The Most Dangerous Russian Mobster America Has Ever Known: Boris Nayfeld
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Well, we got a minute. I'm going to buy that truck I've been wanting. Wait, don't you need, like, weeks to shop for a car? I don't. Carvana makes it super convenient to find exactly what I want. Hold up. You're buying a car on your phone? Isn't that more of a laptop thing? You can shop wherever you want.

I like to do my research, read reviews, compare models. Plus, Carvana has thousands of options. How'd you decide on that truck? Because I like it. Oh, that is a great reason. Go to Carvana.com to sell your car the convenient way. It's mid-2015 in Brooklyn, New York, and 67-year-old Soviet immigrant businessman Anatoly Potik is pissed off about his daughter's messy divorce. How pissed off? A $100,000 murder contract on his son-in-law pissed off.

And Podix got just the right guy for the job, Boris Neyfeld. Neyfeld's a hulking, heavily tattooed Russian-Jewish mafioso who made his name in the bloody Russian mafia wars of Brighton Beach in the 1980s and 1990s. But he's way more than just a two-bit gangster.

He's been involved in organized crime from Odessa to Thailand to Moscow to Antwerp, survived five assassination attempts, done prison in the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, and been involved in diamond heists, heroin trafficking, extortion, shootouts. He's tangled with Russian thieving laws. The guy's name carries weight. And Podik had hired him before to help provide protection in Russia during the chaotic and insane '90s free-for-all there.

But his son-in-law is no slouch either. He's a fabulously rich shipping magnate with enough wealth that the messy divorce and custody battle he's in with his soon-to-be ex-wife is the talk of New York's Tony Upper East Side. And that son-in-law, he has some friends too. One of those sort of friends is an older businessman who happens to meet Neifeld at a fancy Brooklyn bar and grill that caters to wealthy and scary Russian lobsters.

The two get the idea that instead of Boris killing this guy, why not have him pay a bit more than the contract offered, $125,000, to cancel the contract. Nobody has to die, and these guys still make some money. It's a win-win. Except the son-in-law goes right to the police when he hears about the contract for his murder. And then there's a series of meetings with Boris where he wears a wire.

After the conclusion of their third meeting, FBI agents swarmed Boris just as he's about to leave the Italian restaurant where the meeting had been. And here's the kicker. The whole thing was kind of a sham. There was never a real murder-for-hire thing going on. The older businessman and Boris were just going to use Boris' reputation for violence to get money both here and in Russia for some people who had allegedly stolen $20 million from the older businessman.

It's one more arrest and one more crazy story in the life of the most powerful and famous and dangerous Russian mobster America has ever known. This is The Underworld Podcast. Welcome back to The Underworld Podcast, a weekly program and occasional how-to guide on organized crime here, there, and everywhere around the world, hosted by two journalists who have reported on these kinds of things for a long time. I'm

I'm one of your hosts, Danny Gold. I am joined by another one of your hosts, Sean Williams, who plans on making a bunch of nonsensical jokes with the British flavor that only he can provide. Sean, do you want to start us off by referencing some like obscure cricket player that only seven people listening will know of?

Well, I mean, I'm recording this in beautiful Melbourne, home of the King of Spin himself. So, yeah, that's a cricket player for you. But cricket's kind of used to these news. I'm all about Aussie rules football now. I'm heading to my first game tomorrow. It's going to be pretty crazy, like 100,000 people. Is that niche enough? I mean, that's a pretty big amount, honestly. Good for them. But...

Yeah, every time I get into a lot of those arguments with people, Australians about how like Aussie rules football players are so tough because they don't wear pads, but it's like you would they would die like in an NFL game to get hit by the equivalent of like Ray Lewis, like someone would die without pads. Yeah, but yeah, moving on.

As always, bonus episodes and interviews on our Patreon at patreon.com slash underworldpodcast. Or sign up on Spotify or iTunes. Our new merch thing, I think, is up, hopefully, with the Don't Instagram Your Crime shirts and others at underworldpod.com slash merch, M-E-R-C-H. And don't forget, as always, to support our sponsors. So...

This episode came about actually because I had gotten reached out to, I think, by an anonymous Instagram account first, then an anonymous WhatsApp number. A guy I kept talking to who had heard our previous two-part episode on how the Russian mafia came to Brooklyn, Brighton Beach. That was one of our, I think, first 10 episodes.

And he said that he had a connection to Boris Neifeld, who is now back in Russia, but was in the States at the time. And he could connect me to him. And this guy's great. We had dinner eventually afterwards. And he actually did connect me to Boris's son, who handles these things for him. We had some talks and it was going to happen, like an interview. But unfortunately, things fell through. It did not, which is a real bummer because he is a fascinating guy. And he's the real deal, man. Like he's not a pretender.

But I figured we could just do an episode on him anyway, based almost entirely on the book I was using for research. It's called The Last Boss of Brighton Beach by Douglas Century. Definitely pick that up. I can't sort of emphasize enough that this entire episode, nearly 90% of it is based off of that book. So buy that book from Douglas Century and support him for making my life easier.

But the book actually came about because I think they were looking to tell Boris a story like his family or his people in the hopes of having it turn into a movie, which it very well should be.

They reached out to the author, Douglas Century, who had written a bunch of great books and one actually about my neighborhood, a gang on my block called, I think, Street Kingdom, The Franklin F. Posse, which was one of the first books I read when I moved here years ago. Anyway, Boris agreed to do hours and hours and hours of interviews about his whole life. And that's where you get the book. And it's actually really interesting to compare this episode to those Russian mafia episodes we did earlier.

Because I think a lot of this stuff, a lot of our sources for that, and I mentioned it in the episode, is this guy Robert Freeman's work. And other press stuff, which I think was at best really exaggerated. And I mentioned that throughout the episode that I was skeptical of a lot of what he'd written. And he's also the main source for the Frontline doc in our episode on the Russian mafia NHL bribery controversy.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you really want to do us a favor as well, you find those old shows and you listen to them over and over again because, you know, they're great. They're great. And they're well-researched, despite what Danny just said. And it sweetens the deal for advertisers, which is going to help us out, right? No, they are. They are well-researched for sure. And I think we pointed out during those episodes about how this lore was created. Yeah.

about these guys and everything else and we were skeptical initially of his research so when we referenced it we also expressed our opinion sounded like it was a lot of hyperbolic stuff about you know the Russian mafia which is very scary in general but exaggerated anyway

Here is how Douglas Century describes Boris and the new class of Russian mobster in the U.S. that came there from the early 80s on. Quote, they were cosmopolitan, sophisticated, often university educated men who'd survived for years in the Soviet Union by applying their ingenuity and daring to build the corrupted state.

