Biba and the mountain of heroin: the last boss of the Russian mafia in New York. Biba and the mountain of heroin: the last boss of the Russian mafia in New York How to approach the selection criteria

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Thursday, heard in court Southern District New York has another sentence - this time for extortion.

He was given almost two years in prison, which he most likely will not serve.

Nayfeld, known by the nickname Biba, is the latest boss of the old Russian mafia that operated in the cities of the East Coast of the United States in recent decades The twentieth century, which has not yet died, has not broken with its former life or retired.

"He keeps thinking that the 80s are not over!" - a mutual friend told me with condemnation.

From the speeches of the parties it was clear that Biba was driven to a new crime by old habits and lack of money. Before he was arrested in January last year, he lived on an old-age pension of $750 a month.

Long gone are the days when Biba could afford extravagant spending. In August 2000, we met in the empty basement cafeteria of the Brooklyn Golden Gates Hotel, where a bored Russian waitress was watching television at full volume.

He told me that he bought from a gangster friend for $5,000 a "thick memoir about his entire criminal history with the intention of using it in their own memories.

He never wrote his memoirs, although his rich criminal career is crying on paper and asking for a screen.

From painters to mafia bosses

As his sworn enemy Monya Elson, nicknamed Mendel, contemptuously told me, Biba was a house painter in Gomel.

Biba, who retorted that Elson, on the other hand, was a bus driver in his home in Chisinau, does not deny his working past.

"He kept the brigades in the Union, he did not come poor," he tells me.

Arriving in America in 1979, Biba became a prominent member of the brigade of the first " godfather"Brighton Beach, former Leningrader Yevsey Agron.

FROM light hand the late American journalist Robert Friedman Biba is suspected of being involved in the murder of Agron, which he categorically denies and says that "Evsei was a man with a capital letter for me."

Like many Soviet emigrants of his conscription, Biba participated in fraudulent excise taxes on gasoline and, in connection with them, almost became a victim of competition, the instrument of which fate chose the former resident of Kiev Vladimir Reznikov, known in narrow circles as Vadik Reznik.

Reznikov, who was at that time the most effective killer of the Russian mafia and, in particular, shot the "godfather" Yevsey Agron, shot the Brooklyn gasoline company Platinum in 1986, wounding Biba in the finger and killing his friend Ilya Zeltser (Zelya). In honor of him, Biba named his son Ilya, who was born shortly after this.

On Thursday, Ilya was present at the sentencing of his father.

Like many emigrants in America, Biba traveled to Africa to mine diamonds and spent seven months there.

According to him, organized criminal groups were actively operating there, followed by the Israeli intelligence service Shin-Bet and the Soviet emigrant Shabtai Kalmanovich, who was convicted in Israel for spying for the USSR and was imprisoned along with the aforementioned Monya Elson.

The world of these people is small.

"Shabtai seduced many there," Biba told me. But he stipulated that the emigrants who came in large numbers to Africa burned out: "Because you need to know what you are doing. There the river was winding, on which they tried to mine diamonds, but one fine day everything was washed away. Downpours began, which were not taken into account. "

Mountains of heroin

In the early 1990s, Biba was arrested for leading a heroin operation from Southeast Asia into the United States.

The drug was delivered from Bangkok to Warsaw in the cathode tubes of TV sets. The emigrants who came for him from New York poured him into plastic bags with zippers, put him under the mattress in the hotel, tossing and turning in his sleep, they tamped him down, and in the morning they stuck him on his stomach and took him back to America.

“Why did you do this?” I asked. “Knowing what terms they give for this?”

"I took a kilo with delivery for 25-27 thousand (dollars)," Biba explained, "and sold for 115 thousand!"

The problem was that, sitting on a mountain of heroin, Biba could not shake off all of it - "at best, a kilo of twenty," in his words. It was not easy to establish sales in a foreign country.

Being arrested for heroin, Biba began to cooperate with the investigation, but not immediately. He told me that he held on for 13 months, but then it dawned on him that the 34 years that prosecutors promise him is too much.

"I would have served ten!" he said.

According to Biba, he only agreed to testify against Elson. “I rode Monet,” he honestly admitted, but made a reservation that “I didn’t give them anything for others.”

Experts find this unlikely. “It’s like being half pregnant,” another member of the early Russian mafia remarked to me.

