The central idea of Russian organized crime is vory v zakone. The phrase means “thieves-in-law” and refers to the top tier of the underworld. Russian organized crime grew out of the Soviet prison system and reproduced the hierarchies of the gulags. The only law the vory observe is the “thieves’ law,” a strict code that says they will never work, never hold a legitimate job, never do what the authorities tell them to do.
To be a made man in the Italian Mafia means being accepted into a family, in a bona fide induction ceremony—we’ve all seen the movies. The path to becoming a made man in Russia is different. The vor must have been to prison, done hard time, and declared himself a thief for life. People who live like that will, as a consequence, keep going back to prison. The more times the vor goes in and out of prison, the higher his status, which is written on his skin. Icons are as important in Russian crime as in Russian religion, and one way to spot the vor is by his tattoos. The tattoos are an intricate symbolic language, inscribed with ballpoint pen ink and sewing needles, dark and rough and hittery-skittery. Crosses on the knuckles indicate the number of times a man has served time in prison. Stars on the shoulders signify authority. The real leaders who emerge from that process are the vory v zakone.
One of the first vory of stature to come to the U.S. was Vyacheslav Ivankov. From the prisons of Siberia he made his way to Brooklynski—Brighton Beach, the home base of Russian organized crime in the U.S. Spinning cycles of extortion that touched the worlds of nightlife, sports, entertainment, and investment banking, Ivankov became the first target of Kerr’s squad. In late 1995, they got him. In news footage of his perp walk—with Mike McCall at one elbow and his partner, Lester McNulty, at the other—Ivankov actually spits at the camera. The month Ivankov went on trial, the New York Daily News alleged that he put out a murder contract on both agents. All the way to sentencing, in 1997, he refused to admit any guilt for anything. “I am not in a church,” he told the judge. “I have no need to make a confession.”
The Wire
After C24 caught its first big fish, the waters were calm for a while. I and a few other new agents joined the squad—Ray’s Day Care, we called it. Fresh out of Quantico, full of piss and vinegar, we knew nothing. We were all eyes, all ears. A lot of the Russian gangsters were unrefined, but their behavior had its logic. One man arrested in New York for murder confessed that, back in Russia, he had carved up a few bodies with a blowtorch. A blowtorch is better than a saw, he explained, because it is so much cleaner. Dismember and cauterize, in one easy step.
At first, our investigative strategy was, basically, to walk around asking people, Are there any vory v zakone here? This strategy did not get us very far. Kerr taught us to take a different approach. We started asking, Who’s hurting people? Who’s ripping people off? And especially, Who’s showing off? There’s a big overlap between gangsters and people who look like gangsters—a big overlap between true vory and people who go to wiseguy nightclubs and flash a lot of money. We would get to know the bartenders at Russian mob clubs. A bartender at, say, Rasputin in Brighton Beach, might tell us, These five guys come in here every night, spending loads of money. There’s girls all over the table. We’d ask the bartender to describe those five guys in detail.
Eventually, the victim of a crime would describe a criminal who sounded like one of the five guys at Rasputin. Now we were getting somewhere. We would poke around to see what connections might exist between this person and that person, build up a trove of what’s called association evidence.
It’s great to have a tape recording of a thug threatening a victim. But that’s rare. It’s also great when you execute a search warrant and find a shoebox full of happy-snap pictures in their house. That shoebox is a gold mine of association evidence. Oh, really? You don’t know the guy? That’s funny, because here’s a picture of you and him at the beach. That can be valuable not just in building the case against your subject, but also in building your knowledge of the organized-crime networks in the area. Look, here’s that guy Leo is investigating. I didn’t know Leo’s guy knew my guy. Then I go talk to Leo, and it turns out that both of our guys went to St. Barts for Easter break.
Where is all this going? As an agent, you don’t know at first. You probably won’t know for a long while. And the starting point can seem innocuous, like that call from Felix, the furniture-store owner.
