides to become an informant and fearing arrest, Molnar flees overseas, which is something that seems to happen a lot with Israeli organized crime figures.

They just kind of like dip out to South America, to Morocco. They're all over the place. And I mean, the Israeli police, Ben, you can tell us more. They seem kind of incompetent when it comes to stopping these guys sometimes, both because their criminal justice system is weak and because these guys are smart. And it's kind of reminiscent to me

of European police, say, in Sweden, who are basically useless, for lack of a better word, when it comes to stopping organized crime and have a super lax system that always has these guys going in and out like a revolving door. Well, I think when you look at the Israeli law enforcement, it's always been...

far down the ladder in terms of prestige and respect and funding. So you have, you know, obviously in Israel, all the prestige and whatnot is in the security services. So there's Mossad, Shin Bet, the IDF, the Air Force, everything. And then somewhere down the list, you have the police. And then at the bottom, you have the prison service. So they're already kind of

Not a lot of prestige and a lot of respect put there. And a lot of the guys also come from the same neighborhoods as a lot of the guys they're fighting or they're going after. And while there is there is a great deal of professional talent in the Israeli police, especially when you get to those high level investigative units like in the, you know, the Amar, the Akbar unit.

Laha 433 and that whatnot. They have a lot of very talented guys and very advanced technological means at their disposal. The same stuff like the Interior Security Services use and whatnot to fight terror. So they have a lot of good guys, but

There's also a lot of not good. And it's not a corrupt police force like in a lot of other countries on that level. But there is a lot of problems with the professionalism, the ability to close cases, a lot of issues with sexual harassment over the years, but also with organized crime.

They've arrested a lot of guys, but arresting them and getting convictions is a lot different. And also there's been a big reliance on state witnesses, which can be very effective when you get informants like that and cut deals with them. But it's also... I always think it kind of indicates the fact that you don't have a lot of real kind of like street-level intel and people on the inside and people who really understand and are tracking these organizations if what you're trying to do is basically trying to flip guys and get cases that way. So...

So and when it comes to them being overseas, I think that the ability to stop Israeli guys overseas, you know, first and foremost goes to the local cops. But it's also what their relationships are like with their Israeli counterparts. So the Israelis know some guys are looking for in the States. They have real good connections with their counterparts in the U.S. They even have some some of those guys stationed here permanently, like from the FBI.

And if that country in question has good ties with the Israeli authorities and has a good police force, then that makes a big difference. But a lot of these countries that they operate in have their own problems with crime that are much bigger than ours and have their own problems with their police force. Places in Eastern Europe, South Africa, places like that, Mexico, where a lot of guys go. So in places like that, you can kind of you can dip into the scene and start a new life.

Speaking of state witnesses, while Molnar is overseas, the witness in his case, the guy who got flipped, survives one assassination attempt. And then in June of 2004, two hitmen scale a building and kill him in his living room. So Molnar returns to the country shortly after. The murder, of course, has never been solved. A few years after he returns, Molnar and Alperone get into it. They have a meeting at a hotel, a sit down to sort of negotiate a turf dispute, and

One of the Alperones, I think Ben points out, it's the son, Dror, who's supposed to be a hothead, ends up stabbing Molnar in the neck. Yeah, he ended up stabbing him in the neck. Yeah. That's kind of the moment where if he had any intentions of not following the same line of work as his dad, the moment he stabbed Amir Molnar in the neck, now you've chosen that profession. I don't think you're not going to go to a startup. You're now in this life.

Yeah, I'm no mafia expert either, but you got to imagine Molnar wasn't fond of that incident and wanted some revenge. Anyway, a year later, Molnar goes on to become sort of a media darling due to being a bit of just a wild guy. In 2013, a lawyer working a case against him, his car explodes, which is kind of standard procedure for Israeli mafia guys. But Molnar decides to represent himself in court after getting arrested, I think for something else. And

And he gives up his right to an attorney. And apparently he just kills it. I mean, he washes the prosecutors. He interrogates the hell out of the police officers taking the stand and he wins the case. And in another story, another incident, Molnar is arrested. And during the interrogation, like in that room, he takes his schwanz out and just pees against the wall right in front of the detectives.

uh, he claims they didn't allow a bathroom break and had no choice. And of course he gets released on whatever charge that was as well. I would, you know what, honestly, I would, I would give him the benefit of the doubt on that. I find that there's a shortage of, um, public bathrooms in Israel. You don't really find them as much as you'd hope to, but I would also say I could see them hold them in there and not let them go take a piss. You know, that that's definitely possible. I think with, with, with Molnar, um, part of his like public persona was always this

Just quiet looking dude. Like he just a man of few words. Like he just seemed very in control of everything. That doesn't mean he always was. Um, but I think him, him more or less staying out of trouble for the most part, considering everything he's done, allegedly, he's a very smart guy. He's very sophisticated. He's been doing this for a long, long time. People fear him and aren't going to, aren't going to talk about him and talk to the police. Um,

he's always had very good attorneys. He was represented by a guy for a long time, uh, named multi cats who also represented the Rosenstein and the mostly brothers. These guys have money and they have loyalty from the guys are with, and they know not to talk. They know they're not like these, these new younger guys, uh, these mob heirs, like drawer opera. And we mentioned who, you know, they were born into a family that was, that was set up and had money. So they never had to make it on their own. Uh,

That older generation was not that Amir Molnar is not that old, but the generation before they whatever they got, they built their own way and they did it themselves because they had street smarts and they knew how to stay out of trouble. So so guys like them him do a good job at that. I share one other anecdote about Amir Molnar, which I got. I heard from one guy in the hip hop scene in Israel and another guy confirmed it at a party, but didn't want to talk about it. Apparently.

