Exploiting the relaxation of travel restrictions in the former USSR, emigre criminals in the U.S. have begun importing con artists, extortionists and hired murderers who carry out contract crimes for small sums of money and then disappear back home, law-enforcement officials say.
The intercontinental criminal traffic is the most striking way in which a small but violent underworld of emigre criminals has evolved to take advantage of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
And although no one can know the extent of the crime, law-enforcement officials in New York and Los Angeles say they are starting to see evidence of such joint ventures in crime.
In one case last summer, a jeweler in Brooklyn, Fima Miller, was robbed and shot to death in his shop by two Russian-speaking men. The police say they believe the suspects have returned to the former Soviet Union.
In West Hollywood, Calif., in January, sheriff`s deputies found two men from former Soviet republics dismembering the bodies of two murdered emigres. In the process, the investigators say, they stumbled on a fraud ring that had been importing Russians to buy computers with bad checks.
”At the present time there is some indication that criminal elements that exist here, they will import other Russian criminals to do extortions, beating up, whatever,” said a detective in New York.
The traffic is two-way. The emigres have responded to the demise of travel restrictions and the hunger for free enterprise by returning to do business-and run swindles-in their former homelands, law-enforcement officials say.
”They go to Moscow all the time,” said one investigator, who has received reports of a Brooklyn-based emigre in Russia selling counterfeit invitations to America for $300 in hard currency or the ruble equivalent. A Russian has to have an invitation from a sponsor to go abroad.
The movement across continents has created new frustrations for the police, who already have found themselves thwarted by an insular underworld with language and customs they do not understand.
”It was hard before, but this is ridiculous,” said an investigator who has tracked emigre crime for years.
The population of this underworld is believed to be only in the hundreds, a tiny fraction of the 200,000 people from the former Soviet Union who have come to the U.S. since 1975.
But in the last few years, law-enforcement officials say, the criminals have spread out from a base in Brooklyn to cities like Boston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
Much of their activity involves get-rich-quick schemes that include small-time jewel robberies, frauds and what prosecutors called one of the largest insurance swindles in American history, a $1 billion fraud case in Los Angeles.
Russian-speaking criminals have long been involved in lucrative gasoline bootlegging, as well as counterfeiting and murder for hire.
The police say some groups have ties to the Lucchese and Colombo Mafia families and that they have picked up the lore and swagger of the mob. Among Russian-speaking emigres, the criminals are known as the organizatsiya, the organization.
Beyond the wordplay, the emigre criminals are said by law-enforcement officials to have nothing resembling the hierarchical structure of the Mafia. The criminal groups, often based on their cities of origin or ethnicity, usually range from five to 20 members but often split up or divide, just as they do in the former Soviet Union.
”The groups are probably fluid. The members might be together for a number of operations for a period of time and then they combine with other criminals,” said Eric Seidel, first deputy chief of the Brooklyn District Attorney`s organized-crime bureau.
With freer travel between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, the emigres are turning to their former countrymen for several reasons, law-enforcement officials said.
The imported criminals are content with relatively small payments of $2,000 or $3,000. The dollars can be changed on the black market at home for 300,000 rubles or more, a relative fortune in Russia. The visitors also can move quickly out of the U.S. and out of the reach of the law.
The assistant special agent in charge of the FBI office in Los Angeles, Thomas Parker, compared the importation of criminals by the emigres to the Mafia`s efforts to bring in new foot soldiers from Sicily 15 years ago.
Escaping to the former Soviet lands or to Eastern Europe is not a foolproof refuge from the law. The collapse of communism has eliminated the barriers that prevented law-enforcement cooperation.
The Russian government recently sent a representative to the U.S., seeking help in prosecuting an emigre charged with defrauding the resort city of Sochi out of 10.2 million rubles in a business deal, said a federal official.
In the insurance-fraud case a grand jury in Los Angeles indicted two Russian immigrants, their wives and eight associates.
The grand jury said $1 billion had been fraudulently billed. Michael Smushkevich, who had passports from Mexico, the Soviet Union and Israel; his brother David and the others were charged with soliciting customers by phone for what were described as free examinations at their mobile clinics.
At its peak the operation involved 500 companies, authorities said.