Kerr said I had to go out and interview the guy. Felix lived in a predominantly Russian part of Brooklyn, but his store was in Flatbush, a very different neighborhood. Imagine a five-foot-eleven-inch whippet, so excited: That was me. I told a salty old New York detective who had been assigned to the squad where I was going, and he said, Whoa, whoa, you can’t go out to that neighborhood by yourself. One white guy in that neighborhood in the middle of the day: victim. Two white guys together in the middle of the day: cops. Then he asked, What are you driving? Light blue Chevy Caprice, I said—classic bubble cruiser. You’re good, he said. You’re fine, you’re gonna be fine.
Kerr said, Who are you going to take with you? I rattled off the names of the most senior people on the squad. Kerr said, Let me see … He looked out his door and saw Greg Sheehy. He said, Take Sheehy.
Sheehy? Sheehy was more junior even than me. Didn’t even know the almost-nothing that I knew. But again, best possible bad luck. Sheehy proved to be a great agent and an even better friend. From that day forward we were partners. So we drove out to Flatbush. Met with Felix in his store. Raw space, wallboard, almost like a warehouse storefront, stacked to the ceiling with bargain furniture, priced to move. The clientele appeared to be all working people from the neighborhood, without a lot of money to spare. Felix told us a story.
The story was about a guy named Dimitri Gufield, who had been Felix’s partner in a different furniture store years earlier. Then Dimitri moved back to Russia for a year. When Dimitri returned, he reintroduced himself to Felix. Dimitri was a gangster now, and he expected Felix to start paying him protection money. Felix was deeply offended by this. Offended to be treated as a stooge by someone he thought was a peer, an equal. We’re the same, we’re furniture guys! Who are you to think you’re some tough gangster?
Dimitri lived in a nice colonial house out on Long Island. Had a nice family—wife, kids—and they lived what seemed to be a respectable middle-class life. But Dimitri’s dream, the thing he wanted most in life, was to be a big-time gangster. He gathered a little crew around himself, and every young punk in this crew had to go out and identify businesses to extort for protection money. Dimitri’s own focus was on furniture stores, because that was what he knew.
Krysha is the Russian word for roof. The word can be used literally or figuratively. Krysha refers to the exterior top surface of something, such as a building or a car. Or krysha can refer to a person who provides the same kind of protection as a roof. “I’ll be your krysha”—I’ll be your roof—means that I will stop things from falling on you. Since the early 1990s, most businesses in Russia have had to operate with the protection of a krysha. Even if provided by the police or other government officials, the krysha is ultimately tied to organized crime. There is no effective distinction, in Russia, between organized crime and government, so kryshas have proliferated to where they block out the sky. Everyone lives under protection. The transformation has been systemic. It cannot be attributed exclusively to the actions of any one individual. But under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, the cohabitation of crime and government became the norm. Crime is the central and most stable force in Russian society.
Dimitri pitched guys like Felix, and Felix agreed to pay right off the bat. Felix was irate, he felt humiliated, but he was susceptible because he had a family, too. Then Dimitri wanted more. He went back to Felix and said, The other owners, they look up to you. I need you to bring them together. We’ll have a meeting. Call in half a dozen of them. I’ll be there. You’ll tell them you’ve decided to start paying me, and you’ll tell them they should follow your lead and pay me also. That’s wh
en Felix called the FBI. He didn’t want to go through with this meeting. He hoped we could protect him from the protection racket.
A phone call and a story like Felix’s are uncommon. An agent does not often get tipped off to an extortion demand as it’s happening. So Sheehy and I were keyed up. We went back to Kerr’s office, wondering what we should do, and Kerr asked if Felix would wear a wire. I said, I think so—this guy seems all in.
Felix was all in. In our first meeting with him, he said, I shouldn’t have to pay, because this is America. Nobody has to pay for protection here. He looked at us, two fledgling FBI agents, and he said, about the thug who was trying to rule that neighborhood by fear and force, I don’t need him—I have you. Felix was a tax-paying, green card–holding, law-abiding citizen, and his calculus was just that simple. Hearing what he said, I experienced again what I had first felt at Quantico: a shift in the most basic sense of who I was and of my purpose in the world.