About a decade or something ago, Amir Molnar flew Coolio to Israel to do a gig. The story, from what I understand, and this is what makes it very believable to me because it sounds like such a kind of Israeli, certain type of Israeli dude thing. They just really liked Gangster's Paradise. We love that song. We love it. So some of his dudes flew, apparently, allegedly flew there.

It flew him out here to do a show. It was at this club with the promoters. It was somewhat. That's what I understand. I can't confirm that. But, you know, we're happy to talk about Coolio on this show, too. That's the type of power you have. If you can. That's the type of power you can get. You can get Coolio on a commercial flight. And, you know, all these years later.

Flying Coolio out in 2010 to perform that song is just the perfect level of Israeli cheesiness. You got a middle-aged Israeli cheesiness. You got to respect that. One of the aspects of living in Israel is that you never more than...

Let's say 48 hours from hearing this is how we do it by Montel Jordan somewhere still or I got five on it by Luna's like you're still going to hear that. So it's not surprising that, you know, Coolio still has a base, at least with that one hit, you know.

Another potential suspect in the murder and crime family we're going to discuss is the Abutbols. So one of the Alperon brothers, Nassim, he's the one who was alleged to have survived the nine assassination attempts, was said to have been behind the killing of the one-time patriarch of the Abutbols. Sorry, Abutbols, am I saying that right? Abutbols.

Felix, who was outside one of his casinos in the Czech Republic. There's that international reach again. The Israeli mobs, they run a bunch of European casinos. And the Abrazeals may have also been behind the killing as well, as the Abrazeals were engaged in a war with the Abrazeals about international gambling rackets and drug trafficking routes in the US, Europe, and Israel. Felix is one of the original Israeli godfathers.

He rose up as a gambling kingpin in the coastal city of Netanya before expanding his reach into these European casinos. In the late 80s, he was apparently involved in a failed kidnapping attempt of a Nigerian minister in London. The minister was found in a wooden box supposed to be shipped internationally. Felix does six years. Regrettably, I could not find any more information on this and am thoroughly disappointed in myself. So that was...

It's funny because it's actually a story that I wrote about in kind of a roundabout way because it's a very strange case that from what I've learned is very well known in Nigeria or fairly well known, at least more so than in Israel.

Back in about 2012 or 13, I was writing an article about a guy named Alex Barack, who was a childhood friend of Felix and took part in that operation and that kidnapping. And he was arrested with Felix in dead time in prison in the UK with Felix.

The whole question is, why were they who put them up to this? Why do they do it? But the reason I wrote about him was because Alex Barack, a few years, uh, some, sometime after that, he was shot in a assassination attempt in Tel Aviv, paralyzed from the chest down. And then he became this advocate for medical marijuana and they named a strain of cannabis after him. So I wrote an article about him, um,

for high times back then about the uh mystery man organized crime masad figure who inspired a strain of of cannabis so the story is real they did try to kidnap this dude and put him in a wooden box why they thought it'd work i don't know and why these are the guys who who were at the center i'm not sure one thing about felix though um we talk a lot about how these guys are a bit um

not all that suave, at least what we assume from mafiosos. Felix had the reputation back then of actually being a pretty slick dude. Part of that's the Moroccan-French thing, but it was the suits and the vibe. He was kind of that guy a little bit. He had a kind of rare style for these sorts of Israeli dudes. And he lived in Netanya, which is a Francophone city on the seaside. So he was...

Not that everybody there is that slick, but he definitely he was one of the dudes who did kind of have that that classiness, as it were. Which makes sense. I mean, getting assassinated outside a casino in the Czech Republic, I feel like that's a classy way to die as opposed to a car bomb outside a currency exchange. Yeah, that's how I hope, you know, that's what I'm. Yeah, he gets killed in that war between the Abudbols and the Aburazil's.

Two months earlier, an Abrazil had been gunned down in front of his family. Meanwhile, in December of 2005, four guys are caught after conspiring to kill another Abupul, Asi, by firing an anti-tank missile at his house. Somehow they only get between 28 and 37 months in prison. That's months, not years. It's also a very precise number, too.

Yeah, yeah. 37 months. Ossie ends up getting sentenced to 13 years in prison for running a criminal organization, extortion, arson, unlawful imprisonment, and other financial crimes. So you mentioned earlier – or I mentioned earlier about how the kind of dichotomy here where you don't have all that –

a crime rate or public safety like you do in a lot of other places, but the means of crime are more extreme often than other places. So the shoulder-fired missile is a fairly common, I mean, not all that common, but it's certainly not unprecedented. A number of dudes have tried to do this. They've been used on a number of occasions for gangland stuff. There was one back in 2012 I wrote about where these guys in Ashdod, the Magidish brothers, were going to try to kill Shalom Dolmani and their whole idea because he lives on some big villa

out in this rural community, let's call it, in the south, you can't really get up to his house and you don't want to. So they were going to drive a tractor...

