 Welcome back to the original gangsters podcast. I'm Jimmy Bucciolato, aka The Doctor. And I'm here on Zoom with my partner in crime, Scott Bernstein. Hey, now. And Ben, the engineers with us. And you may notice this looks a little different. Usually we're in studio, but today our man, Roberto, was unable to get us in the studio. He wasn't feeling well, so we're just going to try this from home. But we're super excited. We have a very special guest, very acclaimed guest. Author and investigative reporter, Douglas Sentry, is with us. And he is a New York Times bestselling author. He's written some great books about crime, especially books that our audience would be interested in, that we'll talk about a little later, books about El Chapo, books about the Italian mafia, books about African-American crime. And but we're especially here to talk to him about his newest book, The Last Boss of Brighton. And this is our first episode that's going to address the Russian mafia. So we're pretty excited about this. Doug, thanks for joining us. Thank you guys for having me on. Original Gangsters is a great title for a podcast, which I wish I thought of it myself. Thank you. We appreciate that. OG's taken over the world. Yeah. Before we get heavy into the book, I mean, obviously you're an acclaimed crime writer. You've written about other crime groups. What inspired you to take on this story, like specifically the story of Boris and the Russian mafia? Money. I mean, I always people ask me, where do you get your ideas? I said, it's a business deal. What happened was there's a film company out in LA, Hollywood, called Morgan Creek Entertainment. People at Ace Ventura, a whole bunch of big. And they acquired Boris' life rights in 2018-ish, when he was still out on bail for a crazy murder for hire. And they thought they'll do a limited series, a sopranos type, maybe not multi-seasons. But they said, well, everybody's looking for IP, right? Everybody's looking for, what do we base this on? So I get a call from an agent who says, do you know who Boris Neyfeld is? I said, I heard the name Brighton Beach. He was in my office a few minutes ago, and he's the scariest freaking guy I've ever seen in my life. Do you want to meet him? And I said, sure. I mean, I've met a lot of gangsters, so. I agreed to do it under the proviso that it was an honest book. And he had no approval of what the content would be. I didn't write it to be a TV series. And the more, I don't know, you've got, you know, you've got Scotsos or an author or a writer, you don't casually take on the subject and think you're going to fake your way through the details. I really had to immerse myself into this. So once I got to know Boris, he's an extremely interesting mix of charming and deadly. He's a lot of fun to hang out with. So we just started to hang out. We went to the, you know, drink some vodka, went to the bonnet to sweat it out. And I got to know his story. He's 73, now he's 74. He just wanted to tell the story. And I mean, a lot of it was unfiltered raw. I called bullshit when it was bullshit. I said, hey, Boris, I don't think that's the real version of the vet. He's been convicted three times of, well, money laundering, attempted murder in the States, had a prison stint in the, it's not really a gulag anymore, but in the Soviet times, a work camp, which was brutal. And I mean, the only thing he's not been convicted of are the four murders he's suspected of. But if anyone wants to Google Boris Neyfeld and they see all these, you know, everybody knows Russian prison tats, tell you their story, their autobiography. He's got four skulls. You figure that out. But whenever I would ask him about the skulls, he would say, I mean, God punished him. He didn't meant to the heroin trafficking and the cocaine trafficking, but yeah, I thought it was a fascinating. Once I fell into it and realized my family came from the same part of what's called white Russia before the communists took over. They got to America. His family stayed. Some were killed in the Holocaust. So I kind of felt like, well, there, but for the grace of God, go ahead. I mean, these are Russian speaking people, but these are Jewish gangsters, essentially. Almost everybody in the book is Jewish. My family are Jewish from Russia. And the kind of connection, I don't know, I just started to see a kind of sociological interest. And then I realized there was nothing really accurate written on it, not to badmouth anybody else's book, but nobody really captured that Brighton Beach underworld faithfully and accurately to how they really speak and talk. And I took that as a challenge. Now, I wrote this during the pandemic. So halfway through, I thought, what am I doing here? This is nuts. Like I can't, he kept telling me, come down with this. He was in Moscow for most of the writing of the book. I was like, I can't travel. I wanted to kind of see where he was from