Two days later, we went back to Felix’s store, and in his little office he took off his shirt so I could put the wire on him. The recording device was a metal box about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with wire leads connected to microphones coming out of it. Putting the microphone up high on the chest catches the sound best, but on a hairy guy—and Felix was hairy as a bear—you can get a lot of scratching sounds. The device itself has to be hidden somewhere that won’t be found on a typical pat-down, so we tucked it into a pocket designed to hang in the groin area from an elastic waistband.
Felix’s street nickname, which was accurate, if not imaginative, was Big Felix. He was so large that the Velcro ends of the elastic waistband were never going to meet. He leaned over a table and I stood behind him, trying to pull the thing together—like a lady’s maid tightening the strings on a whalebone corset. Then Felix had an inspiration: We could make the waistband stick with packing tape. We wrapped it around and around him and then sent him in. I remember wondering what it was going to feel like when the tape was peeled off.
The meeting was at another furniture store. Dimitri Gufield and his number two, Alexander Kutsenko, along with a man named Mani Chulpayev, who turned out to be in many ways the brains of the gang, rolled up in tricked-out Benzes and BMWs and swaggered onto the sidewalk wearing three-quarter-length black leather jackets. Nothing subtle about this scene. Sheehy and I were staked out up the block in a car. We took a lot of pictures.
Later, when the meeting was over, Dimitri went out on the sidewalk and talked to his guys in front of Felix, and talked to Felix alone a little more. Felix was chain-smoking, gray faced, perspiring heavily. We met up with him later and went to his store. By now he was drenched, looked like he was having a heart attack, fumbling with his keys, couldn’t unlock his own front door. We got the wire off. Then Felix described what had happened. One of the older people in the meeting, Pavel, who was in his late seventies, allegedly owed Dimitri money on a separate debt, so Dimitri made Pavel sit in the middle of the group. Dimitri berated him and slapped him around as he told the rest of the furniture-store owners about the payments he wanted them to make. When a woman told Dimitri, No, she wasn’t going to pay, Dimitri started beating Pavel, as if to show, This is what’s at stake. By the end of the meeting, everyone there—except for the woman and her business partner—agreed to pay. Back outside, Dimitri told his guys, I want the woman beaten, I want her put into the hospital so she stays there for at least two weeks. That’s what Felix heard him say at the end, when he was melting in sweat. We took off the wire and listened. It was all there.
On our instructions, Felix called another meeting with Gufield, Kutsenko, and Chulpayev, and he asked them not to beat the woman. He said he would pay for her. We paid Felix, Felix paid them, and from then on it was a steady cash flow. We spent the next few months collecting as much information about the gang as we could. The first step in the collection stage of an investigation is to figure out who all the targets are. Once you know who they are, you figure out where they live, whether they’re married, what they drive, what their phone numbers are. Who else do they hang around with? What else are they doing? Who else are they extorting? Are they running drugs? Sheehy and I followed the members of the gang, doing surveillance, nights and weekends. We found a guy on the Upper East Side who hooked them up with stolen cars. We found a connection to a gun supplier in South Carolina who sold them semiautomatic weapons, including a MAC-10.
We went to a federal prosecutor, Judith Lieb, who put the whole case together under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—the RICO statute. Passed by Congress in 1970, RICO is the law that made it possible for the U.S. government to prosecute the Mafia—and the law that deters organized crime from infiltrating legitimate businesses. RICO allows the leaders of a racket to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to commit, or assisted others in committing, but did not carry out with their own hands. It is one of the most important laws enacted in the past half century, and it has global reach.
Every RICO charge has to go to the Department of Justice for approval because so much is at stake in the language. No one wants to bring a RICO case that gets challenged and risk an appeal that pulls the teeth out of the statute. The path to use this statute against Italian crime families is well trodden. But we found no preexisting language for a RICO case against a Russian-organized-crime group. Individuals had been arrested and indicted for the various predicate offenses that could have gone into a RICO case, offenses such as drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping. Apparently, the Bureau had never alleged an overall RICO conspiracy involving a Russian-organized-crime enterprise.