To some distance from the house, stand in the scoop or the tractor, raise it up or somebody was stand in the scoop, raise it up and then fire the missile and hopefully hit him and not one of the members of his family. So that, you know, fortunately didn't didn't go through. But these sorts of means are not are not rare here. Certainly not grenades. Grenades are quite common.

These things are easy to steal from the military, and that's one of the ways that the Israeli military can play a role in organized crime as being a good source of ammunition and weaponry in a country where guns are strictly controlled, unlike the U.S.,

Meanwhile, Charlie, who's another brother, he's engaged in what the press calls the shawarma war, which was the Abu Dhabi's fighting with the Aboriginals over what I think was the shawarma racket, the grilled meat racket. Seriously, like the police shut down a bunch of shawarma restaurants owned by the mobsters after Charlie and a few others got shot in front of one of the restaurants.

And from what I understand, the Abbot Bulls are mostly dunzo these days, and I think most of them are in prison. Yeah, so I mean, you know, it sounds funny, but the price of shawarma just keeps growing up. I mean, shawarma is...

It is not a cheap lunch option anymore. You know, I mean, you're looking at 38 shekels just in a pita. So that's about, you know, $12 now for a sandwich. And one is not going to fill you up. Yeah, I think, you know... That's a crime in itself. Well, hold on. Yes, A, it is. But I think not all that long ago, it was about 18. It was 15 when I first came here for shawarma in a pita. And it just keeps going up. I think it's now, it's well over 30 shekels. And so...

Yeah, if you can get in on that early, you're in good shape. With the Abupils, they're one of those families that there's a difference between how well they are known to the Israeli public and how actually powerful they are in the underworld. And so they're somebody – there was one of those families that everybody knows.

And it's heard of and they've been on TV and all that stuff. But they faded a while back. You know, after Felix died, that was kind of that was that was the beginning. And then at the end, then I see again, the son, the heir, who's not really up to the same level of his dad, who was a self-made man. That's that rings true in every one of these families, pretty much. And then Francois Abudbul was killed. And then another Francois Abudbul, who was the son of Charlie Abudbul died.

It's hard to keep it straight. He was arrested for murdering a kid at a nightclub, some kind of just innocent kid who got an altercation. And this guy murdered him. And that was a huge case here and just brought a ton of heat on the family. And then it was pretty much just Charlie Abutbol running the show. And he he took his own life with years ago. And at that point, you know, I mean, they were already not able to really compete. You had a couple of Arab crime organizations moving in on that attack.

the Tanya area and other guys. And it's just at some point, you know, your time's up. And that, so that family kind of, you know, their, their star has faded, let's say. When it comes down to it, though, in my opinion, I think in a lot of others, there are two Israeli crime families that really rise above the rest. And that's the Abrajeels, who I've mentioned a bunch, and the Rosenstein family. And I could do an entire episode just on the Abrajeels because Yitzhak, the leader, like I said, criminal prodigy, the likes of which I've rarely seen.

He's the son of Moroccan immigrant parents, and he grows up the youngest of 10 siblings in the rough city of Lod, in the projects in the 70s. And this is a lot from Ben's own reporting. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother worked a bunch of jobs and was never home. He had older brothers that were in and out of prison and addicted to drugs.

This is a quote he told a court. I can remember that we were always lacking. If Abregil is to be believed, his gangsterdom started at literally three years old, because honestly, who remembers being three? When he started shoplifting and stealing food. He was allegedly hiding guns, drugs, and like grenades for dealers and gangsters when he was five or six years old. He said he would use shapes and stuff to identify whose guns was whose when he hid them. That was his system.

At 12, he graduated to running a stash house selling hash and heroin with his brother. And at 14, he was smuggling drugs to the jail for one of his other brothers. 14 is also when he shot someone for the first time, a 33-year-old who wouldn't let him into like a rec center or something like that, some sort of teen party because he was wearing shorts. And look, I'm not condoning violence or saying bouncers sometimes deserve to get shot, but also sometimes bouncers deserve to get shot. Yeah, I didn't think you can make a case for that in some instances. I think it's

With this particular case, it's to know this is very much an Israeli kind of underworld cliche. Somebody stabbed some guy at a club who didn't let him in. Bouncers get stabbed like that. I mean, it's happened fairly, you know, a good number of times. There's also kind of

There may be arguably a racial component in that as well, because, you know, when you come up to the club, they're going to look at how you look and how you dress and your skin. And they're going to look also if they ask you for your ID on that ID, they can see your last name and where you're from. So by the name of that town and your last name, a lot of these bouncers are going to make a decision. We're not to let you in. But that's that's I'm not saying that's not what happened here. I'm just saying when these things do happen. Yeah.

It happens. By 16, he's running multiple trap houses and importing drugs in from the Netherlands. I mean, this is like LeBron James level type of talent right here. This kid is a prodigy. He's also illiterate, but we'll get to that later. He soon becomes a borer. Borer? How do you say it? Borer. Borer. Yeah. It comes from the word to clear stuff up or to clarify, to make obvious. Yeah.