and all that. But yeah, I mean, it became a matter, I don't know if Scott's the same way, curiosity. I was like, there's not, there's a lot of great books about the Italian mafia, a lot. I really can't, too, too many. And this, I mean, and Gagliotti, the guy in Britain who wrote the Vori, I mean, there are books, but Boris is not that Vori Zakoni. It's not those are the thieves in law, you know, with the stars, this is different. These are the Russian Jewish speaking, or the Russian speaking Jews got out of the Soviet Union. It's a very different phenomenon. And they really existed briefly, 70s, 80s, 90s. It's really, Brighton Beach is very safe now. There's not organized crime there. So I saw it as a period piece. I also, being Jewish, I love the stories of Byerlansky, Bugsy, Siegel, Lepke, Bullculture. And I thought, wow, my grandparents came over in that wave, this wave, it's almost like once upon a time in America, but in the 80s, same thing, fresh off the boat, go to a community 40,000 strong in Brighton Beach. Everybody's stealing, hustling, cheating, figuring out their way to get out of the bottom of the barrel where they were. So I don't know, it just material felt fresh and interesting. And once I got to know Boris, I got to confess, we had a lot of fun hanging out behind that. I can speak, you know, in firsthand experience that a lot of gangsters are fun to hang around. I mean, that's why they are able to accrue power because people want to be around them. There is a magnetism, but it can be a lethal magnetism. And as a journalist, you always have to be weary of blurred lines. And I myself have been guilty or have been caught sometimes in letting those lines blur. And it's been, you know, you jump into the deep end of the ocean, you hope you can swim. Sometimes you might get nipped by a shark, hopefully you don't get eaten. You know, the first book I wrote about gangsters, I was in my 30s. And I've written about, I mean, I've been threatened by, well, Italian mob guys lawyer threatened me, but it was like, you know, we know where you live, we know where you live, we know where you live, Doug. Okay, well, you know, okay, great. But now I'm in my 50s, so I know the code. I don't want to hang out with these guys without crossing that line of, there's certain things you never do, you never humiliate them. You don't want to, you want to hang out with these guys but you don't want to owe them money. So I've been asked, I've been to a lot of precedent in the UK and I talked about the craze, you know. So it was the same, the Copacabana in New York. Yeah, you wanted to rub shoulders with the rat pack is there and the boxers and the mobsters. And in the UK, in London, it was the Kray brothers, but you know, Sonny Liston, Frank Sinatra, they don't be over there. And you want to be around this stuff because it's, you know, they're well dressed, but you know, you kind of forget how, I mean, Boris is a very lethal guy and you don't want to be on his bad side. But as long as you kind of know the code of conduct, you know the rules of the road, you can do it, but you don't want to get too close and you don't want to overstep your boundaries. And you know, that's when you get into some potentially dicey situations. And you know, I don't want to get too, too ahead of ourselves, but just for the audience, kind of give them a, maybe like a palette pleaser in terms of, you know, Boris in Brighton Beach from the, you know, the mid-70s through the new millennium, you know, they were rubbing elbows with quite a few pretty serious, maybe more well-known notorious New York criminals who you might, the audience I'm talking to, you might not have heard of Boris, but believe me, all these other guys that you have heard of, they knew who Boris was and they respected him just as much as they respected anyone in their, you know, in their orbit. Well, I won't go back as far as the Soviet times unless you want to, but he gets there in 79. By 1980, he's in Brighton Beach. The first thing he says is I got to get a 38 caliber. He just forces his way into the network of the established crews. There was one from Leningrad, which they called Praterskis, because that's the old name, St. Petersburg and then Odeskis from Odessa. There's sort of two crews at that time and he quickly established himself as a, he's a very, very intimidating guy. So he became a very feared enforcer for the established boss. But yeah, getting by the time they had this nightclub, sorry, this country club, still there in Mill Basin called El Karib and it's owned technically by a man named Dr. Morton Levine, whose nephew is Michael Cohen from Trump World fame. There's so many connections to, I mean, the guy like Boris loves Trump, but he's doing a counterfeit deal with a guy named Sheffarovsky. Sheffarovsky later changed his name to Seder. So that's Felix Seder. A lot of these guys, Ivan Kov, one of the most