Part 1 - The Russian Mafia Comes to Brooklyn
43:51 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat. That's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds.

This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

Welcome back to another episode of the Underworld podcast, where we dive into the world of organized crime and various criminal phenomenons. I am your host, Danny Gold. I probably just mid-said the word phenomenon, but we're going to keep going with it anyway.

It's Phenomena? Phenomenon? Yeah. I don't know. I don't even know. Anyway, I'm Sean Williams. And today we have a great episode, something I think a lot of people are interested in. Brighton Beach, Russian mafioso, as many of them Jewish. It's a really fascinating story that I think draws a lot in. But first...

You know, Sean, I'm not a proud man, you know? This isn't where I want to be in my life, you know, asking people to go to our Patreon, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast and support us. But I got to do it anyway, you know? Like, no shame here. It's the saddest thing because you're not used to it, but I've been capping her my whole life, so. Yeah, but I'm making that sacrifice now. So please, if you can, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast, support us.

Let us know that we're doing a good job and we should keep doing this. But anyway, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Brighton Beach neighborhood in New York City was a war zone. Dozens of bodies were dropped, some at nightclubs, some on the boardwalk in broad daylight. Law enforcement was caught so unaware that there were multi-state task force commissioned to study the problem. And even a Senate inquiry to tackle the Red Mafia, or Organizazia, as some called it.

Fearsome Russian mobsters like Boris Neyfeld and Monia Elson were wrestling for control of extortion rackets, the drug trade, and the neighborhood. These were tattooed men with thick accents who met in sauna and steam rooms and went to the symphony. I like them. I like these guys. Yeah, they're fascinating characters. Cheesy Hollywood screenwriters couldn't have dreamed up something better. A state investigator once called them the smartest criminals he'd seen.

They were capable of taking lives and surviving multiple shootings and car bombs, while also conducting giant fraud campaigns that bilked the government and banks out of tens of millions of dollars. Rumors swirled about their previous lives before they got to the bountiful shores of Brooklyn. Were they killers who ruled a Russian prison? Were they internationally connected black marketeers? Or were they just petty pickpockets who reinvented themselves when they came to America like so many before them?

It's hard sometimes to grasp the reality of organized crime and mafia figures. Like sometimes the people that tell the stories have a vested interest in making them larger than life, whether they're journalists, law enforcement, or the crime figures themselves. And this is kind of the quintessential example of that story.

The Brighton Beach Russian Mafia story is really interesting, and I'm still unsure what to make of it. You know, in the 90s, there was this panic about these super Russian mafias operating in America and globally. And to be sure, you know, they were doing some pretty big time stuff, just vicious murders, hundreds of millions of not billion dollar scams. But there was almost like a satanic panic like element to it at times where the media and law enforcement didn't.

just really ran wild with the accusations and the story. I mean, the wall has just come down, right? So the media probably just needs this Russian bogeyman still. I mean, to be honest, like they were doing it before the wall even came down and all this happened. I think it's just, you know, we saw in the Chinese mafia story was something that happened in the early 80s as well with the Chinese mafia. But yeah, it's still, I mean, I'm still confused by it. And

Robert Freeman, who was this like old school gritty reporter, the kind of guy who got death threats and drank in bars with goons of all sorts and hit men and feds, is really at the crux of some of it. And a lot of today, the story I'm telling comes from his work, which, you know, big long form stories in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Village Voice, and his book, Red Mafia. He was an incredible reporter and his work was focused on calling attention to the burgeoning Russian crime problem because no one else, like not even the feds, were paying enough attention.

He even got a six-figure bounty placed on his head.

But at some point, do you end up being a hype man doing more to promote them than anything else? And that's the thing with journalism in general, right, and that I've grappled with in my career. When are you calling attention to a problem and trying to get action taken, trying to, you know, put it on record? And when are you sensationalizing and making it worse than it is? Yeah, I mean, here at the Underworld Podcast, we're never going to be accused of sensationalizing crime, right? We're just, we're telling stories, man. It's just how it is. We're not The Economist, you know? Yeah.