It's like the Israeli version of a Russian thief-in-law, the kind of high-level respected criminal who oversees other criminal disputes.

And then he kills somebody, a pimp that allegedly threatened him with a grenade. He's, I think, 17 at this time. By the way, 17, and he kills this guy. So during the trial, his oldest childhood friend, who was also engaged to his sister, betrays him and testifies against him. And according to Abrajeel, he never gets over that. He gets sentenced to 30 years, but ends up doing 12. But Ben, my question is like 12 on 30. How does that happen? Right. So one thing in general about Israel, there tends to be...

Not very serious sentences for crimes, especially compared to the States. You don't have the sort of thing where a guy gets busted for trafficking and he gets a life sentence or a guy does armed robbery and he gets 30 years, no chance of parole. You don't have that. A life sentence is 30 years. And I think him getting out early was largely because he was 17. It was also because he...

When he was in jail, he was famous already. He was famous on the street before he went into jail. He was famous in prison. He became...

Kind of like a guy out of a movie who just sort of like ran the prison and had real criminals just kind of waiting on him as a young man, you know, still a teenager. And he was just a master manipulator. So he had and it's one of the more bizarre stories. He he built up a friendship with the warden and he convinced the warden that, you know, he was he was changing his ways, a kind of classic story. And he actually convinced the warden.

To take him to be on a TV show, because that's the other thing, not just that's not just low sentences, really. Criminals get a lot of furloughs, which I in general tend to be kind of in favor of. But either way, he on a furlough there, there took him to be on this primetime TV talk show. And you can find it on YouTube. It's him being interviewed about how he has changed his ways. And now he's a student of philosophy. He even read a poem.

that he made, and then not long after that, he gets released and becomes the most feared criminal in the country. So I think it's a case of a guy being 17 when he did the crime, doing 12 years, which is pretty good for Israel, and then just being able to manipulate his way out there. In prison, he stirs up, like Ben said, a whole ton of shit, stabs people, and he becomes his boss, and he also meets a guy called Shmaaya Angel. Angel? Angel? How would you say his last name? Angel. Angel. Angel.

He's a much older first-generation Israeli gangster. He died at 51 of cancer in 2004. He was serving a life sentence from a situation in 1982 where he killed two of his drug trafficking partners. He was considered one of Israel's most dangerous prisoners and once got a prisoner who was set to testify against his wife, stabbed 131 times despite being held in a guarded cell. So Shemaiah takes this guy under his wing and also teaches him how to read. And as Ben has reported, he's fond of Ayn Rand, right?

Yes, Ayn Rand and Nietzsche. Also, um...

Siddhartha by Herman Hess. I haven't read the book, but he in his testimony in the big 512 case against him, he talked a lot about these books. And in Nietzsche, he said, thus spoke Zarathustra, changed his life behind bars. I don't know if that's an indictment of Nietzsche or not, but he really said it made a big difference in his life. And that's how he learned to read with these books. So I don't know if Ayn Rand...

gets any of the blame for this but um i think it definitely it definitely does definitely i mean alice shrugged yeah uh here's a quote from you talk you know so typical of course he's an aid ran guy you know here's a quote from him i was born into crime grew up in crime was breastfed crime heard crime did crimes all of my life i was in one giant bubble of crime

There was nothing else, nothing, a pit and nothing that was connected to normal life. I knew the world of crime, the laws, rules, grammar, but the normal world. And as you can see, actually, you know, but the normal world or the question mark at the end of it, I phrased that wrong. But either way, as you can see, this guy, he loves doing crimes. And it's actually, it's all he knows. You know, he was a product of his environment.

Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. I think definitely in the story he tells, which again, his life story got to take a little bit of grain of salt. But the story that he does tell and just the facts of being from a really large family with a ton of siblings, basically a one-parent household in Lod in the 70s in Binyan Rakhivit, like a boxcar building they call them.

That's a hard place now. That's a tough town now. So I can imagine what it was like in the 70s, how poor it was. I'm not saying a guy like that never had any other options, but I can understand why somebody like that would feel like they didn't and would feel like he didn't have a chance. And also, if you combine that with his natural talent and charisma, you can see how he was destined for that sort of success. You can also imagine, like I'm sure you said in other podcasts, this type of guy like this, if he had grown up in a different family in a different neighborhood...

He could have been, you know, he could have been a doctor, a lawyer. He could have been a politician, but, um, fortune 500 CEO, you know, like, you know, his lawyer said he was extremely charismatic and all that, but he ends up getting released from prison. I guess he's 2930 and he just gets right back into it. He's importing drugs on a global level, killing people on three continents. You know, the usual, uh,

He once described going into the underground casino business, and when asked what he brought to the table as a business partner, he answered, I bring with me 13 years in prison. I bring with me Yitzhak Abergil. In other places, if you lose money, you don't pay. Okay. But when I'm a partner in the business, there was no such thing as not paying. So, you know, that sounds like the kind of person you want to be in business with, maybe if he's on your side. Definitely.

