Every Saturday morning, Evsei Agron went to the Russian and Turkish Baths on Manhattan's old Lower East Side. The ornate 19th-century bathhouse had been a favorite hangout of Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Lucky Luciano during Prohibition, when there was a cubbyhole behind the towel counter for gangsters to deposit their tommy guns. It was the perfect place for Agron, the undisputed Godfather of the Russian mob, to have sit-downs with his pals, sweating in the heat of the 200-degree steam room while burly men hit their backs with bundles of oak branches.
On May 4, 1985, Agron's brawny chauffeur was sitting outside his boss's Brooklyn apartment building in his black Lincoln Town Car, waiting to make the weekly drive across the East River into Manhattan. Just before he walked out, Agron told his common-law wife he would meet her for dinner at a Brighton Beach restaurant. At exactly 8: 35 A. M. , Agron pressed the elevator button outside his apartment door. Suddenly, a man wearing a jogging suit and sunglasses stepped from behind a comer in the hallway and shot Agron at point blank range, hitting him twice in the right temple. He fell to the floor, blood pooling around him on the black-and-white marble-cake tiles.
A few days later Agron's driver strolled into what had been Agron's modest office at the El Caribe Club in Brighton Beach. He was there to begin his new job as the driver and bodyguard of the man who benefited the most from the rubout of Evsei Agron: Marat Balagula, the new Godfather of the Russian mob.
Within a few months of seizing power, Balagula showed he was the very model of a modem don. While Agron had been a thuggish neighborhood extortionist who presided over a loose-knit gang that terrorized the small emigre community, Balagula was a brilliant, coldly efficient crime boss who would transform the Organizatsiya, or organization, into a multibillion-dollar-a-year criminal enterprise that now stretches across the tatters of Communist Eastern Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia.
"Balagula", says U. S. federal agent Harold Bibb, "makes John Gotti look like a choirboy".
Spreading out from their base in Brighton Beach, the cloistered seaside community of Russian Jewish emigres, the Russians have pulled off the largest jewelry heist, and insurance and Medicare fraud, in American history, with a net haul exceeding $1 billion. They are importing heroin into the United States from Southeast Asia as well as from poppy fields around Chernobyl, the site of the world's worst nuclear accident.
"The poppies are huge -- and radioactive", says Joel Campanella, an investigator with the U. S. Customs Service.
Currently, Balagula's henchmen are expanding into the former Soviet Union, where, in the irony of ironies, they are using out-of-work KGB agents to run their rackets.
"Their dream was to go back when communism fell and privatize the economy", explains a corporate lawyer who has worked for Balagula. and while the Russian's ruthlessness has led to a body count that rivals that of the Italian Mafia's, U. S. law enforcement does not seem to have a clue about how to slow them down.
The Russian mob may not have 70 years of tradition behind it like La Cosa Nostra, but it already has more than 300 members in the New York City area alone, making it larger than the Bonanno, Colombo, or Luchese crime family.
"The Russians are an emerging group", says Justice Department prosecutor Patrick J. Cotter, a member of the team that convicted John Gotti. "They make tons of money, they kill people, they are international, they are moving into drugs -- but we don't have a single unit of the FBI that's devoted to going after them", he said.
"If we don't begin to address the problem now, we'll be running around asking ourselves how the hell this Russian organized crime got so big and how we can get rid of them".
As for the New York City Police Department, it has almost no Russian-speaking cops, and even fewer reliable informants in the Russian emigre community. To top it off, it took two years for the N. Y. P. D'. s intelligence unit to recruit a single detective to monitor the Russian Mob, because many cops are scared.
A large part of the problem in dealing with the Russian mob, which is predominantly Jewish, is political. In Germany, where the arrival of the Brighton Beach Mob looms as a serious problem, police have formed a task force of 100 specially trained investigators to combat the Russians, according to a classified report prepared by the German Federal Police in Wiesbaden. The report notes that the Russian crime wave, including bloody rubouts in fashionable restaurants on Berlin's Fasanenstrasse, has forced authorities to overcome their "supersensitivity. . . to the Jewish aspect of emigre crime".