And if someone does call bullshit, it's also hard to tell if they're being appropriately skeptical or if they just didn't get it. Like I said, these Brighton Beach guys were actually putting the work in. And that's before we even get into the idea of whether or not they were actually a mafia in the sense of the word, like the Italian version, or just a conglomerate of criminals. But at its heart,

This is just a quintessential American tale that we all know and love, you know, that of a marginalized ethnic community arriving here, fleeing oppression, struggling to accomplish their American dream, and then deciding to extort a bunch of bakeries and furniture stores. Bed, bread, and borscht. Holy Trinity of the Russian Mafia. I mean, this is, this is Fievel Goes West, man. These guys are all Fievel. They just decided to be the cats and the dogs instead of, I haven't seen the movie in a while, but I'm assuming the cats and the dogs were organized criminals. Yeah. Great movie though. I mean, have, watch it with your kids. Yeah.

But let's dive into it. I'm kind of wired on coffee right now. I don't know if you can tell. I'm going for it. They'll make some good stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. First, though, we need the sweet, sweet background before we get to the fun stuff, which I know you guys know and love. You had two real waves of Russian organized crime taking off, one initiated in the 1970s with one wave of Soviet immigration that was mostly Jewish and one that happened in the 1990s with a second wave after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Russian immigrants to New York and America weren't a new phenomenon. God, I got to stop using that word, man. No, it's solid. It's solid. You got at least five per episode now. They'd been coming to the US forever, and there had been a boon after the Russian Revolution and after the Second World War. Yeah, I mean, like, in the 30s, even hot on Hitler's heels, Stalin even created this Jewish autonomous state in Siberia next to China. And it's still there today, but, like, there's not many Jews there anymore. It's kind of like...

I think they enticed them to go and live there, but it was kind of like maybe not just a request. You're speaking pretty euphemistically for the way that Stalin handled Jews in Russia. Enticed is like a pretty euphemistic word of describing... Yeah, enticed is definitely not the right word. I mean, mostly it was show trials and executions, but that's a story for another day. So the 1970s saw a different kind of immigration.

The Soviet system had made it extremely hard to leave. You know, nobody was supposed to want to leave the workers' paradise. But in the 1970s, Richard Nixon starts pushing for detente and putting some pressure on the Soviets, especially after he went to Moscow in 1972.

Jews were being persecuted in the Soviet Union at this time and like all times that have ever existed, too. So that's who was able to really get out. That's who they wanted out to. The first wave of Jews came in 1973 and the Soviets relented a bit and more Jews started coming in. Most of them ended up in Brighton Beach. Things go a bit further with the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974, which applies pressure to communist countries to let people emigrate by restricting international trade otherwise, like if they didn't.

At first, there was a small effect, but then by the 1980s, Gorbachev decided to comply, and then hundreds of thousands of mostly Jews, some evangelical Christians and Catholics came to the U.S. By the end of the 1970s, 40,000 Soviet immigrants had settled in Brighton Beach. And eventually, over 100,000 Jews came to the U.S. during this period.

They all set up around 20 square blocks in this one neighborhood. And for those of you who don't know Brighton Beach, it's way over at the end of Brooklyn on the Atlantic Ocean next to Coney Island. It's not what you would consider a fancy neighborhood. And in the 1970s, the area already had a Jewish population of older immigrants, mostly Eastern European, who had moved there after the war. It had cheap rents. It was affordable. It was kind of a shithole. You know, I guess a lot of New York City was back then. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, like, down that part of the city, not a lot's changed in the last 20, 30 years, right? I mean, when I lived in NYC, that stretch of Brighton Beach under the rail tracks looks like it's straight out some gangster movie in the 70s, like French Connection or something. I remember I would get, like, the F train all the way down, and it's like, you see Albanian restaurants and Moldovan restaurants and Uzbeki restaurants. It's really cool. I really love that area. Yeah, it's an amazing area. It's, um...

It's still kind of gritty. Obviously, everything in New York City has changed. It's nowhere near as dangerous as it was 30 years ago. I don't think it's anywhere near as poor, too, even though, obviously, it still has elements of that. There's also newer immigrants moving in. You have Chinese and Latin American immigrants moving there, too. I think a lot of Mexicans. But it's still, I mean, you still walk on that boardwalk, and it's like you're back in the old country, you know? Yeah, it's really cool. All the signs are in Russian as well, right? They're all in Cyrillic and stuff. But anyway, yeah, it's very coming to America at that time.