notorious thieves in law who was on the run and they found him hiding in Trump Tower in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. A lot of these guys were super connected both to the powerful Kozenostra families. So Gaspipe Keso, notorious guy from the Luccheses, Francesi from the Columbos. I mean, every guy in the Italian world who was in the gasoline scam, which was Francesi told me for the book and I used it as a quote. This was the biggest thing for Kozenostra, gasoline tax, since prohibition. Way bigger than drugs. We're talking a billion a year minimum in theft. So yeah, they partnered with the Italian Kozenostra but they all had a lot of connections to politics. A lot of connections. And some of these guys from Brighton Beach are back in Russia, Ukraine as oligarchs now. People ask me, what happened to the Brighton Beach mob? I said, a lot of them went back and there's a few oligarchs who started off in Brighton Beach restaurants as busboys. I'm not kidding you. There's a guy who's worth 300 million right now in Ukraine who started off in one of Boris's kind of connected restaurants as just a waiter. Now he's in his mid 30s and he's a multi-billion, sorry, multi, no, hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's a very high level of organized crime because it goes to politics and to establishment figures, how to present it? One thing that was, yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry. I was gonna say, I mean, the Russian names by themselves may not ring a bell, but a lot of the people around this orbit have been in the news lately. Yeah, yeah, that was something that was striking about your book. And if I can rewind a little bit, one thing that was striking to me, reading your book about Boris's background, predating his arrival in New York. And when you're talking about his experiences in the Soviet Union as a kind of hooligan or bandit, one thing that was really striking to me, and I can't help it, I like to get academic, that's what I do, that's my day job, was really striking to me how many similarities there were to the underclass in the Soviet Union and the underclass here in the United States, in the sense of not very few economic opportunities, discrimination, and you end up hustling, and then you get in trouble, and you go to prison, and it doesn't rehab, there's no rehabilitation, you just meet other prisoners and Boris comes out and he learns how to be an even better, not so much a hooligan, but now a gangster. And so I just saw so many parallels between what was a totalitarian system, and then here it's a free society, and I don't know, it did not make me feel good to think about that there's so many parallels there. Yeah, let me set the scene, so the word, they've appropriated the word, as far back as Zara's time, they took the Irish English word hooligan and it's pronounced hooligan, and Boris was a hooligan. Now these are street gangs in the 60s, mostly in the mid-60s, up to the 70s. Vladimir Putin proudly talks about having to be the hooligan in Leningrad. He called it his University of the Streets, and Putin was known for being about five, six, 150. They said he fought dirty, he would jump on the backs of bigger guys and start punching them in the face, clawed their hair. So this hooligan gang phenomenon, I viewed it, nobody really written this, but there were so many orphaned kids after the Great Patriotic War, which is what they call the invasion of the Soviet Union. 20 million debt, but tens of millions of kids without parents, so Boris was one of them ended up in a kind of orphanage. And then when those kids hit 15, 16, 17, 80, they a lot of them became street gang guys. Boris ends up going, like you said, to a work camp, a zona, where they basically were counting the amount of calories they needed not to starve to death or freeze to death. He would jump, by the way, everybody's heard the Russians say, your prisons are like country clubs. Well, Boris would say, no, in the Soviet zone that we got 350 calories this, the weakest tea, this little porridge, you know, this is what you needed to have not to starve to death. We got to the American prisons, it was who controls the remote control for the color TV? And are we having a chess tournament or a botchy ball, like he said, it's no comparison. But yeah, and so he spent, I said this to a British reporter the other day, I said 18 to 21, that's so formative for most young men. I mean, in Israel, 18 to 21 is when you serve in the army. 18 to 21, he spent it in a brutal, brutal prison where they really would be marched, you know, up with guards with rifles. And he said to me, I never knew a single person who came on a normal person again. And so yeah, to get to your point, once you came out with a criminal record, I mean, socialist paradise, workers' paradise, he had zero unemployment. So you had to go get a job, or you'd be, you'd go back to prison, literally