But in the U. S, according to several law enforcement officials, Jewish organizations have lobbied the Justice Department to downplay the Russian mob, fearing that adverse publicity will jeopardize the mass exodus of Russian Jews to Israel.
"The Russian Mafia has the lowest priority on the criminal pecking order", admits FBI spokesman Joe Valiquette.
Many of Valiquette's colleagues are harshly critical of that judgment. They argue that the Russians, tutored in a brutal totalitarian state riddled with corruption, have developed a business acumen that puts them in a class by themselves.
Many of the Russian gangsters have advanced degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics and speak several languages. Marat Balagula himself has a graduate degree, in economics and mathematics, and claims to have a photographic memory.
He came to New York with his wife and two young daughters on Jan. 13, 1977, not because he had suffered as a Jew, though he concedes, "I used that as an excuse when I applied for my visa". He decided he could do well in America after working on a Soviet cruise ship that catered to foreign tourists.
"I saw with my own eyes how people lived in the West", says Balagula, who was born in Orenberg, Russia in 1943. "This pushed me to move".
According to American law enforcement sources and Brighton Beach colleagues, party bosses used to slip Balagula currency, gold, valuable Russian artifacts and stolen artwork, to hawk to the tourists or fence in Europe. He denies doing anything untoward, but he does admit, "It was a good job. I got good money.
"My salary was in dollars and rubles. I traveled to Australia, France, England and Italy. The KGB gave me visas, no problem. I brought back lots of stuff: stereos, cameras. I was not middle-class. I was upper-middle-class. I had a nice apartment in Odessa, a dacha on the Black Sea". In New York, Balagula attended English classes, and worked for six months as a textile cutter for $3. 50 an hour. His fortunes improved markedly when he met Evsei Agron, a small, grandfatherly looking man known as a rukovodstvo, or someone who wields a great deal of power, comparable to a Mafia Godfather. Balagula became Agron's consigliere and financial adviser in 1980.
When it comes to questions about Marat Balagula, Brighton Beach residents are characteristically tight-lipped and suspicious. Yet one still hears legends about his Midas-like wealth: he owns a fleet of supertankers that ply the high seas; he tried to purchase an island off the coast of South Africa to set up a bank for money laundering. A mobster enviously told me that Balagula circled Manhattan on luxury yachts, holding all night drug and sex orgies, and rode in a custom stretch limo, white and immaculate, with a black liveried chauffeur and ice cold bottles of vodka.
"Marat throws around diamonds the way we throw around dollar bills", Joe Galizia, a soldier in the Genovese family, told an associate in a conversation taped by police.
As Balagula's wealth grew, so did violence in Brighton Beach. At least 15 unsolved homicides have been attributed to Balagula's turf wars with rival Russian mobsters. Many of the gangland-style slayings were brazen, broad-daylight shootings inside Brighton Beach restaurants in front of numerous witnesses.
The going price for a Mob hit in Brighton Beach is $2, 000. It is a lot of money to the hit men, who are often Chechens, Moslems from the Caucasus. "The problem is, it's now cheaper to have someone killed than to pay off a debt in Brighton Beach", says Alexandre Grant, editor of a Russian-language newspaper called Novoye Russkoye Slovo.
A few months ago, I sat down with Balagula's wife and younger daughter in a midtown Manhattan law office. Aksana, a sullen, curly haired 19-year-old optometry student, was wearing a low-cut lime green dress. As she slouched in her chair, sipping a ginger ale, she complained that the press falsely portrayed her father as the Russian Godfather.
"I love my dad very much. My father's my world to me", she said. After her parents moved from Brighton Beach to a $1. 2-million home on Long Island, she said, her father's notoriety had caused her trouble in high school.
