About This Book

- Russian mobsters took advantage of the limited emigration of Soviet Jews in the 1970s to enter the United States and resume their criminal activities. - The Russian mob quickly seized control of the Russian Jewish mob in Brighton Beach and grew into a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. - Russian mobsters have a reputation for being ruthless and violent, with no regard for the unwritten rules of gangland violence. - They have infiltrated various industries and markets, including the National Hockey League, and have been involved in large-scale frauds and criminal activities. - The Russian mob has a global reach, operating in more than 50 countries and engaging in activities such as drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, and large-scale extortion.

Top Highlights

• Ironically, the first wave of Russian mobsters used the same excuse to gain entry to America. During the détente days of the early 1970s, when Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had agreed to allow the limited emigration of Soviet Jews, thousands of hard-core criminals, many of them released from Soviet Gulags by the KGB, took advantage of their nominal...
• The FBI has described Ivankov as the most powerful Russian mobster in the United States. Before coming to the U.S. in 1992, he spent many years in the Gulag for a number of gruesome crimes, including torturing his extortion victims, and he had personally ordered the killing of so many journalists, police, and civilians in Russia that a ruling counc...
• In all, thirteen journalists from the Russian Federation have been killed by the mob since the fall of communism, according to the committee. In one of the worst incidents of intimidation, Anna Zarkova, a forty-year-old award-winning crime reporter, had sulfuric acid hurled in her face in downtown Sofia in May 1998. From her hospital bed, now blind...
• Russian mobsters, in the United States, simply don’t play by the unwritten rules of the acceptable uses of gangland violence. Rarely has the Italian Mafia, for instance, inflicted harm on a member of the American media, prosecutors, or judges, fully aware of the retaliation that would likely result. The Russians, however, have no such prohibition. ...
• Though FBI boss Louis Freeh has said that Russian criminals pose an “immense” strategic threat to America, the bureau didn’t even set up a Russian organized crime squad in New York until May 1994, long after the Russian mob in America was well entrenched. It should perhaps come as no surprise that the FBI, which likewise failed to go after La Cosa ...