Except this is not like the arrival of an African prince, but a bunch of folks just like the, aha, aha, where's the spoon guy? You know? That's good. Definitely not the American dream at first, but it was the typical New York City story of an ethnic group creating their own little universe. And it was by the sea, like the famed Odessa, where many of the immigrants came from. Odessa in Ukraine was a port city known for a thriving black market, con men, gangsters, and just overall degeneracy.

wrote Keith Elliott Greenberg in his letter from Brighton Beach in 1992. Some, the residents tell him, carried on in the Brighton Beach tradition like they were still in Odessa, scamming and robbing. Also, it's been alleged that the KGB, like Castro would later do, opened up the prisons and gulags and deliberately sent a bunch of hardened criminals over with the immigrants. You know, sort of like Scarface, I think that's a big plot line,

According to Robert Freeman, who again, I think he has a penchant for exaggeration, in an initial wave of 5,200 Jews, there were, quote, thousands of gangsters. Like a minimum 50% of these guys are hoods, right? Solid guesswork there. Yeah, like I said, I think there's a bit of him being hyperbolic. Others have it that some criminals faked ID documents to be made Jewish to get in on the emigration.

Both of these are taken as fact by many, but there's more to why organized crime gained such a foothold among the Brighton Beach immigrants. And that's because of where they came from and the mentality that they brought with them from having to survive in the communist system and the mentality and how they saw America and freedom, baby. Capitalism, you know?

In Soviet society, like in any authoritarian or communist society, you kind of had to scam to survive. I'm going to read some quotes from an investigative paper that was commissioned as a part of a look into the Russian organized crime in New York, Pennsylvania, and Jersey, which, you know, a joint partnership between law enforcement in all three states. As is true in all societies, people are conditioned by the moral, social, and economic environment in which they live.

Soviet citizens were reared by a government which, although unable to adequately provide basic necessities for its people, lavishly rewarded high-ranking and loyal members of its dominant political party. Thus, to survive, many Soviet citizens were forced to find ways to beat the system without getting caught.

Actions such as bribing an official to do a favor, paying a premium to obtain desired goods, or buying necessities from black market salesmen became common practices accepted by the general population as necessary for survival. Consequently, many Russian émigrés are well-schooled in this type of behavior.

This is actually something my dad always used to talk about. He grew up in Czechoslovakia for the first 16 years of his life, and he remembers my grandfather and grandmother having to hustle whenever party officials came by to get things, like maybe some fresh produce from the farm there, some booze here. It was a means of survival. And the Soviets, the people there just knew how to survive in a shadow economy.

You see it here in Berlin as well, right? You see like people from the former communist countries, the Poles, the Czechs, Yugoslavs, like these guys hustle like mad. I mean, I've got a lot of respect for that. It's great. And people try to, you know, ascribe it to being a certain ethnicity or from a certain place, but I guess from a certain place. It's not, it's nothing to do with your ethnic makeup or who you are as a person, right? It's the system you have to survive under.

Yeah. And I mean, like, you know, like in Britain, everyone cribs and moans about Latvians and Poles coming over and taking their jobs. Like, yeah, of course, man, because they're like they work hard and they know how to do stuff. And they grew up in like communism. I mean, these guys, these guys know what they're doing. Right. They had to hustle to survive. And it involved a lot of diving in gray areas, black markets, forgery, scams, bribes, you know, just to get their basics. It was done out of necessity.

especially the Jewish ones. So in the book World on Fire, Amy Chua writes about how Russian Jews were usually left out of their top choices for universities or jobs because they were Jewish. And many found work on the black market. Misha Glennie talks about this in his book McMafia too, when discussing the Russian Jewish mobsters that flocked to Israel around the same time period and later in the 1990s. Yeah. And this like was a massive wave of immigration, right? So in the nineties, I think it was like a million ex-Soviet's fled to Israel. And

And Israel has less than 10 million people even today. So you can imagine how like it completely changed the face of that country overnight, really, or 10 years ago. I want to do an Israeli crime episode and we'll definitely talk about Israeli organized crime. We'll talk about that as well. Yeah, for sure. So Glennie says that while there were a few exceptions, Jews were mostly kept out of the top jobs. Lots of them found work at something called Tolkachi. Again, I'm mispronouncing that.

Because of this, lots of them found work as something called tolkachi, which basically the word means they were people whose role was to use informal connections to enable production managers to meet or manipulate targeted outputs imposed by the central economic plans. Or, you know, for lack of a better word, they were hustlers. They were smart. They couldn't get work elsewhere. And basically, they had to become super resourceful wheeler dealer types who kept the poorly planned Soviet economy moving. Quote, who could hustle the right materials from any source anywhere?

connections, entrepreneurship, skills in the most trying of circumstances. So you can see how that translates to organized crime and racketeering. Says Glennie, quote, the criminals and oligarchs emerged from the communities who inhabited the twilight periphery of the Soviet Union. Although usually denied access to the central institutions, they were not pariahs. Instead, they were compelled to seek out the possibilities of social and economic activity that existed in the nooks and cracks of the state.