Alexandra, Balagula's tall, elegant, blonde wife, told me charges that her husband is a mob boss are "bullshit! If somebody comes and says they don't have anything to eat, he gives them a job. This is his nature, to help people. This is why he suffers now".
She was referring to the fact that Balagula was residing in the Lewisburg federal penitentiary, situated on 1, 000 acres of rolling Pennsylvania farmland. The maximum security prison, however, is a vast stone fortress, with 30-foot-high walls and eight gun turrets bristling with automatic weapons. Balagula shares a dormitory room with 36 dope dealers, rapists and murderers. He is one of only a handful of inmates in Lewisburg convicted of a white-collar crime. He is also the only mob boss allegedly running a "family" from the facility.
When Balagula, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and bound in manacles and chains, was ushered into the smoky ground-floor visiting room he looked tired and deflated. He sat down heavily, a thick chain wrapped snugly around his soft paunch, and lit a Marlboro with yellow stained fingers. On his knuckles were Cyrillic letters that marked him as a made man in the Organizatsiya.
Convicted of credit card fraud in 1986, Balagula fled the United States three days before his sentencing, leading the Secret Service on a five-continent chase before he was apprehended in Germany two years later. He was subsequently extradited to the United States and slapped with an eight-year sentence.
This November, Balagula was sentenced to an additional 10 years for evading federal taxes on the sale of 4 million gallons of gasoline.
"This was supposed to be a haven for you", declared U. S. District Court Judge Leonard Wexler. "It turned out to be a hell for us".
Balagula, who will be eligible for parole in 1995, has refused to give authorities any information about the Russian mob's activities in America. "They want me to tell them about the Mafia, about gasoline, about hits", Balagula said glowering. "Forget it. All these charges are bullshit! All my life I like to help people. Just because a lot of people come to me for advice, everybody thinks I'm a boss. I came to America to find work, support myself, and create a future for my children.
"There's no such thing as the Russian Mafia. Two or three friends hangout together. That's a Mafia? "
Robert I. Friedman is the author of "Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel's West Bank Settlement Movement", which has recently been published by Random House. This article is an abridged version of a longer article that appeared in Vanity Fair, and is reprinted here with permission of Vanity Fair.
On May 4, 1985, Agron's brawny chauffeur was sitting outside his boss's Brooklyn apartment building in his black Lincoln Town Car, waiting to make the weekly drive across the East River into Manhattan. Just before he walked out, Agron told his common-law wife he would meet her for dinner at a Brighton Beach restaurant. At exactly 8: 35 A. M. , Agron pressed the elevator button outside his apartment door. Suddenly, a man wearing a jogging suit and sunglasses stepped from behind a comer in the hallway and shot Agron at point blank range, hitting him twice in the right temple. He fell to the floor, blood pooling around him on the black-and-white marble-cake tiles.
A few days later Agron's driver strolled into what had been Agron's modest office at the El Caribe Club in Brighton Beach. He was there to begin his new job as the driver and bodyguard of the man who benefited the most from the rubout of Evsei Agron: Marat Balagula, the new Godfather of the Russian mob.
Within a few months of seizing power, Balagula showed he was the very model of a modem don. While Agron had been a thuggish neighborhood extortionist who presided over a loose-knit gang that terrorized the small emigre community, Balagula was a brilliant, coldly efficient crime boss who would transform the Organizatsiya, or organization, into a multibillion-dollar-a-year criminal enterprise that now stretches across the tatters of Communist Eastern Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia.
"Balagula", says U. S. federal agent Harold Bibb, "makes John Gotti look like a choirboy".
Spreading out from their base in Brighton Beach, the cloistered seaside community of Russian Jewish emigres, the Russians have pulled off the largest jewelry heist, and insurance and Medicare fraud, in American history, with a net haul exceeding $1 billion. They are importing heroin into the United States from Southeast Asia as well as from poppy fields around Chernobyl, the site of the world's worst nuclear accident.