They settled in the decaying South Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach for generations a haven for immigrant Jews and refashioned it as their own little Odessa. Almost immediately, criminals like Boris Nafel distinguished themselves for their fearlessness. They partnered with, but were never cowed by, the Italian-American mafia. They joked about how easy it was to steal in America. They scoffed at the cushiness of U.S. penitentiaries in comparison to the starvation conditions in the forced labor camps they'd experienced in the Soviet Union.

They displayed a ruthlessness and casual use of violence that shocked even jaded members of U.S. law enforcement. So, yeah, that is a solid, solid intro right there to Boris Neyfeld. He is a gangster. Like, if you looked at a photo of him, he's just a huge, imposing dude, shaved head, big Russian mafia-style tattoos all over his chest, including God Forgive Me in Hebrew on his stomach.

And surprisingly, he actually got them in, not in Russia, but in prison in Colorado, which we'll get to. He's born though and grew up in the Soviet Union in what's now known as Belarusia. And he grew up in Gomel. Gomel? A backwater in the Soviet days in 1947. Now, you know, I think I know something about

gommel gommel i don't know yeah it's like a huge you probably say better than i do i don't know but i think it's big on tractors that's the only thing i know and they stopped me from going there on a train when i went to minsk a few years ago which is actually a really really cool city uh shame about the dictator lukashenka we could definitely do an episode on him as well he's absolutely mental yeah i mean people people love that stuff

But back in 1947, it was mental as well. The Soviet Union, it's a brutal place then. They've got food shortages, famines, recovering from World War II. There's all these orphans. And Boris's dad, when he's born, is in a gulag thousands of miles away, sentenced for being a black marketeer.

His mother abandons him with his dad's parents only a few years later, him and his brother. His dad's parents were just, you know, simple people. His granddad worked in a factory and they kept the Jewish home, which wasn't easy to do in the Soviet Union at that time. His dad shows up and Boris is about five after being released from the Gulag.

but he clashes with his grandfather and promptly disappears from his life again. Soon after, his grandfather gets sick with cancer and dies, leaving only his grandmother to care for him and his brother. And it kind of, you know, this feels almost like a movie, right? About a Russian gangster's background story, you know? Yeah, it's nuts. Without his grandfather or dad keeping watch,

Boris starts getting into trouble, stealing, fighting. I mean, nothing crazy, but the kind of stuff they didn't put up with back then, especially from poor families in the USSR. And since it seemed like his grandma couldn't keep tabs on him, she was convinced to send him to these boarding school orphanages.

At nine years old in 1957, he shipped off to one of those schools for all the orphans or neglected kids after World War II. And these are just tough, brutal places. And he's fighting bigger, older kids right away. And it's exactly what you imagine, like really rough conditions, everything getting stolen, food hard to come by, communist indoctrination. Boris takes some beatings, you know, as we all do at one time or another.

But he also learns how to fight. And by the time he's in grade seven, he's kicked out because they can't handle him. This is like, it's so filmic, this back story of this guy. I mean, a kind of communist...

boarding school orphanage does make my own upbringing look pretty urbane by comparison. I don't know. Do kids still fight in school? I used to love fighting. It was like really fun. Do kids still do that? Wow. Your Britishness is coming out. Who would have thought this gentleman right here

was out there getting scraps with the other firms in grade four over Man City or whatever the fuck you guys fight over. Oh my God. Around the back of the bakery, that was where it all went down with Sovereign Rings. Oh my God. It's so like comic book.

Yeah, so Boris goes back home. He probably was just as good as a fighter as Sean was behind the bakery. He gets into wrestling, which was huge in the former USSR and after the fall of the Soviet Union too. I mean, those wrestling gyms basically became breeding grounds for gangs and mafias. I think we've talked about that before in other episodes about the Russian mobs that come in the 90s and other places, I think Albania. Wrestling, these sports gymnasiums kind of become where you recruit your hooligans.

By 14, Boris, or Biba as they call him, he's a menace. He's tough, he can fight, and he likes to gamble. You know, all that stuff. He's what's referred to as a hooligan, but maybe it's hooligan, it's spelled K-H-U-L-I-G-A-N in Russian. That's so cool. Hooligan. Yeah, that's way better. It comes from Irish, apparently. It's some guy called Houlihan who was really into fighting in the Victorian age, so...

there's a little fact for you. But yeah, this guy, I mean, Boris is awesome. It sounds amazing. That's interesting that it comes from that because, you know, thug comes from, right, the Indian thuggies. The Indian thuggies. Yeah, yeah. I think we talked about, I mean, I don't remember exactly what it was, but they were some group that, you know, did thug-like things.

Always, always, always great research on this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, we were, I remember things. I just don't remember the exact details when we're going over it and it pops in my head. Boris gets, he gets caught up stealing for something he actually didn't do and threatened to be sent to a juvenile penal colony. But his family kind of finesses it. I think his mother had connections and him and his mom, who is now back in his life and stepdad end up in Norilsk, Norilsk, Norilsk.

The northernmost city in Russia, which is cold, unforgiving, and full of criminals. Boris gets in trouble again. He gets sent to a different city. He eventually gets back to Gomel, where he becomes a full-on hooligan. These were the gangs of neglected or abandoned kids who started up their own juvenile gangs. It was a big thing in Russia in the 50s and 60s. Vladimir Putin was apparently part of one.

Boris, at this point, he's getting known now, right? He's getting into knife fights. He's getting a rep, doing petty crimes but elevated from before, graduating to robberies of kiosks, but also still wrestling and doing sports. I think he won some awards. Soon he's busted, though, for hooliganism, thrown in jail, and then he's shipped out to a penal colony, which is, interestingly enough, the name of a club that Sean used to spend every weekend in during his wild Berlin days. Yeah.