Ben quotes a source in one of his articles as saying,

This is not something that we've known before, and it's not something that has come back since. And you have another source saying, he's the most superior high-ranking criminal that has ever existed in Israel. In his personal capabilities, his personality, his disturbed psychopathic approach to life, and his intelligence and charisma, he is the most dangerous criminal that there has ever been here. Look, I would tend to agree with most of that, but…

one of the guys saying some of this stuff was involved in the state's prosecution. So maybe he has some sort of interest or he could be prone to kind of exaggerate a little bit. But there is something to that. I mean, they had you certainly had feuds in Israel and murders between gangsters and criminals way back in the 70s, 80s, even before. And they were highly publicized. People knew about them. They made the news and people got killed in the broad daylight and all that. But this was more gang style feuds and crews on the street. It wasn't

Israeli dudes having guys killed in Prague because of beef back in Israel or moving cocaine from Brazil to Montreal and ecstasy from Holland to L.A. and murdering people in the States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, etc.

That type of thing you didn't really have, in addition, obviously, also to the technological stuff they have now, the type of means they have at their disposal to kill people and track people and all that is quite good. So that wasn't there before. And he's kind of the he's the guy who kind of built that and inspired that. And he had the I guess you say he had the vision to be a, you know, to be a ground man.

you know, groundbreaker in that sense. Yeah. I mean, him, the DEA, along him and Zev Rosenstein, they called them the Escobars of Israel. And it said that he was once at one point, one of the top 40 drug traffickers into the U.S., which means he's competing with like all the Mexican and Colombian cartels, Dominican importers, things like that.

His organization trafficked ecstasy, cocaine, hashish, and other drugs around the world, from the U.S. to Belgium to Japan, moving between Morocco, Spain, Belgium, and the U.S. itself. He and his brothers, I think there were three others that were actively involved, had been arrested and detained in multiple countries. I think they're still waiting on a five-year sentence for him in Belgium. And they're just truly this epic crime family. And they

And they really are something out of a plot line, like I said in Grand Theft Auto. And I think we see that most when they team up with the Violin Boys, that's with a Z, a Latino street gang in LA that was sick of being pushed around by the Mexican mafia, La M.A., who control Southern Los Angeles, or Southern California, I'm sorry, telling them what to do.

You see, the Aboriginals had all this ecstasy, apparently even owning manufacturing labs in Belgium, but they needed help with distribution and protection in LA. I mean, sure, they're powerful, but let's not they have a bunch of gang members and street dealers in the US. So this happens in 2000. They strike up a deal with the violent boys. The feds start to catch on shortly after, though, because these guys start making way too much noise.

In July of 2002, they bust a big ecstasy deal in action involving three groups of people, including some big Israeli players and their bodyguards who are carrying automatic weapons. Now, the big player in the U.S. for the Aboriginals is this guy Moshe Malul. He's their man in L.A. And another guy by the name of Sammy Atlas was there, too. He was in their ring.

Sammy, though, he's not exactly the most loyal, gets a little too smart, tries to steal a shipment of pills and sell it on his own. Moshe and his brother, they catch on to this. They fly to Spain to meet with the Aborigines, who decide that Sammy has to die. Then the Vineland boys, they catch them in a cafe in California, in Encino of all places, and they kill him in the parking lot.

Unfortunately, one of the violent boys also kills a cop in 2003, and that puts you on the radar. By 2005, 1,300 law enforcement officers are involved in a huge sweep to shut them down. Don't kill a police officer in the US. I've seen it with the NYPD. I've been on the scene shortly after it happens when someone shoots a cop, and they react like an army, like nothing else. They will send the choppers. They will flood with officers way more than they need to.

to try to set something happen. So that's kind of what happens there. And it's, again, it'll put you on the radar in a way you don't want to be. It's important to point out, too, that the Aboriginals weren't just street thugs and drug dealers. Like, they were actually quite smart and sophisticated. They ran a huge money laundering and embezzling operation, stealing tens of million dollars from an Israeli bank. And I also kind of wonder, like, you know, who does the paperwork for these guys? Because I don't think they're the ones doing it. So they had, with that, that was one of the bigger...

That was such a huge story in Israel in terms of kind of a turning point in organized crime and just in terms of the massive amount of money that it put out there that was able to seed all types of things. The estimate I've read or heard was somewhere between 250 to 300 million shekels, which comes out to about – now it's about 3.2 shekels of the dollar now. So it's about $70 million, $80 million. Jesus. And this was – so they had – it was because of two main inside guys. They had a guy named –

Ofer Maximov, who owed a lot of money to the mob, and his sister worked for the bank as their head of investment or deputy head of investment. So she was she was pretty high ranking in there. So she was able to embezzle all this money for her brother. And yeah, it didn't it didn't well for her. She didn't go into prison. But yeah, they definitely had a guy on the inside and they they exploited her as much as they possibly could.

Look, I'm not going to get too far into it because financial crimes are for the most part boring and I barely understand it. But it seems like from this summary from the Times of Israel, they, you know, they had these plans where they would push out loans to Israeli business people in the U.S. who were then extorted. So they had to give up their businesses and just, you know, that sort of stuff, embezzlement, whatever. It's boring, but you get it. So unfortunately, though, the Aboriginals were about to learn a lesson that many organized criminal has learned before, which is

Shit is different when you start fucking with the U.S., especially when you're doing so from a country that's an ally, because the Abrazeals, with the help of the Israeli government, were going to be put on trial in the U.S. Yitzhak Abrazeal and his brother, Meir, they end up getting arrested in Israel in 2008.