"The poppies are huge -- and radioactive", says Joel Campanella, an investigator with the U. S. Customs Service.
Currently, Balagula's henchmen are expanding into the former Soviet Union, where, in the irony of ironies, they are using out-of-work KGB agents to run their rackets.
"Their dream was to go back when communism fell and privatize the economy", explains a corporate lawyer who has worked for Balagula. and while the Russian's ruthlessness has led to a body count that rivals that of the Italian Mafia's, U. S. law enforcement does not seem to have a clue about how to slow them down.
The Russian mob may not have 70 years of tradition behind it like La Cosa Nostra, but it already has more than 300 members in the New York City area alone, making it larger than the Bonanno, Colombo, or Luchese crime family.
"The Russians are an emerging group", says Justice Department prosecutor Patrick J. Cotter, a member of the team that convicted John Gotti. "They make tons of money, they kill people, they are international, they are moving into drugs -- but we don't have a single unit of the FBI that's devoted to going after them", he said.
"If we don't begin to address the problem now, we'll be running around asking ourselves how the hell this Russian organized crime got so big and how we can get rid of them".
As for the New York City Police Department, it has almost no Russian-speaking cops, and even fewer reliable informants in the Russian emigre community. To top it off, it took two years for the N. Y. P. D'. s intelligence unit to recruit a single detective to monitor the Russian Mob, because many cops are scared.
A large part of the problem in dealing with the Russian mob, which is predominantly Jewish, is political. In Germany, where the arrival of the Brighton Beach Mob looms as a serious problem, police have formed a task force of 100 specially trained investigators to combat the Russians, according to a classified report prepared by the German Federal Police in Wiesbaden. The report notes that the Russian crime wave, including bloody rubouts in fashionable restaurants on Berlin's Fasanenstrasse, has forced authorities to overcome their "supersensitivity. . . to the Jewish aspect of emigre crime".
But in the U. S, according to several law enforcement officials, Jewish organizations have lobbied the Justice Department to downplay the Russian mob, fearing that adverse publicity will jeopardize the mass exodus of Russian Jews to Israel.
"The Russian Mafia has the lowest priority on the criminal pecking order", admits FBI spokesman Joe Valiquette.
Many of Valiquette's colleagues are harshly critical of that judgment. They argue that the Russians, tutored in a brutal totalitarian state riddled with corruption, have developed a business acumen that puts them in a class by themselves.
Many of the Russian gangsters have advanced degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics and speak several languages. Marat Balagula himself has a graduate degree, in economics and mathematics, and claims to have a photographic memory.
He came to New York with his wife and two young daughters on Jan. 13, 1977, not because he had suffered as a Jew, though he concedes, "I used that as an excuse when I applied for my visa". He decided he could do well in America after working on a Soviet cruise ship that catered to foreign tourists.
"I saw with my own eyes how people lived in the West", says Balagula, who was born in Orenberg, Russia in 1943. "This pushed me to move".
According to American law enforcement sources and Brighton Beach colleagues, party bosses used to slip Balagula currency, gold, valuable Russian artifacts and stolen artwork, to hawk to the tourists or fence in Europe. He denies doing anything untoward, but he does admit, "It was a good job. I got good money.
"My salary was in dollars and rubles. I traveled to Australia, France, England and Italy. The KGB gave me visas, no problem. I brought back lots of stuff: stereos, cameras. I was not middle-class. I was upper-middle-class. I had a nice apartment in Odessa, a dacha on the Black Sea". In New York, Balagula attended English classes, and worked for six months as a textile cutter for $3. 50 an hour. His fortunes improved markedly when he met Evsei Agron, a small, grandfatherly looking man known as a rukovodstvo, or someone who wields a great deal of power, comparable to a Mafia Godfather. Balagula became Agron's consigliere and financial adviser in 1980.
