FACES AND PLACES: Ukraine and the "Red Mafiya" (05/20/01)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Ukraine and the "Red Mafiya"

It was 1985. I was returning to the U.S. on an El-Al flight from Tel Aviv. I had just experienced a spectacular tour of Israel. Seated next to me was my late friend, David Roth.

An article in The Jerusalem Post about a diamond smuggling ring caught my eye. I was shocked. "This is awful," I said, turning to David. "Jewish criminals!"

David looked at me with amusement. "What did you think, Myron, Jews can't be criminals?"

I thought for a moment. "No," I said. "It's not that. It's just that a Jewish mob doesn't quite fit with what I had just experienced in Israel."

In his book "Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams," Rich Cohen describes, with no small amount of romantic nostalgia, infamous Jewish American gangsters from the 1930s and 1940s.

The first truly famous one was Monk Eastman who was followed by Arnold Rothstein, "the Moses of the underworld," Big Maxie Greenberg, Irving (Waxey) Gordon, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles (who looked like a mama's boy but once buried a rival alive), Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, Red Levine (the Orthodox hit man who refused to kill on the Sabbath) and Louis Lepke, who masterminded Murder Inc. and died in the electric chair.

"I don't want to glamorize what these men did," writes Mr. Cohen. "They were killers ... And yet, looking at how Jews were everywhere being treated, the abuse they took and would continue to take, I cannot help but admire some part of their story. Here were men who had no idea Jews were supposed to be weak, so they weren't."

Jewish American mobsters, however, were boy scouts compared to the Jewish Russian and Ukrainian mob which dominates an international crime syndicate known as the "Red Mafiya." As Robert Friedman points out in his book "Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America," today's Jewish crime coalition is neither red nor a mafia in the Italian sense of the word. This Jewish crime alliance is much more sophisticated, more ruthless, more cunning and more merciless than any of its predecessors. Even the real Mafia is fearful. "We Italians will kill you," a John Gotti associate remarked, but they "will kill your whole family."

The boss of the so-called "Red Mafiya" today is Semion Mogilevich, a Ukrainian-born Jew living in Budapest who holds an economics degree from the University of Lviv. Another alleged Ukrainian Jewish Mafiyoso is Vadym Rabinovich, an oligarch and a close friend of President Leonid Kuchma. Like other oligarchs, he works closely with the former KGB and the Communist Party of Ukraine. According to The Washington Times, Mr. Rabinovich also had close ties to the Clinton administration.

Unlike other Jews who helped establish the Soviet Union - Trotsky, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Zinoviev and, Kaganovich come to mind - none of the new gangsters were loyal to the USSR; few served in the armed forces during World War II. Most spent time in the gulag for thievery, murder and extortion. Others were right at home in the USSR where corruption was the business of the state. According to David Remnick, author of "Lenin's Tomb," "It was as if the entire Soviet Union were ruled by a gigantic mob family ..." Compared to the loathsome apparatchiks, criminals were held in high regard by many Soviets. Criminals had beaten the system.

America's gates were opened to Jewish mobsters by the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which withheld most-favored-nation status from Marxist countries that restricted Jewish emigration. According to Mr. Friedman, the Soviets were happy to oblige during the 1970s by "emptying their jails of thousands of hard-core criminals, dumping vast numbers of undesirables" on an unsuspecting United States. More than 40,000 Soviet Jews settled in Brighton Beach which soon became the seat of the "Organisatsiya," the new Jewish mob. Initially assisted by the Genovese crime family and the politically astute and well-connected Jewish rabbi Ronald Greenwald, the Jewish mobsters, some of whom have Ph.D.s in mathematics, physics and engineering, as well as MBAs, quickly expanded their operations to include bank fraud, money laundering, Medicare and insurance fraud, counterfeiting, drug dealing, natural gas bootlegging - scams which netted billions of dollars. The mob has even infiltrated the National Hockey League through its intimidation of Russian and Ukrainian players.

Today the old Jewish criminals of the past have been replaced by mobsters such as Efim Laskin, the Goldberg Gang, the Zilber Brothers, Monya Elson, Evsei Agron, Marat Balagula, the Nayfeld brothers, Emile Puzyretski, Yurkin Brokhin and Leo Liebowitz.

Given the extent of Jewish criminal activity, why haven't the authorities stepped in? Since most Jewish refugees were being resettled by Jewish welfare agencies, investigations of Jewish mobsters "came under considerable criticism from the Jewish establishment, which complained that the adverse publicity generated in the hunt for Russian Jewish criminals would foster anti-Semitism and jeopardize the continued emigration of Russian Jews to Israel and the West," writes Mr. Friedman. When the FBI attempted to step in, "Jewish organizations continued to lobby the Justice Department to downsize the threat posed by the Russian mob."

The Russian Jewish press also provided protection. Valery Weinberg's Novoye Russkoye Slovo "is unique among the dozens of Russian publications in the United States for its routine glorification of the Russian mob and its vilification of U.S. law enforcement," writes Mr. Friedman. In March 1999, Mr. Weinberg received an "outstanding leadership" award for his work on behalf of Soviet Jewry from United Jewish Appeal.

As Ukraine's woes continue to multiply, it is increasingly apparent that the same mob family of thieving thugs that controlled Ukraine during Soviet times is back in business. Is there anyone out there who still believes that Leonid Kuchma is good for Ukraine?

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected].

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