Now, this is referring mostly to the rise of oligarchs inside Russia in the 80s and 90s, but it also replies to the average citizen, Jewish citizen as well, not to mention Georgians, Ukrainians, and even Chechens. And it's really a shame to think about when I think about it, because my maternal grandfather was hustling like this in the 1940s in the former Soviet Union. He was a black marketeer in Kazakhstan after the war, you know, in these DP camps during the war, too, I think when he was there briefly. He was stuck in these essentially refugee camps, and that's what he did to survive.

And imagine where he could have gotten like over the next five or six decades if he hadn't come to America. I mean, I could be part of an oligarch family. The podcast, the podcast would just be about me. Like I, like, fuck it. I wouldn't even need a podcast. Oh, I mean, when we get a millionth listener in like a month, you won't be saying that. And besides we're recording this on a Friday evening, like I'm about to go down the casino. So you keep doing the podcast. We got it. We got to pay off those gambling debts. Yeah. Um,

Anyway, even as these immigrants were leaving, they had to adapt this hostile mentality to survive. The Soviets limited the amount of money that the immigrants could take out of the country. So everyone had to smuggle things out from cans of caviar to diamonds to gold. When my father's family left Slovakia, they did the same thing. They had to smuggle things out in their shoes and then sew it into their jackets and things like that.

It's crazy. But back to that investigative paper. Quote,

Instead, they engage in a variety of frauds, scams, and swindles because those are the kind of crimes that mostly build upon their previous experience in the former Soviet Union. Unlike their ethnic predecessors in crime, Russian emigres do not have to go through any developmental or learning process to break into the criminal world in this country. They are able to begin operating almost immediately upon their arrival.

Yeah, that's really cool. So you get this whole wave of guys coming straight off the hustle production line. They're like ready to make it rain right off the bat, right? I mean, they were original scammers, baby. Like they forget these Instagram rappers talking about credit cards. Like these guys, they were the originators. They were the real deal. Yeah. But you know, this was freedom for them. This was the free market. Everything was free.

everyday citizens not having every word and move monitored, no secret police, money just wide open for the taking. Again, Scarface reference. It's not even a good movie. And this is a particular vulgar quote, but you know, this country is like a great big pussy waiting to get fucked.

I feel dirty just saying that. I was just going to let that one lie. I wasn't even going to comment on that. As a Russian mobster told Robert Friedman in a 1994 New York Mag article, you have to understand the Russian mentality. In the former Soviet Union, the only way to survive was to scam. He later goes on, in this country, it is easy to make money. I love this country. I would die for it.

That's like street level Iwo Jima vibes there. I mean, it's like, isn't it crazy that the best way to prepare someone for like American capitalism is Soviet communism?

Like, yeah, it's really cool. I don't know if it's the best way to, you know, prepare someone. Maybe the best way to operate in the gray areas of it and illegally. I don't know. Maybe like going to Harvard and having a bunch of friends that own banks is probably the best way to prepare someone, you know? Isn't that the real mafia, man? Yeah.

Now, of course, most of the Russian Jewish immigrants who came in were not Harding gangsters. That's the case for any group of immigrants that come. It's a tiny, tiny amount. But talking about average upstanding citizens, it just doesn't make for a great podcast. So let's talk about some of the ones who were.

When these guys first start off, they're your average two-bit hustlers running every scam in the book. Selling fake driver's licenses and social security cards, doing credit card scams, extorting their local immigrant communities, literally switching out real jewelry for fake jewelry in stores. I mean, this is real slapstick stuff, like a Charlie Chaplin movie. There's even, I mean, I couldn't believe this. There's a sack of potatoes scam.

where they convince some poor recent immigrant that a sack is full of gold coins when it's actually full of potatoes. I mean, it doesn't get more Slavic than a scam involving a sack of potatoes. I mean, I know all these guys are like fresh off the boat, but that is, that's pretty fucking stupid. That's amazing. I mean, I'm probably selling it short. Like I'm sure there were other elements to it, but it was literally called the sack of potato scam. Cool. Yeah. Great scam. But some of these guys, they start to take things a little bit further.