When it comes to questions about Marat Balagula, Brighton Beach residents are characteristically tight-lipped and suspicious. Yet one still hears legends about his Midas-like wealth: he owns a fleet of supertankers that ply the high seas; he tried to purchase an island off the coast of South Africa to set up a bank for money laundering. A mobster enviously told me that Balagula circled Manhattan on luxury yachts, holding all night drug and sex orgies, and rode in a custom stretch limo, white and immaculate, with a black liveried chauffeur and ice cold bottles of vodka.
"Marat throws around diamonds the way we throw around dollar bills", Joe Galizia, a soldier in the Genovese family, told an associate in a conversation taped by police.
As Balagula's wealth grew, so did violence in Brighton Beach. At least 15 unsolved homicides have been attributed to Balagula's turf wars with rival Russian mobsters. Many of the gangland-style slayings were brazen, broad-daylight shootings inside Brighton Beach restaurants in front of numerous witnesses.
The going price for a Mob hit in Brighton Beach is $2, 000. It is a lot of money to the hit men, who are often Chechens, Moslems from the Caucasus. "The problem is, it's now cheaper to have someone killed than to pay off a debt in Brighton Beach", says Alexandre Grant, editor of a Russian-language newspaper called Novoye Russkoye Slovo.
A few months ago, I sat down with Balagula's wife and younger daughter in a midtown Manhattan law office. Aksana, a sullen, curly haired 19-year-old optometry student, was wearing a low-cut lime green dress. As she slouched in her chair, sipping a ginger ale, she complained that the press falsely portrayed her father as the Russian Godfather.
"I love my dad very much. My father's my world to me", she said. After her parents moved from Brighton Beach to a $1. 2-million home on Long Island, she said, her father's notoriety had caused her trouble in high school.
Alexandra, Balagula's tall, elegant, blonde wife, told me charges that her husband is a mob boss are "bullshit! If somebody comes and says they don't have anything to eat, he gives them a job. This is his nature, to help people. This is why he suffers now".
She was referring to the fact that Balagula was residing in the Lewisburg federal penitentiary, situated on 1, 000 acres of rolling Pennsylvania farmland. The maximum security prison, however, is a vast stone fortress, with 30-foot-high walls and eight gun turrets bristling with automatic weapons. Balagula shares a dormitory room with 36 dope dealers, rapists and murderers. He is one of only a handful of inmates in Lewisburg convicted of a white-collar crime. He is also the only mob boss allegedly running a "family" from the facility.
When Balagula, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and bound in manacles and chains, was ushered into the smoky ground-floor visiting room he looked tired and deflated. He sat down heavily, a thick chain wrapped snugly around his soft paunch, and lit a Marlboro with yellow stained fingers. On his knuckles were Cyrillic letters that marked him as a made man in the Organizatsiya.
Convicted of credit card fraud in 1986, Balagula fled the United States three days before his sentencing, leading the Secret Service on a five-continent chase before he was apprehended in Germany two years later. He was subsequently extradited to the United States and slapped with an eight-year sentence.
This November, Balagula was sentenced to an additional 10 years for evading federal taxes on the sale of 4 million gallons of gasoline.
"This was supposed to be a haven for you", declared U. S. District Court Judge Leonard Wexler. "It turned out to be a hell for us".
Balagula, who will be eligible for parole in 1995, has refused to give authorities any information about the Russian mob's activities in America. "They want me to tell them about the Mafia, about gasoline, about hits", Balagula said glowering. "Forget it. All these charges are bullshit! All my life I like to help people. Just because a lot of people come to me for advice, everybody thinks I'm a boss. I came to America to find work, support myself, and create a future for my children.
"There's no such thing as the Russian Mafia. Two or three friends hangout together. That's a Mafia? "
Robert I. Friedman is the author of "Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel's West Bank Settlement Movement", which has recently been published by Random House. This article is an abridged version of a longer article that appeared in Vanity Fair, and is reprinted here with permission of Vanity Fair.