We put it together, Lieb charged it, and we arrested six guys right off the top—the two leaders of the crew, three guys who were “furniture,” or muscle, and the key figure in the case, Mani Chulpayev. Mani was not in New York the day we made the arrests. He was in Los Angeles. He and his partners, it turned out, were also involved in human trafficking. They would bring women from Russia and Uzbekistan to the U.S., seize their passports, and make them work as prostitutes to earn money toward getting the passports back. Mani was in Los Angeles delivering one of these women to a pair of Russian dentists who wanted their own live-in prostitute. The L.A. field office put Mani on a flight back to New York, and Ray Kerr gave us a master class in how to flip somebody.
Mani was Uzbek. He had immigrated to the U.S. as a child. His father supported the family by running food carts in downtown Manhattan. By the time of his arrest, he was five feet six of puffy hubris. In the interview room, Greg and I were not getting off jump street with him. Then Kerr walked in and sat down in his perfect dress slacks, perfect dress shirt, gold-rimmed glasses, tie perfectly knotted.
Ray started talking to Mani. He said, You don’t have to say anything, Mani. Don’t say a word. Just sit here, just listen. Listen to us. I’m gonna tell you a little bit of how this process works, what kind of system you are in now, what’s going to happen after tonight, what’s going to happen tomorrow morning, what’s going to happen to you, what you’re facing, when you’ll be able to speak to your lawyer and your family. I’m just going to talk to you a little bit—just stop me and ask me questions if you’d like—but you don’t have to say anything. Don’t feel any pressure. We’re not going to ask you any questions right now.
I could see Mani thinking, Ahhh, this is all right—I can handle this.
Kerr laid out the situation for him. Here’s how it works. You’ve been charged by complaint. This is what that means. You’re going to get to see the judge. It’s an initial appearance. Ray walked him through the process and then started slowly asking a couple of questions. And Mani, being a spectacularly arrogant person and wanting to tell of his greatness, began to talk.
But Ray interrupted, rum voiced, the perfect host: Okay, before you go any further, let me just say you should probably—you know, we’ll stay here as long as you want—we’ll stay here all night with you if you like. We’ll get you some food, we’ll get you something to dri
nk. We’d love to hear what you have to say. I’m sure you have a side of this, and we’d like to hear what that is. Before you do that, you should know that you do have the right not to speak to us.
Mani said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got that. Don’t worry about it. And he signed the consent to be interviewed without an attorney present, and proceeded to tell stories that we had never heard before. He told us about the time the crew kidnapped a guy, took him to somebody’s basement, tied him to a water heater, beat him with a tire iron, and stubbed out lit cigarettes in his ears. Told us about collection kidnappings they had been doing that we had no idea about. Guns they had bought. Stolen cars. The human trafficking.
As he spoke we could start to see how the various income streams converged. The guy on the Upper East Side who was the connection to stolen cars also had a person in the New York State Health Department who could create fraudulent Medicaid accounts. For a few hundred dollars, you could get a Medicaid card and have total access to health care. There was no operating cost for the scam. It was pure profit. We asked, Do you know who you did this for? Mani said, Yeah, I know who I did it for. It’s all in my notebooks. He had kept a handwritten ledger of who brought in how much money for which job; who owed money; who had been paid. It was like the Rosetta stone of the gang’s activity. We got the notebook and charged the gang. He laid it all out to us that night.
Olympic Dreams
When our squad shut down the Gufield-Kutsenko Brigade and another gang with a similar MO—rackets revolving around violence—it had a chilling effect. Wiseguy nightlife started powering down. White-collar insurance fraud started picking up. One gang set up medical mills all around the city, hustling for people who had been in car accidents. Patients came in to the mills and got pushed through a dozen doctor’s appointments in an hour. The mill would bill for every bogus treatment, while insurance companies got taken for a ride. To prove the case—which resulted in fourteen arrests and the closing of several clinics—we staged a car accident on paper and wired up three NYPD detectives who went undercover as patients.
The Threat Page 5