But this one, it's not a flashy techno club where everyone wears tons of leather. It's grim, hard labor, the stuff that would later have Boris say that American prisons were a cakewalk compared. He's hungry all the time. It's unsanitary. It's basically hell. Yeah, was that one of your school reports?

What does that mean? Oh, never mind. Like a report card? Yeah. Oh, I'm hungry all the time. Unsanitary. Okay. No, that was good. That's on me. That's on me for not picking it up. That was decent. Yeah.

Boris is 18, and right when he gets there, he has to fight someone to lay down who he is, and he gets sent to solitary. And he says, quote, to compare the conditions in a Soviet zone, zone is how they refer to these, I don't even know if you call them penitentiary, penal colonies, whatever it was, in the 1960s to an American prison where I later did many years. Well, how can I put this? It's hell versus paradise.

When you're there, you have to follow the thieves and law codes. I think, what was it? Vor-E-Zakon? Is that how you pronounce it, Sean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We've talked about them a lot. I think we even did an episode on them way back. It might be like the strictest criminal code ever. It came out of Stalin's gulags, maybe even before then. It's just, it's brutal. You basically have to forsake everything from civilized society, any and all authority, and everything is basically punishable by death. But it was also a great education. Yeah.

And Boris learned the ways of being a criminal. It's funny. I wrote that. I didn't make it sound funny. Yeah. And Boris learned the ways of being a criminal so that when he got out after three years, he had some ideas and dude was just hardened, you know, and what does a hardened Russian gangster in waiting do?

Probably chain smoke cigarettes while drinking vodka and getting tattooed in a sauna. Certainly not get a real job. Something that me, Sean and Boris have in common. Well, you get your tattoos done in saunas. That's I mean, that's more Berlin than the penal colony, to be honest.

Boris Boris dodges mandatory Russian military service. He has a kid. He gets a construction job where he basically serves as an enforcer to make people work in Siberia where there's a construction boom. Actually, he makes decent money for the USSR. He's hustling now. He's getting his own state contracts for the construction. He's making bank the Soviet way, which involves skimming, embezzling and, you know, basically having all these no show jobs.

Everything there is corruption, state-sponsored corruption, and Boris is embezzling from the state, which is a very dangerous thing to do in the former Soviet Union. By his late 20s, he is making bank, though, and spending it underground. Fur jackets, a giant gold star of David, which is a ballsy thing to do in the Soviet Union. He buys a car, designer shirts. Again, all this is very ballsy to do under an authoritarian communist regime, displaying any wealth like that.

He's starting to get harassed by the authorities, but he's paying off these bribes until the threats get more serious, like firing squad serious. And Boris is starting to get a little scared. Yeah, I mean, I guess you're going to go into this a little bit, but where are we on sort of Soviet anti-Semitism in the 70s? Because they look like the really grim stuff happened in the 50s, right? Under Stalin and they there was exiles and they created that autonomous oblast thing and.

But like, I'm guessing even running around in the 70s dressed like some Jewish Derek Trotter is probably not doing Boris much good with the authorities still. I don't know. Like, was it really bad then? Yeah, it had picked up again in the 70s with Brezhnev. He was pretty anti-Semitic and so were his advisors. And it was kind of like institutionalized anti-Semitism, right? They weren't allowed to get, Jews weren't allowed to get certain jobs. A lot of Jewish cultural stuff was shut down. There were crackdowns.

They were repackaging a lot of Nazi conspiracies. It kicked up mostly, I think, after the Six-Day War because the Soviets were...

They were originally trying to lure Israel under their sphere because it was a socialist country when it first emerged, and there wasn't this alliance with the West and the US. But then the sort of Arab countries fell under the Soviet sphere of influence. The Israelis turned towards the West. This is all post-67. So that's when the Soviets really kicked up or the Soviet regime really kicked up the sort of anti-Semitic stuff.

you know, started making movies that borrowed from Nazi imagery and Nazi stereotypes and all that sort of stuff. And it started to get really bad. And that's when you had a lot of groups in the West, a lot of Jewish groups in the West,

campaigning for the release of the uh of soviet jews allowing them to leave because that was another thing too they were restricted forbidden from leaving uh so that that really kicked up i think in the 70s but i'm not sure but yeah we have the jackson vanik amendment in the mid 70s the soviet system had made it extremely hard to leave nobody was supposed to want to leave the workers paradise nixon starts pushing for detente and putting some pressure on the soviets especially after he went to moscow in 72

And, uh, Jews were being persecuted. Then, uh, the first wave of Jews were allowed to leave and they came in 73. The Soviets had relented a bit, uh, and more start to leave. Most of them ended up in Brighton beach. And then I think the Jackson Vanik amendment is passed in, uh, in 1974, which applies pressure to communist countries to let people emigrate by restricting international trade otherwise. And Boris, uh,

was able to take advantage of this. Boris still needs to smuggle out his money though. Otherwise the Soviets would, would steal it. So he buys some stamps and diamonds to transport, which is going to come back in a, in a, in a minute. Diamonds are really an old standby for smuggling out money or just transporting. They're easy to hide. They're small, all that sort of stuff. So,

He heads to Austria, then Italy, and then finally makes his way to America, where he arrives at JFK in 1979. And his family gets placed in Albany, where they get housing, clothing, living expenses from a local Jewish community. And he has the usual epiphany when he sees an American supermarket. Yeah, when you go to the diabetic aisle and it's like...

bigger than your local supermarket that that pretty much did me into no i mean who was it was it gorbachev or yeltsin who who realized that communism was going to fail when he went to an american supermarket in like indiana or something oh yeah but i have that that i have that moment too when you go into like a wegmans you know or like a suburban whole foods and you're like this is this is incredible like what what an amazing thing

Really, I mean, have you been to a Wegmans? Was there a Wegmans in Oklahoma or wherever the hell you lived? You been to a Wegmans? Oh, what was it? Sprouts or something like this? This was like the big fantasy supermarket. Whatever that sounds like, it's a gas station. Go to Wegmans, dude. It'll change your life.