Deals with investigators

The second time Biba sat down in 2008, together with the Dozortsev brothers, well-known in New York, and with his old acquaintance, born in Katowice and living in London at that moment, Russian-speaking Pole Marian Richard Kozina, aka Jerzy (Jerry) Bank, aka Ricardo Fanchini aka Richard Rothmann.

Russian gangsters in America called him Richard, Pole or Gypsy.

The arrestees were charged with a whole bunch of charges - from drug smuggling to cigarette smuggling. Biba helped himself here by agreeing to cooperate, and cooperated so well that the prosecutor's office asked the Brooklyn federal judge Charles Sifton to show him maximum leniency.

Sifton, however, gave Beebe five years in prison.

For the third time, Biba was arrested at the beginning of last year in a case of contract killing, which also involved his peer, former Kiev resident Boris Kotlyarsky, who acted as an intermediary.

Then the New York multimillionaire Anatoly Potik was added to the accused, who allegedly ordered Biba to kill his son-in-law, businessman Oleg Mitnik, who had long been engaged in divorce proceedings with Potik's daughter.

The charges of ordering the murder against Potik were quickly dropped, and now, according to court documents, he is accused of covering up the crime, for which he faces a trifling punishment.

Biba told Mitnick that he was "ordered" for $100,000, but offered to send the customer away if Mitnick paid him $25,000 more. Mitnick turned to the FBI - and further negotiations took place under the record.

Biba agreed to cooperate with the investigation, so many documents of his case are classified.

In open documents there is no mention of one episode, which was told to me by one source. Kotlyarsky allegedly turned to Biba with a request to collect multimillion-dollar debts for him in Russia, and for this he flew to Moscow for two months, where he still had bandit connections.

In May, I was present at the sentencing of Kotlyarsky, who looked very nice and received 41 months in prison.

"A Very Complicated Old Gentleman"

At 1 p.m. Thursday, bailiffs in civilian suits and black leather gloves ushered Biba into the courtroom of Manhattan federal judge Katherine Forrest.

The convict, who was wearing a blue prison suit, slippers and glasses, sat down between his defense attorney Frank Tassoni and court interpreter Nelli Alishayeva.

Since there was a reporter in the room, the judge, Tassoni's lawyer, and prosecutor Andrew Thomas spoke in allegories so as not to focus on the fact of Biba's cooperation with the investigation.

But they could not hide the fact that the prosecutors sent the judge the coveted "letter 5K1.1", in which they asked for a sharp reduction in the sentenced sentence as a reward for fruitful cooperation.

As in the case former adviser Donald Trump, ex-Muscovite Felix Sater, and before that his father Mikhail Sheferovsky, the prosecutor and defender vied with each other begged the judge to give Biba a minimum sentence.

They rested on the fact that Biba is almost 70 years old, and also noted that, having learned about his cooperation with the investigation, other criminals are unlikely to want to deal with him, and one in the field is not a warrior.

"Obviously, he's very Difficult person, - the prosecutor remarked streamlinedly, - who has been involved in crime for most of his conscious life.

The prosecutor called Biba an "old gentleman" and told the judge that his wife Angela was divorcing him. Biba, according to him, went to the crime, "because he did not know any other way out of lack of money."

He noticed that Bibe lacked not only money, but also "spirit and hope."

Then Biba spoke in Russian the last word, in which he apologized for what he had done and noted that "after seventy, I can go to another world at any moment, so I would like to die at home." He apologized again and sat down.

"Thank you, sir," the judge said.

She said that the prosecutor's "letter 5K" she had received was still not a complete indulgence.

"In my opinion, we are talking about a serious crime,” said the judge. "He led a life that allowed him to acquire a reputation for violence, which he turned into a tool for extortion ... Despite his age, he is a very dangerous person."

She then sentenced Biba to 23 months in prison. Since he has already served 18.5 months, he will be released before the end of the year. The judge gave him three years of public supervision, but took into account his age and did not oblige him to give urine for analysis, since drug addiction is unlikely.

She also did not sentence him to a fine, because she considered that he did not have the means to do so.

"And Kotlyarsky, who is not a bandit, got 41 months," I remarked to a New Yorker who knew both of them firsthand.

"So he did not cooperate," he explained.