But we've kind of already covered how the Israeli criminal justice system is sort of inept and how these guys were wild enough to go after all the prosecutors and judges and whatnot. We should also mention that there was another killing of a civilian in 2008 that shocked the country right around when this happened, which was a woman who was a social worker was killed in front of her kids and husband in an assassination attempt gone wrong. That led to another sort of coming to God moment for the country. So that's, you know, they were fed up with this stuff. Yeah, that was a huge, that was a huge stage. Her name was Margarita Loughton.

It was on the beach in Bat Yam, a place just tons of people, families, all that all around. And that was one of those ones like you can't really ignore that.

The Israelis figure it's better for these guys to go on trial in the U.S., face the U.S. justice system, and then get sent back to serve out the remainder of their time in Israel due to some legal stature that, frankly, I'm not going to bother to learn the specifications of. Here's the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project on it. Why try Abrazeel and other foreign drug dealers in the U.S.? The answer is simple in the Abrazeel case. RICO and other U.S. legal provisions are tougher than any law Israel has to offer. We're

Retired Israeli police commander Yaakov Borovsky, speaking to the Jerusalem Post in July after a botched mob hit left a young mother dead, said police were hamstrung by Israel's current three-strikes law, which stipulates that a file is not flagged with a suspect's connection to the crime family until his third offense. The Aboriginals are arrested in 08, they're sent to the U.S. in 2011, convicted, and then sent back to Israel to serve out the rest of their time for this particular crime spree in 2014.

The Aborigines, though, they weren't the first Israeli mafia U.S.O. to go through that process of extradition and trial in the U.S. That honor belongs to Zev, the wolf with seven lives, Rosenstein, who, if you remember, survived that bombing in 2003 and fought a vicious war with the Aborigines after they tried to expand into his gambling empire.

The Aboriginals actually met with a bunch of other crime families in Brussels in 2003 to discuss how to take out Rosenstein shortly before the bombing. One thing about the bombing, too, and why it was such a big deal, as Ben talked about, this is Israel, right? They have their federal government back then focused on the Intifada, their suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, Hamas, all that all over. So to see an Israeli doing this during that time, people were pissed off. Yeah, it was definitely—I remember being here at the time, and it was—

you know, a bomb blast in the middle of the day in Tel Aviv, obviously you're going to assume the worst. And then it quickly emerged that it wasn't a terror attack. And then it became this sort of thing. It's like, we got all this other things to worry about. And then we got to worry about getting blown up by a Jew in the middle of the day, randomly with no morning. So it's like, you know, we didn't have enough problems right now. It's like in the middle of pandemic. Now you got, Oh, by the way, now there's bird flu. It was like, well, we had this, we were doing COVID. And anyway, you know what I'm saying? So it was like another thing on top of that.

And it was a similar kind of dynamic in 2013. You had this underworld war with Shalom Domani and Benny Shlomo and Ashkelon.

And Ashkelon is in southern Israel near Gaza. And so what they usually deal with in terms of explosions is rockets from Gaza when that happens. And then when they started having these car bombs there, the first couple of times they go up, people assume it's a rocket or the first time at least. And so there's the same type of dynamic. It's like, wait, we don't have enough problem dealing with these rockets and those sirens and those explosions and that trauma and that PTSD. Now these knuckleheads are going to be blowing up each other in our neighborhood as well. Like, don't we have enough to deal with? So that dynamic really pissed people off.

And it got a lot more attention on these guys than they would have had otherwise. So not all that smart. Zev is the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants. He's born in Jaffa, which is just south of Tel Aviv. He dropped out of high school, starts working at an electronics store, which is just kind of, you know, quintessential Israeli. So many guts and all that.

That was the Sabra Price is right. I'm always happy when I've met someone or spoke to someone who's actually seen that skit. It was so dumb, but it was accurate in a very specific way, like the Zohan was. Completely ridiculous, but also it hit on something. I don't know. It's hard to...

So he starts off during that time as a petty thief, soon got involved with running gambling rackets and illegal casinos near the old bus station neighborhood in Tel Aviv, which is actually a really interesting sort of hardcore rundown area, or at least it was when I spent some time there. I had tried to make a documentary about African refugees in Israel back in 2008. And this whole area, it's a really tough, tough neighborhood, but kind of cool. What's that long street that's over there? It's called Nevisha Anan, which is also the name of the neighborhood.

I would say it's got some problems and whatnot, but it's easily one of the most interesting and unique places in Israel and definitely worth checking out. Yeah, it's full of restaurants and bars run by all the immigrants in Israel. So you have Filipinos, Chinese, Eritreans, Sudanese, all their shops, some Israeli Arabs, tattooed Russian gangsters sitting out drinking beers. But yeah, it's also super shady and full of drugs and prostitution, or at least it was back then. Yeah, yeah.