The only job Boris can get in Albany is as a janitor. And it doesn't take long before he says, screw this. And he makes for Brighton Beach. By the end of the 70s, there were like 40,000 Soviet immigrants that settled in Brighton Beach. And they set up around 20 square blocks. For those of you guys who don't know it, it's way over at the end of Brooklyn. It's on the Atlantic Ocean next to Coney Island.

It's not what you would consider a fancy neighborhood even now, but it had cheap rents back then. It was affordable. It was, you know, kind of a garbage dump. Definitely not the American dream at first, but it was the typical New York story of an ethnic group creating their own little universe, which is still like that. And it was by the sea, like the famed Odessa, where many of the immigrants came from.

Boris starts doing what else? Driving a cab and trying to get the run of the place. Remember, this is a guy who figured out how to finesse the Soviet Union. So he knows how to hustle. He knows. And comparatively speaking, America is just wide open. Like I'm not going to reference that Scarface line, but you guys get it.

He takes the lay of the land. He sees there's two major criminal factions in Brighton. And right away, he buys himself a 38 special for $350. The Russian mob, or what's referred to as the Russian mob, it's only really just getting started in New York at that point. And it's not... Though I guess, you know, in the early 1900s, you had a Russian mob. They weren't Russian mobsters. They were just like the Lower East Side and, you know, Brownsville guys, who a lot of them were...

What would become I don't even know if it was yeah, it was before the Soviet Union, a lot of those maybe after, but you had a lot of like Eastern European Jews who were involved in the mafia, along with the Italians and the Irish. So it's weird to call it. Yeah, I mean, obviously, you don't call those guys the Russian mob, but you know, anyway.

It's the Russian mob as we know it, the modern version. It's not really a mafia per se. It's really just organized criminals who band together at various times. There's no like hierarchy type of deal like the Italian American mafia. By then, him and a few other Russian hoodlums, they're already brawling with the Puerto Rican and black gangs that were targeting the Russian immigrants. Here's Boris on that quote.

Some of us got knifed. Some of them got knifed. But little by little, we pushed them out of Brighton Beach. I mean, that is so good. That's like that is literally the kind of like opening VO on the Scorsese epic that we are going to write on this guy. I mean, I'm like hooked on him. It's just like this guy's life is insane. He's lived about 10 different lives. Also, it is Sprouts Farmers Market headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. So there you go. I got it right. I'm sure it's lovely.

Now, remember those diamonds that Boris smuggled in? Some two-bit hustler convinces him they're not worth as much as they are, gives him a tiny bit of cash for it, rips him off, and he soon finds out the guy was lying, pulls that gun on him, pistol whips him, eventually gets his full money back, and word spreads that Boris is not a guy to be messed with. And he gets an invitation to meet the top dog in Brighton at the time, who's a former thief-in-law named Evse Agroan.

Agron is going to go on to become Boris's mentor. He was born in 1932. He lived in Leningrad through the war, survived the siege. A Russian paper said he was rumored to be a murderer and went to jail in Russia and served seven years. But there's also rumors that he served time for being a pickpocket and financial fraud, but also like...

one of the best pickpockets out there. And you'll see a lot with these guys. No one really knows if there was some vicious murderer back home or some run-of-the-mill person, actually. A lot of their bios are just completely up in the air. But according to Boris, he was a pickpocket first, but a legendary one. He does serve time in Russia, and he gets inducted into the Thief-in-Law ranks, which is no small thing, which makes him more than legit. But he also had a gambling problem and pissed off the other Thieves-in-Law's... Thieves-in-Law?

Thief in laws? Whatever it is. He eventually loses what they would call his crown because of that, and he leaves the Soviet Union.

For the states. He's said to be this like kind of steely guy. He dresses like a lawyer. He takes his wife to the symphony and all that. He gets to the U.S. in 1975. He shot in 1980, the first of many times. And typically they call him the first Don of Brighton Beach. He operates out of the El Caribe or El Caribe Social Club, which still exists. I think it still exists, but it did back five, six years ago. It's where Michael Cohen of Trump fame was involved with. Yeah.

But yeah, he was a genius. He ran a ton of scams, robberies, all that. Also, I think in that first episode, we talked about how he was rumored to stroll the boardwalk with a cattle prod. But according to Boris, this is an exaggeration, and it was just a stun gun. Okay, so this is normal, completely above-board behavior. I mean, these characters are great. I

I'm so into this story. It's brilliant. Yeah, when you make the movie, you make it a cattle prod, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boris doesn't join his crew right away, though. He starts as like a, you know, a freelancer. Jewel thievery, arson, robbery, the basics. And he takes a trip to Europe in 1981 to do some robberies. He comes back. He keeps focusing on stealing jewels, and then he steals some artwork. But a couple of his jobs go south, and eventually he decides to join Agrun's crew. Here's Douglas Sentry on it. Quote,

The Russian Jewish mob in Brighton Beach, headed by Evsey Agroan, was often referred to in both the press and official FBI documents as the Organizatia. But that label is a misnomer. There was little organization, no hierarchical structure like in Cosa Nostra families. In Brighton Beach, there were always many competing factions, and each group tended to be amorphous, a collective of independent criminals coming together opportunistically to work for a shared purpose.

It was less a structural criminal organization than a bratva, a brotherhood. Boris does say there's a leader and that everyone else is kind of brothers, but those brothers, they do anything they can like the mafia to make a buck. Swindles, scams, flim flams, robberies, strong arms, especially because the people that left the USSR, those immigrants, they don't go to the police. They don't talk. If you think stop snitching culture is big, deal with these immigrants. They were not talking about anything.

And it wasn't just sexy jewel thievery and things like that. These guys have learned how to work the system in communist countries. So, you know, they're scamming insurance companies for big bucks like it's like it's child's play. I mean, you know, scamming insurance companies is kind of a victimless crime. Or maybe I'm just trying to spin it because Boris is my new hero. And I'm like really into a story about freelancers making tons of money, too. So I'm on board.

You know, different market conditions in the 70s and 80s. But of course, one of their biggest things is protection rackets, what they call the roof.