At first. And the first of these is Evsei Agron. Agron is not to be trifled with. Rumor has it that he walked around Brighton Beach with a cattle prod, which is just, I mean, that's a solid, unique accessory. It's just, it's the right type of flair. He was born in 1932 and lived in Leningrad throughout the war, surviving the blockade. 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 a financial fraud.

And you'll see that with a lot of these guys. No one really knows if they were some vicious murderer back home or some run-of-the-mill purse snatcher. A lot of their bios are just completely up in the air. The story goes that at one point, he became a money manager of sorts for criminal types, collecting and paying off lawyers, which is how he became known in the Russian underworld.

He was said to be just a steely guy dressing like a lawyer, taking his wife to the symphony. He stopped off in West Germany in 1971 to run a prostitution ring. And he came to the U.S. Classic connecting flight hustle. Just like I make stock of a free few years, you know, like get some hookers, make some money. But after that, he comes. Yeah. He comes to the U.S. in 1975 where he was classified as a jeweler.

He was shot in 1980, the first of many times. Typically, they call him the first Don of Brighton Beach, and he operated out of the El Caribe Social Club, which still exists, and which Michael Cohen of Trump fame was involved with.

a grown also apparently used to stop at the russian turkish baths on east 10th street once a week which has the full endorsement i think of the underworld podcast i used to go like every two weeks back like wait when these things were okay and it's just a delightful place you could sit there and listen to like old jews talk about tax codes models trying to recover from a hangover russian gangster types getting wasted recovering addicts former hardcore punk guys now into yoga

Yeah, I mean, punk guys now doing yoga is basically half of Berlin, right? And Brooklyn, I guess. And just all sorts of weirdos trying to sell you all sorts of things at times. Like, you can't beat it. And the food is incredible. I remember once I was ordering, I think, borscht there, and I saw a mouse crawl across the food preparation area.

And then I look at the cook there, this guy Sergei, and he looks at me, we make eye contact, and he goes, what? It's good for flavor. I mean, you can't beat that. It's a fantastic place. When they reopen, please go support them. Anyway, a grown was running protection rackets, extorting people left and right, earning 50K a week in the early 1980s. He was also running scams of all types. A Village Voice article about a guy named Murray Wilson, a lawyer accountant type who worked with a lot of these guys, details one.

Quote, in April 1983, a grown and a large contingent of Russians accompanied Wilson on a Passover junket to Las Vegas' Dunes Hotel.

The immigrants were there to assist Wilson in a $1 million heist from the hotel casino. The plan was simple. Wilson, a valued Dunes customer, had arranged for credit to be advanced to the Russians, who, unbeknownst to the hotel, had no intention of gambling. Instead, the Russians returned the chips to Wilson, who had other associates, then fully clothed, redeem... I don't know why it says that. I think they were meeting in steam rooms. Redeem them for cash. I mean, this is like... I don't know how you get away with this. I guess a lot of fake documents, but it's not sophisticated stuff, right? Yeah.

There was some sophisticated stuff going on, and we're going to introduce Boris Neyfeld. And Neyfeld is just like...

He's just perfect. If you ever like Google a photo of this guy, he was actually just recently released from prison again, I think in 2017, 2018, I think after serving another sentence. And he's just exactly what a Russian gangster should be. He's a big hulking guy. He's older now, covered in tattoos, shaved head, just like really tough looking, speaks in broken English with like the real thick TV like Russian accent, which I'm going to be forced to impersonate later on. So forgive me for that.

I mean, hell, his first name is Boris. He was photographed for this recent AP article, just tattoos fully out in a robe in a bathhouse. He's in a Nat Geo doc about the Russian mob, which I use some information from. And he's giving an interview where he explains how he started getting involved in extortion and racketeering. And he describes it like this. I take gun. I put on head. I tell them, you not pay me. I kill you. He pay.

I mean, I was going to say a shit joke there, but that stands on its own. That's an incredible quote. It's like perfect. He is the TV version of himself. Well done for treading that line between a Russian and American accent there as well. I mean, that's the twinge. It's the best I can do.

One report has Nafel trying to be a taxi driver, then a house painter, but it didn't work out, so he started robbing churches, synagogues, running simple extortion scams. Another report says he got off the plane from Belarus in the late 1970s and went to work in the criminal underworld right away. A grown took him under his wing, using him as a driver slash bodyguard, sort of the Christopher Moltisanti to his Tony. We're in the early 80s right now, and the hot new thing in mafia circles is the fuel tax scam.