It's definitely a seedy place, and it's got a lot of issues. But you're also safe there to walk around and take it in. It's not like a lot of other places in the world. Yeah, no, it's cool. I like it. Rosenstein comes to prominence in 1993 when he allegedly took out a big-time 70s and 80s gangster, Yehezkel? Yehezkel. Say it again? Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel. Yehezkel

You were in the ballpark. He's an Iraqi. Yeah, I'm getting close. He's an Iraqi Jewish godfather whose face was deformed because he was shot nine times in a previous assassination attempt. What is with these guys? Like, what do they put in the water there? These guys just survive all that stuff. So it could be bad aim, you know, like, I mean, yeah, maybe that's user error. You know, it's not just. But yeah, it's yeah.

But yeah, he ends up in Mexico war with the Aboriginals and a bunch of the others and all that. Honestly, at this point, it's hard to keep track. Everyone went to war with everyone. Let's just, let's just say that even some of the guys we haven't covered. And in 2001, Rosenstein urges the murder of a competitor and a guy in a motorcycle guns down three people outside a beach club.

The Aburziles at one point, they think Rosenstein conspired with the Abut Buls and another family to have their brother, Yakov, killed in 2002. Remember, Felix gets gunned down outside the casino in Czech Republic in 2002. But yeah, that's what leads up to the bomb attempt in 2003 that kills three civilians and shocks the country.

But that bomb attempt, it misses him in 2003. Unfortunately for him, he can't avoid the U.S. criminal justice system, and he's bossed it in 2005 in Israel. He was injured, though. He did get lightly injured in that, in the blast, and then drove himself to the hospital. If you remember, like Cameron, when he was robbed in Harlem, and he drove to the hospital in a Lamborghini for the New York listeners. But other than that, I mean, again, he unscathed, and three other people who weren't involved did get killed, so...

That's how, that's how. Big deal. Yeah, definitely. Big deal. When he's busted, it's said that the Israeli mobsters control 80% of the world's ecstasy market. And if you were hitting the clubs in like early 2000s, shout out to Sound Factory, you would realize that is a lot of money. At one point, a bust of Rosenstein's people turns up 700,000 pills in one apartment in Manhattan in 2001. According to Douglas Century, quote, the new Israeli ex-Sea Kingpins had a unique advantage over competing global mafiosos.

They owned the underground drug labs in the Netherlands and Belgium and already had an infrastructure in place, often using strippers and ultra-Orthodox Jewish teenagers as drug mules on flights to New York and Los Angeles. To give you a level of how high up the Israelis were in this trade, one Israeli gangster supplied to another, who supplied to another, who then supplied to another, who happened to be the guy who supplied Sammy the Bull Gravano's ecstasy ring. He was running out in Arizona, I think, when he was supposed to be in Witness Protection.

The Israelis also apparently supplied it to the guys who controlled the trade in limelight, which if you've ever heard about Peter Gation, Chris Passiello, Michael Alec, Klumland, all that good stuff is a really fascinating story, but also kind of like maybe like the global ground zero for ecstasy in New York, in the States, maybe in the world at that time.

But yeah, the Israeli police, they'd failed to get Zev locked up for years. So they took him in 2005 with the help of U.S. law enforcement for smuggling drugs into the U.S. Says the LA Times, in the 2006 prosecution of former ecstasy drug kingpin Zev Rosenstein in a precedent-setting arrangement, he was charged in America, arrested in Israel, and extradited, sentenced to 12 years in prison, then shipped back to Israel to serve his time.

And the Ford in 2008 wrote, "...the current moves by Israeli authorities stem from an amendment to Israeli law in 1999 that allowed the country to extradite citizens who reside in the country on the condition that they serve their prison sentences in Israel. The Israeli government had previously adopted a law in 1978 barring the extradition of its criminals because of what then Prime Minister Menachem Begin described as a fear that the prosecution of Israeli criminals abroad would be tainted by an anti-Semitism abroad."

I mean, I guess I could see that. I think for sure, definitely. I mean, depending on where they are arrested, certainly. But I think just just from the standpoint of the criminals themselves or the suspects, it's much better to do to do that time in Israel. You know, Israeli prisons are pretty filthy and crowded and loud and don't smell good. And, you know, they've got some really rough guys in there, too. But but it's a lot safer than being in a penitentiary in the States.

The conditions are better in terms of all those, you know, anything from solitary to everything else. Even murderers can get furloughs, regular furloughs in Israel. You can get conjugal visits quite easily. All these things are much easier than they are in the American penitentiary system. And also for somebody like

a barge or like rosenstein here they know who you are here your name actually has some weight if you're in a federal prison in colorado nobody's gonna know who you are or care and or they might find out who you are but you're not really going to be a guy whose name strikes a lot of fear into their hearts so for these guys uh it's definitely in their interest to do their time here near their families and near um where their fellow convicts will fear them

Also, you got to imagine if you're an Israeli prisoner in an American federal prison, like, you know, the whole Aryan Nation guys and the black nationalist guys, they're not going to be like a big fan of you. You know, it's probably it's probably tough. I actually met a Colombian. No, he's a Venezuelan cartel guy.

who was Jewish and wearing a yarmulke in lockup in D.C. Interesting. He was like a high-level Venezuelan cartel guy affiliated with the government. And he was like, yeah, people aren't – his English wasn't great, so we couldn't communicate that much. We exchanged letters for a while, but he was just like, yeah, people aren't – they're not so fond of me in here. And this was a dude who was like, you know, trained in the art of defending himself and murdering people. I mean, I think it's great that he, you know –

Oh, he definitely found God in prison. But he was not... Yeah, this is one of the most powerful cartels in the world. But he was just like, yeah, it's not the best place to be right now. Yeah, it's going to be hard to find... I mean, I remember being the only Jewish kid in school. It's tough. So, yeah, but I think if anything, that's good that he's becoming more observant. That could help him just to kind of pass the time, if anything, and also get his life back together. But, yeah, I assume...