That was their biggest earner. Boris is Agrone's main muscle. He collects the money all over Brighton Beach, Coney Island, Sheepshead Bay, 47th Street. And things are going well enough that the Bratva takes over El Caribe, that huge catering hall, health club, whatever it was. The Italian mafias are frequent guests there as well. It becomes sort of the grand central for the Russian mob in New York. And that's also where the Russians and Italians kind of come together sometimes to

Boris and his cousin by then, we're talking the mid-80s, they have a feared rep as enforcers, prone to violence, and just not scared of anything. They're also big dudes. In August of 83, a fight breaks out and an 18-year-old kid is killed. And Boris is telling, the kid pulls a knife on his cousin, and in the ensuing just chaos, he's stabbed. And Robert Freeman's telling in Red Mafia, the book he wrote about the Russian mob in America...

Boris' cousin lifts the guy up like a rag doll with one arm and stabs him in the heart with the other. You know, like I said, I think all the Red Mafia stuff is exaggerated. I don't really trust his work. But we don't know the truth of what happened. The cousin gets off on self-defense. The kid's dad was apparently no slouch either. He starts putting money on Boris' cousin's head. So Boris has a meeting with him and he says, quote, I tell him, if anything happens to my cousin, you need to understand one thing. What?

We'll make your entire family pay. Why start a feud? What happened, happened. It's over. What's more, I saw how your cousin was acting. Your son behaved improperly.

The kid's father wisely decides to drop it. Yeah, that's a good move. And also very wise and may add statesman-like from Boris. I mean, who I might actually try and get on the ticket for the next US president. He sounds great. I don't, like, I doubt the direct quote was your son behaved improperly. But, you know, that's what the book says.

Meanwhile, Evsey Agron keeps expanding. He's linking up with other Russian mafiosos in cities like LA. And by the time the 80s are in full swing, Russian gangsters are really having their moment in Brighton. There's all these opulent supper clubs in the area that are filled with them. Money's being made hand over fist. Violence is being dispensed. Guns are being pulled. Boris and Evsey provide the protection for most of those clubs and restaurants, and they live it up.

Boris meets his second wife out one night, a nice Ukrainian Jewish girl from Kharkiv, which is a great city. It's going through a rough time right now. I was back there in April of 2022. Yeah, hopefully there are better days ahead for Kharkiv soon. Boris actually picks her up through his ballroom dancing skills.

which apparently he took lessons back in the day and is just very, very good at it. And that's the thing with these guys, like despite them being hooligans, just, you know, big, scary dudes, they're also kind of refined in a way, like they're intelligent. They're not your typical thug. They read Dostoevsky, not just like Robert Green books and the art of war. Yeah, man. I mean, girls love a guy who can read and beat a man half to death over a gangland feud, right? That's why I'm such a magnate.

Are you going to get out to Ukraine again sometime soon? The story you did out in... Was it in Kharkiv you did that piece for... Was it Vanity Fair or was it... That was crazy. I did some pieces in Kharkiv, but it's not the piece you're talking about. But yeah, I don't know if I'm going to get out there, to be honest with you. I need to figure out work more so here.

But yeah, I think what you're missing in that also is you can't ballroom dance. You're terrible at it. So if you pick up that, it could work out for you well. I did do Lindy Hop lessons in New York, which was probably the lamest thing I ever did in my life. But yeah, I'm no Boris. But yeah, it wasn't all Lindy Hop and Foxtrot for Boris.

Someone was always gunning for Evzei. He had his share of shootouts, and there's a protection racket war brewing between Agrone and this guy named Boris Goldberg, who ran a, quote, cowboy crew based in Chelsea, Manhattan, that did robberies, extortion, and drug trafficking. There's another attempt on Evzei's life in 1984. He actually gets shot in the head with a .25 but survives.

And this sort of changes things. The good times are over. They think Boris's crew did it, but they're not sure. No, other Boris. Boris Goldberg's crew did it. So it should be said, too, we're getting all this from Boris Neyfeld's retelling. So keep that in mind. I think Century did what he could with fact-checking, but it still all comes from Boris. So another thing to keep in mind is that Boris claims he's never killed anyone. So we don't know exactly what transpired in all these wars and...

And the revenge after that shooting, what really happened. Either way, Ebse Agroan fades out after this, and this guy named Marat Balagudla shows up. He's a Ukrainian immigrant born in 43, raised in a gangster paradise of Odessa. He studied economics, worked on a Soviet cruise ship, and immigrates to the U.S. in 1977. Great CV. I'm hooked already.

Yeah, I don't know if it was like a, it says cruise ship, but I think he means like a Soviet military boat, you know, where he like controlled logistics. I don't know, something like that. Yeah, I mean, they did have, they had big cruise ship industry, the Soviets. Like, there was a famous one that- Did they really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a famous one that sank off the coast of Wellington, weirdly, like in the 80s or something. And the guy, maybe the-

The pilot got sentenced to death or something in the fucking Soviet Union. Yeah, they were a pretty big deal. Sounds like an awful vacation.

Uh, there's a lot of legends about Balagula and his crazy Soviet connections and insane international criminal exploits. And one thing we know for certain is that he was very, very smart, but apparently he was not entirely a global mastermind. Some journalists make him out to be at first. He definitely was connected eventually, but Boris gets to start knowing him by torching cars for him. Like he owned an auto body shop in Coney Island. So, um, probably not a criminal mastermind in the start.

He looks like a nerd. He was like a real businessman type guy, was apparently jumpy and nervous, not a hard-nosed gangster, not a tough guy. But he was also making good money in the restaurant and nightclub business, which, you know, you got to be tough to be involved with in that area. Him and Ebsi Agron didn't like each other. Boris was kind of the peacemaker. And Agron was on top in the early 80s, but Balagula was expanding and, like I said, was a very shrewd businessman. He had the real criminal brains.

He's one of the guys who started the infamous FuelTech scam. I think we've talked about this a bunch, and there's probably 20,000 Michael Franzese videos on the FuelTech scam. But basically...