Prior to 1982, every gas station had to collect fuel taxes, 40 cents on the gallon. But the law changes so that now the fuel wholesalers need to pay it. Quote, licensed fuel companies began to purchase bulk fuel and move it through bogus sales to a series of dummy wholesale companies. This created what came to be known as a daisy chain.

Gas was transferred from one company to another till it gets to the last one, which is just a P.O. box. They faked like the taxes were paid, sold it to independent stations at cut rates with fake taxes paid stamps, and eventually the P.O. box company disappears and no one pays the taxes, which 40 cents on a gallon adds up to a lot of money.

There was another involving selling home fuel as diesel fuel or vice versa. I really don't know. I mean, it's the part of organized crime that isn't that much fun to talk about. But what I do know is this starts making organized crime figures tens of millions of dollars into the hundreds of millions after a few years. And the Russians are in on it. There's a lot of debate about this, but apparently the fuel tax scam started with a Long Island businessman who got threatened while doing it by local Long Island thugs. I don't know what local Long Island thug means. I think it's just a bunch of guys who, you know,

They're all former lacrosse players and they drink Bud Light Tallboys on the LIR and they have Yankees logos tattooed on their calves. I mean, what is happening right now? Who are these people?

There are a few people who will get these references, I think, and I'm really catering it towards them. So this guy who was threatened by the local Long Island thugs, he gets the Colombo family to help. If you've seen any Mafia documentary or podcast or web show, you've no doubt seen Michael Franzisi, who was high up in the Colombo family. He was one of the ones who got the Italians into it. Meanwhile, at the same time, another Russian organized player named Michael Markowitz was

was running the same scam. He eventually linked up with Franzisi. The Nat Geo doc calls Markowitz the Jewish Scarface, which is like kind of unoriginal and lame, but whatever. Together, Markowitz and Franzisi are running 600 gas stations together, bringing in 8 to 10 million a week.

And the feds aren't nipping this in the bud? Like, what's going on here? 600. Eventually they catch on, but I mean, it's a pretty... You know, this is a low information era. Technology isn't what it used to. I think a lot of this is done by hand. It's a good scam, and you can see because everyone got involved in it. And this Michael Francesi guy, like, he's all over the TV, right? He's, like, relabeled himself as kind of the spokesman for the Colombo family or whatever, but, like...

He's actually legit, right? The guy was pretty high up in the organization. Like he's not just spouting his mouth off, I guess. Oh yeah, no, he's, he's the real deal. Like he was, he was high up in like one of the five families. Um,

Frankly, I don't know how he's allowed to get away with talking about some of this stuff. But it's I mean, he's got fantastic insight, but he's like really, you know, he's all over YouTube. He's all over every interview. I think BuzzFeed does like 50 videos with him. Everyone does videos with him because very few people like this talk. But, you know, he's doing the speaking gigs, whatever. I support it. You know, good for him.

Markowitz and Negron, they don't really like each other, and Negron is running his own tax fuel scam with his buddy Boris Neyfeld and another Russian wise guy named Marat Balagula, who had actually taught them how to do it. Balagula was, he was different. He was smarter than Negron, smarter than Neyfeld. He had grown up middle class and studied mathematics. His father was a lieutenant in the Red Army, and he managed a food co-op of sorts on a Russian ship on the Black Sea where he familiarized himself with the black market and wheeling and dealing.

Balagula was born in Odessa in 1943. He came to the U.S. in 1977. Balagula said he read about capitalism while in the Soviet Union and knew he could do well over here, according to his lawyer. They say he's the one who really, truly changed things for the Russians, who got them organized, really got them in bed with Italian crime families. Balagula goes and allies his crew with the Lucchese family, a different one of the five families, and they protect him. You gotta understand, the Russians, they were not this big, scary crime family during those days that we kind of think of them as now.

They were wild, they were reckless, but they were kind of weak compared to the Italians, who back then had everything on lock. Also, the classification of them as a mafia seems like a bit off. They don't operate like the Italians do at this point with families and strict hierarchies. There was no capo, capo regime, soldiers, that sort of stuff. Alliances and enemies shifted per scheme. I mean, their whole thing was based on opportunism. Who knows who and can do what with who for which scam.