You know, like so many things in the penitentiary, it's going to be more strength in numbers. And if you're, you know, if you're well known here, that's better for you than if you're just a nobody there. Yeah. And just to give an example of how tough it was to try these guys, in 2004 in Israel, there was a judge who was killed, I think, right outside his home. And that was right before Zev got locked up. Yeah, that was a big case back in 2004. You know, Matashon is quite a nice area in Israel, a fancy town. Yeah.

Judge named Adiazar, he was gunned down in his car in the driveway. I don't quite remember the exact motives for it, but it was a couple of pretty bad dudes who did it. And that was one of these very shocking cases, obviously, when something like this happens.

I mean, you know, it's not every day a judge gets killed, obviously. So yeah, a bunch of these families, they've been prosecuted, they've been broken up, killed, all that. And there are some other upstarts we're actually going to get into in the bonus episode for Patreon subscribers. But to add things, we have to mention Case 512, which started in 2017. And if I'm not mistaken, it's apparently still going on. It's the biggest case ever in Israel and involves the prosecutions of a bunch of the mobsters we talked about, including the Aboriginals and crimes just going back decades. Here's Ben actually summing it up in one of his articles.

Case 512 also covers two murders in Israel and Germany, two attempted murders in Japan and the Czech Republic, and the manifold crimes associated with running a global drug trafficking, money laundering, and tax evasion network. As the investigation weaved its way around the globe over the course of 15 years, it took on a life of its own, eventually ensnaring more than half a dozen Israeli mob bosses from several different and rival crime gangs.

Indicted with Abujil were, amongst others, his brother-in-law, Moti Hassin, his former right-hand man, Avi Ruhan, a major crime boss operating out of Renana, and Netanya Ma bosses Asi Abutbul and Rico Shirazi, rivals of each other, and in Abutbul's case, of Abujil as well.

And I think at one point Rosenstein was actually called to testify against the Abrazeals, who remember have tried to kill him multiple times, and he actually refused to talk. So there you go. Nice little code of signs still being honored over there in Israel. But you've covered this case extensively. Yeah, quite a bit. It was...

Well, with Zev, in his case, you know, I don't see any interest he could have had in testifying. He's going to be released pretty soon. I don't know what they would have got him. And I think if he wants to settle that with with the barge on his guys, he's not going to do it by by testifying against him. It was I would say one of the crazy things about the case is just the way that it was. It wasn't just that it was taken down this organization. It was it.

it scooped up all types of guys who were in all different organizations and all don't like each other. A lot of them, you know, a lot of these guys were rivals and they all just, this is case to just sprawled and sprawled. And it had seven different state witnesses who were all very involved guys and not very good guys. So it is definitely, I would say that's not, you know, that's not exaggeration. It would be,

the largest criminal investigation in Israel's history that did not involve Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like, other than the cases, the four investigations and counting, you know, outside the investigations against Prime Minister Netanyahu and his indictments and those against former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who did some time in prison, this would be the largest one, certainly in the organized crime world. Just the scope of it, the resources they invested in, the names, all of these guys...

are big names. A lot of them are names to people who are everyday people who don't cover this as journalists or don't live in that world, like Abadja, like the Abubos, like all these guys. And then there's a bunch of other dudes who aren't household names but are real heavy guys. And it just scooped up a ton of them. Now, how many of them are actually going to get convicted and do any serious time is a whole other thing. But it's definitely been a big one. And it's still ongoing. Obviously, COVID and the pandemic has kind of screwed up the court system a little bit. But

You know, it'll wrap up pretty soon.

So yeah, there's, there's, there's, there's a lot we actually didn't get to a few more minor players, ridiculous stories, including something called the affair of the avenging police, which is straight out of like a Bruce Willis straight to streaming movie. Basically a bunch of officers in a particular town felt like they were being left out to dry by their high command when facing down this mobster, Michael Moore and his organization. So they took matters into their own hands and, and, you know, put a pipe bomb under his car and threw a grenade at his house and the whole thing backfired. They got arrested. We'll get into it. Patreon episode, uh,

Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. Thank you so much to everyone who's been subscribing. We really appreciate it so we can keep doing this. I want to thank Ben a ton for his excellent reporting and for being a guest and everyone who has signed up for the Patreon going on. Like I said, we're going to get into more of this. There was just so many names that for the first time ever, we're not just doing an interview bonus episode. We're going to tell a story in there. It's definitely worth your time. Throw some cash. Make it happen. Underworld Podcast. Thank you so much.

Ben, what's your organization again that you're working for right now? Yes, I write at canigma.com, C-A-N-N-I-G-M-A.com. We also podcast the Cannabis Enigma podcast. Check us out. We cover the whole world of weed. So come check us out, canigma.com. Thanks, guys.