There were a whole bunch of shell companies that fuel was transferred from and to and from again only on paper. The Russian mobsters and the Italian mob figured out how to build the U.S. government out of gasoline tax dollars and made, I think, tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in the process, a billion a year by some estimates. It was what's known as a daisy chain scheme that happened after a 1982 law shifted the taxes from retail to wholesale suppliers.

Franzisi once said it was the biggest moneymaker since Prohibition. I mean, I feel like at this point, this far down the line, we should just never, we should just rule out ever having him on the show. Like, it'd be too obvious. And it'll probably get us a ton more listeners, which is, uh,

Clearly not what we're doing this for. Yeah, we want to make as little money as possible and spend as much time as possible doing this. That's always been our goal from the start, and we're accomplishing it. We're doing it, yeah. So Balagula becomes the dominant player in it on the Russian side. He's partnered with the infamous mafia killer Anthony Gaspipe Casso of the Lucchese crime family. Apparently how it worked was Gaspipe protects him from the other Italians and Boris from the other Russians.

Boris said they needed the Italians who had been doing this for far longer, you know, being mafias. They had their people in all institutions from the warehouses to the unions to the politicians and police officers, everything. At one point, four of the five New York families eventually get involved in the fuel tax scam. It was that much of a moneymaker. Everyone's getting rich.

Boris remembers going down to Atlantic City with Balagula. He would lose $100,000 at the tables and they would just get the best sweets, cognac or congiac if you're on the firm biz, lobsters, steak, all that. But the good times, again, don't last for Boris, sort of.

On May 4th, 1985, he goes to pick up a grown to hit the sauna. They like to go early in the morning. A grown never makes it down to Boris's car. He's killed in the hallway and it's never solved. Many suspect he might've pissed off some of the wrong Italians. Others think it might've been Balagula or Nafil themselves who have bumped him off so they can move up.

Boris says he would never have killed him. He had nothing to do with it. He says he was like a father to him, like a mentor. He does let on that Balagula himself was pleased about it because he never liked Agron. Boris says he loved Agron. He was like a father to him. And Boris suspects it was another killer named Vladimir Reznikov called Vadik that took out Agron.

Nevertheless, Balagool and Boris end up teaming up now on a lot of criminal exports. Boris is the muscle, Balagool the brains. They do a big score in Antwerp. They rob like $1.5 million in diamonds, and that's their first big hit together. Nice. I mean, Antwerp, oh my God, what a cool place. It's got the best building in the world, I reckon. It's like the train station there is insane.

I miss Europe. Europe is nice. Yeah. I mean, they got all those snakes and spiders in New Zealand, though. That's got to count for something. Nah, man. They even got that. That's over here. I'm going to get eaten by something. Oh, that's where you are. Today, I'm sure. Yeah.

Then in December of 85, Boris sells an Uzi to someone, as one does, who weeks later uses that Uzi to try to kill him. They rush the office. He's in with his cousin and I think a friend or a partner. It's Reznikov, the guy who he thinks killed Agrone. And he lights up everything with the Uzi. They fight back, but Boris is shot. His partner is killed. Boris recuperates. Then he goes looking for the shooters and his crew to kill them. But before anything goes down, he gets convinced by Balagula to go to Sierra Leone and

To work overseeing a diamond mine with a KGB agent who isn't good with a general who's running the country. Yeah, that's a thing that happens. This guy, that KGB agent is also a friend of Balagula. I think he's a mafioso KGB agent, double agent. You know, I didn't get too far into it.

Boris ends up living like deep in the bush. And I've been to Sierra Leone. It is a, even in like 2014 or 2015, it was a rough place to, uh, to live in the bush. There's no electricity, no running water. Um,

He's there to oversee a diamond mines, but it's mostly a disaster. Boris does end up winning a bet for 12,500 bottles of cognac off another Russian mobster, which is about $600,000 worth. Eventually, he gets called back to New York to take out Reznikov, who they finally get a beat on, but they can't get to him. And Boris needs to fly to Germany to sell a few keys of cocaine, which, oh yeah, he's doing drug trafficking now. This...

Is insane. I mean, I'm not even joking. We have to write this. I know there's a couple of producers listen to the show. So, yeah, what could be better than a true crime biopic written by two hateful, you know, but also wonderful reporters? I don't know. Is that a pitch? Is that a good elevator pitch? I assume it's already in the works. I think the book was written with the point of it becoming a screenplay. So I'm sure somebody is already doing it. But we're here if not.

While there, while Boris is in Germany, Resnikov makes his move on Balagula, who, remember, isn't a hardened gangster. He demands payment of $600,000 for the gas tax scam money he thought he was owed. Boris hears of it. He wants to finish it. But before he can do that, Balagula lets Gaspipe know that their business is being threatened and Gaspipe has Resnikov killed. He was actually like a real psycho. I think maybe we'll do an episode on him. He killed dozens of people.

Meanwhile, Boris links up with a globetrotting mobster dubbed the Polish Al Capone. He was half Polish, I think half Italian. Riccardo Fanchini. Yeah, definitely not a Polish name. Who we're definitely going to do an episode on. He's this incredibly smooth operator who moved around Brighton and then Europe. Going from, you know, a robbery specialist to a guy running a major import-export business in Belgium. He's, I think it was mostly electronics, but he's like an Ocean's Eleven type character. Just global super criminal mastermind on yachts.

More businessman than murderer, but definitely still a gangster. Boris does security stuff for him, and they start running stuff to East Germany after the wall falls. They make a killing. He's also doing diamond scams in Antwerp to where he lives now. Boris, that is, having a blast. He actually calls it some of his best times. He's partying a lot, living it up.

Just bags of money. Despite that, in 1990, he decides to get involved in the heroin trade. He'd been smuggling cocaine to West Germany in the 80s, getting a key for like 15K, having mules take it to Germany, selling it for 55K. You know, a little cash here and there. But he couldn't compete with the big dealers getting it straight from Colombia.

Fanchini, though, he could get Boris heroin straight from the source. China white from Thailand, not the crummy Turkish stuff that was everywhere. And they would get like 20 to 30 keys and smuggle it in the back of Japanese and Korean TVs they bought in Bangkok. They smuggled it to Poland. And from Poland, they mule it to the US, which worked well because no one was suspecting heroin coming in from Poland. I mean, trafficking heroin is maybe the only thing Boris has done so far that has made me dislike him just a tiny bit. So, um...