Yeah, I mean, and these guys, are they just based in New York at this time? Is that really, are they just down in Brighton Beach or are they all over the country? They're in Brighton Beach. I think there are various elements starting to make waves in Los Angeles, in Miami. But for right now, I mean, their center is Brighton Beach. But the feds and local cops on the other hand, they have pretty much no clue what's going on. I mean, the Russians had just sort of shown up and started running wild in the late 1970s and law enforcement wasn't tapped in at all.

They had no idea who these guys were, not to mention there were barely any Russian-speaking members of law enforcement. Anyone who did speak Russian in law enforcement was more focused on Cold War stuff than organized crime, which didn't exist much in the space beforehand. And organized crime was really focused on the Italians. Also, the Russians were an extremely insular community. I mean, they took stop snitching to like a whole new level. It wasn't just out of fear of retribution from the organized criminals. But remember, a lot of them didn't speak English and they still had the Soviet police state mentality.

Back in the motherland, you did not talk to the state. Apparently, during these times, they even had their own people's courts in the Russian-speaking community where men of influence passed down rulings. Yeah, this is absolutely wild. It's like these guys were perfectly created to become American gangsters. I mean, you couldn't have made a better community of mobsters if you tried. I think, you know, it's that element of organization and black market stuff. But you see that, too, in a lot of ethnic groups that come from areas that are

that lack opportunity and that are violent. You know, we talked about Vietnamese coming here. You see with Balkan gangsters as well, people who grew up in torn societies and war torn places, they're generally going to get here. And, and well, again, I don't mean people themselves, but there's minor elements that are focused on crime are going to get here and just have a different mentality. Yeah, for sure.

So Brighton Beach quickly becomes the Wild West. The Russian gangsters are running all sorts of scams and hustles and racketeering. They're aligning with the Italians, and the gas scams are making everyone rich. Bodies are starting to drop, though, all over Brighton Beach in brazen ways. Brazen? Brazen?

Brazen. There we go. And people are starting to pay attention. Agrone gets killed in 85 and it's never solved. Many suspect he pissed off the wrong Italians. Others think it might have been Balagula or Neffel themselves who bumped him off so they can move up. Franzisi gets busted. Markowitz gets busted. He's later killed in 89, suspected of being an informant. And Neffel actually goes to work for the brains, Balagula.

According to Robert Freeman, again, grain of salt maybe, Balagula is apparently the one who organized the Russians to something a little less chaotic. He's said to have ties with, quote, KGB spies, corrupt third world despots, and international terrorists.

He transported automatic weapons from Florida to the USSR via New York. In Sierra Leone, Balagula and the Genovese gangsters financed the presidential campaign of Joseph Momo in 1985, gaining access to many subsequent business deals such as importing whiskey, printing the country's money, and the importing of oil. Wait, so they, what, they did, the Russian mob was printing the national money of Sierra Leone?

Like that is, that is globalization right there. You know, you know, again, this is something I really got to look into more, but this is according to Friedman. He was super tapped in. I just, you know, I, it's crazy. Grain of salt.

But his reign at the top was short like leprechauns, as they say in Brooklyn. Balagula flees the U.S. in 86 after getting convicted for a scam, along with Neyfeld, of faking charges from Merrill Lynch customers. So it's like, you know, how does that fit in with him being this guy tied in with the government of Sierra Leone? Like, could they really be the super mafia if you're scamming credit cards?

Anyway, while on trial, he showed up at court every day in a limousine. Eventually, he fled abroad, bounced around the world until he got caught in Germany and was extradited to the U.S., where he served a credit card sentence and was also charged with gasoline fraud.

As I mentioned, around the late 80s and early 90s, the Russian mob of Brighton Beach and its other factions start getting press, and they are hyped up in no small part due to Friedman. It really kicks in after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but even in 1989, the New York Times is now publishing stories on the growth of organized crime there. Take this lead. Quote,

is reaching beyond its base in Brooklyn, using extortion and violence in its own neighborhoods, and engaging in multi-million dollar racketeering schemes on an international scale. I mean, that writer was basically writing the logline hoping for an option, right? That's a good opening line. It's true, right? It's a really good opening. I mean, I want to read more. I want to hear a podcast on this. Oh, yeah, for sure.

It goes on to detail their crimes. And remember, these guys were into everything. Fake antiques, jewelry scams. In one unpublicized case under FBI investigation, a Soviet emigre crime ring infiltrated one of the nation's largest jewelry manufacturers and methodically stole gold and gems valued at $54 million from the Manhattan company Jardinet Incorporated. They stole gems, man. Gems.