Yeah, let's move on from this. Yeah, but the ROI is on it, man. You know, you got to understand that's where it's at. Forget cocaine. In 1990, he's basically the most dominant, powerful Russian mobster operating in the US. But he gets into a beef with Monia Elson, who's a former friend. Elson was born in the early 1950s in the Jewish slum in Moldova before he moved to Brighton Beach in the late 70s.

He went the familiar route of pickpocket to fraudster to extortionist and everything else that covers. At some point, he gets arrested on cocaine charges in Israel. He does six years, but he's back in Brighton in 1990 to open up a nightclub. By then, he had a crew of thugs with him called Monia's Brigade, and he decides he wants to try to force his way into the heroin market that Nayfield was dominating, despite them being loose friends. And that

leads to war. For his part, Boris Kosmonian, kind of a fake who tried to pretend he was a thief-in-law and did time in Russia, but he actually never did. Well, I mean, we know that most Moldovans are wusses, right? I can testify to that. I mean, them, people from Indiana, and that Phillies mascot, I don't know, they can all get in the bin. I don't know who else I'm pissing off lately, but

That's that's Sean Williams spelled W I L L I A M S. If you're looking, not Danny gold, Sean Williams, who's saying that it's like, it must be a thing though. Right. Because Moldova was incredibly rough during the, the Holocaust was awful there. Right. I think it was like had the highest numbers of people killed per capita. Right. So like, there's no, I thought the Dutch was Western Europe.

Yeah, I just get there's no surprise, right, that these guys are coming out of this kind of gruesome history. And they're like, really, I guess they're just really ingenious. Yeah, I mean, it's like, Moldova, it wasn't just Moldova, that was Moldova, Belarusia, Russia itself, Odessa, you know, it's anyone coming from a society like that is going to be when you're on the margins in a in a in a brutal authoritarian society, like, you know, you're going to be a rough and tumble type of dude who knows how to hustle if you've survived that long.

In 1991, Year's Eve, one of his hitmen tries to kill Boris with a car bomb. It's a dud, though. He survives. In return, Boris then puts out a contract on Elson. These guys go back and forth, back and forth. In 1993, Elson gets shot five times in broad daylight in the stomach, but he survives. Both these guys are each shot numerous times. It gets hard to keep track.

Boris claims in the book that someone else ordered the hit on Monia, but in a Nat Geo doc, he later describes their beef like it's an episode of Tom and Jerry. Quote, honestly, I try kill him all the time. He very lucky guy. He says in that doc about the, you know, Brighton Beach Wars that they had. I think we're going to need that one again. Your best Russian accent.

I don't think you can get cancelled for doing Russian accents, right? No, I think you can still do ethnic white accents, right? You're allowed to? I believe. You could do Italian or Irish. Honestly, I try to kill him all the time. He's a very lucky guy. That's the best I can do. I'm terrible at accents. That's quite cheerful. Yeah.

Boris also hires a special forces Russian gangster who just came to the US to take him out for $100,000. As it turns out, Monia actually tried to kill Boris because a Berlin-based Russian mafioso who had soured on Boris for refusing to deal with him had taken out a contract and Monia was looking to fill it. He wants the heroin operation in the States for himself and the Berlin gangster wanted that import-export European business.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, now I've got your voice in my head. You sound like NoHo Hank from Barry. It's kind of romantic, this back and forth. Great, great character. I mean, this guy's just a great interviewer. I mean, imagine getting to sit down with him. It would have been incredible.

Melania eventually puts $500,000 on Boris' head, later allegedly up to a million, which are numbers that are unheard of unless you're Drake making it up in a song. More shootings, more assassination attempts, big-time Russian thieves-in-laws involved, Boris trying to sell explosives in Poland. It's all chaos. By early 1994, though, forget the Russian mob wars and the money on his head. He's got real problems, which means the DEA is onto him.

His mules are getting busted at JFK, people are talking, and sure enough, he gets busted at his big mansion in Staten Island, and he gets hit not just with narcotics, but RICO charges. He actually ends up taking a deal where he confesses to trying to kill Monia, but he also gives up Monia, who would go on to take a deal as well. Still, Century quotes some sources as saying he probably gave up more than just Monia, but I don't really know what the details are there. Yeah, I mean, you know, snitching...

snitching is not the worst thing in the world to do. I don't know. Maybe I could push another line on this show that snitching is fine.

I don't know. People's even like the weirdest people seem to hate snitches. Why? Why? Because they're pretending. But I just want to say I didn't use the term snitching. That again was Sean Williams. I might meet this guy. So W.I.L.L.I.A.M.S. But but yeah, I think the 90s, too, was just a period of breakdowns and organized crime. And you had tons of Italian mafiosos cutting deals. You know, there was no code either. Same thing with the Russians. Like there was everyone was trying to save themselves. Yeah.

So he's in prison, in jail. He seems to enjoy the US penal system. He says it was a breeze compared to the Soviet ones. He raves about the jailhouse wine, says he meets lots of interesting criminals there, the food was excellent, and he only ends up serving four years. When he gets out, he tries to collect some of that old import-export money he was owed, but one of his partners claims the company went bankrupt. That's not true.

That guy is soon gunned down. Boris is suspected, never charged, but also he was forbidden from leaving the states at that time, let alone the country. So, I mean, forbidden from leaving the state, let alone the country. So it's a hard way to make a case against him as being guilty in having done that one. He, though, according to him, is broke. So he starts doing some of that what he calls money extraction jobs, which, you know, solving some problems, settling disputes, getting payments done.

He basically also starts serving as the roof or protection for massage parlors. He recruits a slew of like young Georgian guys who had just immigrated for his brothel. They end up as basically protection partners for all these brothels.

He also gets involved for protection rackets for people heading to Russia to do business. Now that the country was open, most of them were Russians who had left during the Soviet Union days. And we're now heading back to try to make their fortunes. And as we know, Moscow, Russia back then in the nineties was just like a bloodbath, like insane amounts of murders, uh,

Very scary people doing very scary business deals and wars all over. He first teams up with the infamous Yaponchik, who was a thief-in-law who had done nine years in Russian prisons. When we first talked about him back in the Brighton Beach episode, we mentioned how reports said that he was recruited to come to the States to oversee all Russian mafioso activity and how he brought with him dozens of former Russian special forces guys who fought in Afghanistan.

It's not true. The truth, according to Boris, is that he had a lot of enemies in Russia when he got out of prison, so he came to the States solo to make some cash, though he did have a sort of pretty badass reputation. But yeah, no, he comes to New York. I didn't mention that. And they link up there to help as protection for people going to Russia to open up these businesses.

Like I said, protection, you know, was sorely needed. And it's just illustrate how powerful and dangerous Boris was that if you're the kind of guy who could provide protection in the 90s Russia and live to tell about it, you are not someone to be trifled with. Yeah, 90s Russia is a trifle free zone. I mean, I also love Boris taking a subtle dump on your ponchik as well. Wasn't he basically like the biggest gangster in Russia at that time?

He doesn't take a dump on him. He's not insulting him. He's just saying that some of the stuff wasn't true. I think they were partners for a minute, and I think he respected him. But he doesn't know. I mean, I'm assuming that. But he's not insulting him. He's just saying these insane, exaggerated stories about him coming to the U.S. to oversee everything with hundreds of Special Forces guys are obviously made up. But I definitely get the impression that he respected who he was and what he did.

Shortly after their deal, though, that's when Boris gets arrested. Yaponcha gets arrested. Eventually, he gets shipped back to Russia and then murdered. So many of these guys that Boris was with or associated with or fought eventually get murdered. It's insane how much of a survivor that he is. After he gets released from prison, he almost has the same deal going in terms of protection with an infamous Kurdish Yazidi gangster from Georgia, alleged to be one of the most powerful fiefing laws ever, this guy named Ded Hassan. Hassan? Hassan? Ded Hassan? I don't know.

But he was later killed by a sniper's bullet just like Japonshik was. He had been warring with some other mafiosos over the Sochi Olympic rackets.

What, like construction contracts, stuff like that over the game? Yeah, yeah. I assume it was that or even like catering stuff, you know, like there was tons of money flowing in there. I think obviously a ton of it was corruption. But yeah. So Boris, he's still wheeling and dealing in the early 2000s. So the feds are watching him tightly. So he's focusing on more legal businesses now.

He sells some property in Russia, makes like close to a couple million. He has a good time living the high life in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa. There's a ton of these casinos cropping up in Moscow and Boris knows all bunch of the owners. So he has some good times, wild parties. He's got businesses doing well. He's living good. But he soon gets involved with Fanchini again, selling counterfeit cigarettes and laundering money for him in Odessa.

It barely lasts before the whole thing gets brought down. Boris gets arrested by the DEA and a UK organized crime task force for being part of Fanchini's narcotics trafficking, cigarette trafficking, fraud, money laundering operation. He gets pegged for money laundering. I think that's related to the cigarette stuff. And he actually gets picked up, I think, the morning after his 60th birthday celebration, which is just rough, man. It's just not a nice thing for the police to do. I mean, that's not fair.

Nearly everyone ends up taking plea deals because apparently the case would have been a headache because it was all over the world with so many different people. Fanchini only gets 10 years. Boris pleads guilty to money laundering related to the cigarettes. He gets sentenced to five years, stuck in isolation for part of it because the feds classify him as like this high ranking Russian super mafia. So he gets released in 2014 after five years and heads back to New York City. Stuck in isolation for part of it because the feds classify him as like this high ranking Russian super mafia.

67 years old, not a lot to offer on the job market, and that's when he gets wrapped up in the story from the cold open, the murder for hire extortion, all that sort of stuff. I'm assuming he's like a US citizen because how is he getting into the country? Yeah, yeah. He came here as a refugee, so I assume he was a citizen. Ah, right. Yeah. It's just like –

So yeah, he had to have been a citizen. Yeah, because he fled the Soviet Union. They were technically refugees.

So he gets out of jail that last time in 2018, and we see a round of press with headlines from the AP like notorious Russian mobster says he just wants to go home. But unfortunately, he's got three years of probation. Here's a quote from that article. I can't do nothing, Nathale graped in a thick Russian accent between shots of vodka at a restaurant a few blocks north of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood, which has been a haven for immigrants from the former Soviet Union since the 1970s. Give me a chance to start a new life.

Nathal told the Associated Press he longs to move back to a homeland where his skill set connecting business people of all stripes will yield better dividends, which is sort of a euphemistic way of describing his skill set. That is for sure. So where is Boris now? He's back in Russia, last I heard, checking into the States every now and then, I think at least. Maybe not anymore, but that's how I almost got that interview.

I believe, like I said, they're shopping life rights or they have been, or they've been bought for the Douglas century book, which you guys should all buy called the last boss of Brighton. Um, it came out a couple of years ago, I think. And honestly, if someone isn't trying to turn Boris's life at the very least, the Russian mob wars in Brooklyn from the eighties and nineties into an HBO miniseries, they just don't like, I don't understand the point of Hollywood and how it works, but, um,

Buy this man's rights and make it a TV show. Yeah, or better still, pay us to write it because we're great. Wow. I mean, that was...

That was a journey, man. That was like an insane story. Do you think that like the chances of you getting an interview with him are just dead now or do you think there's still a flicker? I mean, we'll see if he comes back to the States. Maybe there's still a shot. I know that the guy that I was connected with who connected me to his people wants to hear this episode. So we'll see how that goes. But didn't you call him a snitch as well? Did I imagine that? God.

Dude, I don't even know what to do with you. You're lucky you're in New Zealand, bro, in Australia. Anyway, Sean Williams, that's S-E-A-N-W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S. If you're upset, DM me. I'll give you his address. Anyway, patreon.com slash the normal podcast for bonus episodes, YouTube, TikTok, whatever that, yeah, all that stuff. And Spotify, iTunes, five hours a month. Help us out. Until next week, thank you guys for tuning in.

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