There's the money. By 1986, investigators said some 25 emigres had infiltrated the 300 employees and brazenly diverted or stolen nearly 54 million in gold and diamonds before the scheme was discovered in an inventory the next year. I guess, like, this is the least surprising scam they did for me, right? Because it aren't a bunch of those diamond guys in midtown Manhattan, like former Soviet Jewish emigres as well, like...

I remember checking them out when I was going to get married in New York and I was let down all these kind of corridors and back rooms, stuff with all kinds of crazy stuff. Like it's pretty cool. Pretty mad that people don't even know that like this is right next to Empire State Building as well. Yeah. The Diamond District, man. It's, oh, you're in Empire State Building. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 34. No, 47th Street. It's around that way. Yeah. It's crazy, man. It's super shady. I don't know if the ones they ripped off were Russian Soviet emigres. I feel like at that point they would have been more clued in.

So I'm going to assume no, but again, I have no idea. Fact check me, people. Look this up. We're too lazy to. Many of the Soviets who came over had technical skills, were highly educated. This is the new batch, by the way. Technical skills, highly educated, or trained in the undergrounds that flourish in bureaucratic communist states, like forgery. And you can kind of see the lore forming. One NYPD detective tells the reporter, they feel we are pussycats, and the United States is one big candy store. It's like the PG-13 Scarface quote. Yeah.

Like a big orchard just waiting to get picked or something. Yeah, exactly. A retired FBI agent by the name of John Good says, the Russians just don't care. They're not afraid of the consequences. Now, you know, they're a big problem. They're becoming a big problem. And with that, this is a two-parter. I'm going to end part one here. But not before I read a quote from the task force about a classic Russian organized crime scenario. And maybe you can kind of see why some people doubted how organized and powerful they actually were.

In Brighton Beach, a Russian emigre shoplifter was the extortion victim of Alexander Levitschitz, also known as Sasa Pina, a particularly violent Russian emigre criminal. The basis for this extortion is notable. Pina and his girlfriend became involved in an argument over Pina's infidelity based upon information provided to Pina's girlfriend by the shoplifter. Pina demanded a monetary settlement from the shoplifter to atone for the problem he had caused.

Eventually, a resolution was reached whereby the shoplifter provided Pena with the names of other low-level criminals in Brighton Beach from whom Pena could successfully extort money. In September 1993, Pena was arrested by the Suffolk County District Attorney. This is good. This is going somewhere. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's just the classic, you know, you rat me out to my girlfriend and I extort you and other people that you know. Yeah. This is a crazy story. I mean...

How like, I don't know, like how these people were so industrious and how they kind of like gained a foothold in a city that was supposedly run by, I mean, giant Italian mafias, right? I mean, like really, really fascinating stuff. Yeah, they're brilliant. And I split this up because it's really long, but I think we're going to do part two later this week on Friday. And part two, we really get into the wars that were fought in the early 90s where you had just dozens of people killed and

Um, we get into some detail when they failed and a couple other Russian mafia. So is that rise up, including this guy, a little you punch it, who was what they call a vor, which is like the old school, um, thieves in law, which there really aren't that many people assume that all Russian mafias are, are, you know, Eastern promises, tattooed stories, all that. But that's really something that that's in the past. So there's only a couple hundred of these guys existing according to the feds in, in, in the world. And only a few of them were ever in the U S and he's one of them. They say, okay,

uh so we're gonna yeah and in the next few days people should definitely check out pictures of neifel right because he is like yeah i've never seen a gangster look more gangster than this guy i want to find him i don't think he'd make for the best uh the best co-host sort of thing but i think he'd make for a great interview just a fun time so when kovic comes down i want to go to the steam with with him and just kind of hang out and have him be my friend you know but anyway

Thanks again for tuning in. We really appreciate you guys and all the support we've been getting. The numbers are growing. Sean's almost out of debt.

Um, so thanks for the contributions at the patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. Uh, we've got an Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, all that stuff. I want to thank again, our, our tireless sound engineer, audio producer, Dale Isinger, who, uh, just kills it every time. And, um, everyone who's supporting us on the Patreon, we really, really appreciate it. We're going to keep these episodes coming.

I think next week we have a two-parter as well on the Yakuza that Sean did. That's fascinating. So thanks again, and until next week.