for social parasite. That was a charge, social parasitism. So in order not to go back to prison, he goes, you know, you go to the iron plant and they'll say, prison, okay, well, we'll have you like clean the toilets or, you know, shovel the snow. You couldn't then become an engineer. So yes, then he told me the only thing he did in prison was learn, how do you lot not leave fingerprints? How do you not leave witnesses? How do you do this? He said, I just learned how to be a better criminal. And there was no rehabilitation. And then after he became a criminal in America, I would ask him, did you ever think of stopping? He goes, no, I became a criminal so young, I can't change. So even today, he tells me, Doug, he's not like I'm driving taxi over here. You know, I said, he's in Moscow. I said, don't tell me what you're doing. If you don't want me to notice, I don't want to know. But yeah, it becomes unrepentant, unrehabilitated criminal in part because of lack of opportunity, Scott's Jewish. I mean, people don't realize how restrictive it was for Jews in the Soviet Union. They were only small numbers were allowed in universities. There was official policies of antisemitism. So, I mean, they weren't being massacred on mass like they were by the Nazis, but it was not a happy life. So Boris got out, I was gonna say, so Boris got out in that wave that a lot of your viewers will be too young to remember, but finally the US through Scoop Jackson and Vanick, it was called the Jackson Vanick way, put economic pressure on the Soviet Union, which started in the 70s, and then it became this wave from 71, 72. The high point was 79, because if you remember, in 1980, the Soviet Union got the Olympics and they were really trying to clean up their act and the US ended a boycott of the Olympics, but Boris got out in 79 in that peak year of Soviet Jewish emigration. And they were just all trying to get out to have a halfway decent life, because they really didn't feel like they were free in the Soviet Union to be Jewish, to practice Judaism, to have legitimate economic opportunities. So, you know, the most dangerous gangster, I always say the most dangerous guy in any room is the guy with nothing to lose or very little to lose. And I mean, the Jews in the Soviet Union had very little, they had very little to lose because they were low on the totem pole, let's say. Getting back to your social economic status, as you said. I'm just gonna add that all four of my great-grandparents immigrated from Russia in the early 20th century, so I traced my roots to the same place you guys do. And some of them became a pretty infamous gangsters in Detroit. The Bernstein brothers were the founders and leaders of the Purple Gang. The Purple Gang is a scary bunch of guys, man. Yeah, so those are my great-grandfathers, first cousins and- Well, mausoleums. Russian Jews that- That's not a mausoleum. Yeah, so I can relate to a lot of this, just it happened in another part of the country. Oh, by the way, I loved, you know, Boris and I were sitting at Central Park, right before the pandemic, and there's a great building in Majestic on 72nd, famously where, you know, Frank Costello got shot in the head by Chindy Giganti and he crazed his head, but also Meyer Lansky lived up there. So I was looking, I was showing Boris, you know, Meyer Lansky had a big apartment up there. But then it always pissed me off that Jews are, you know, American organized crime buffs like, oh, you know, Meyer Lansky, the accountant on them up. I mean, go through the archives of the New York City like mugshots, and it wasn't just murder incorporated. There were so many Jewish hitmen, murderers. I mean, in the, or murder incorporated wasn't Jewish hit. Well, it was Italian, it was Italians and Jews. But what I'm saying is we were just the crazy Jews. Yeah. And a little digression here, but like when Lansky saw every, you know, we're talking a bit about Jewish gangsters in addition. Boris is a Jewish gangster to me more than he is a Belarusian, but yeah, there's a famous story that Sidney Zion, a great columnist in New York told me when Meyer Lansky met up with who played Hymen Roth in The Godfather, Strasburg. Yeah, these are probably. Yeah, yeah. And he goes, you could have showed me, I am a grandfather of, you could have showed me a little Italian, a little bit of, that I was being outsmarted by the Italians. And then he told Sidney Zion, can you imagine a Jew being killed by a WAP? I mean, we're smarter than them. I was just like, so this rivalry between the Jews and the Italians, like what did a Jewish gangster ever get whacked in Miami? So this goes back and Boris to this day, he's like, the Italians, oh, they make me laugh with their mama, Mia, they work together and they hang out in prison in MCC, Boris would do time with the Italians. But there's always been this, you know, the Jews always felt they were just as tough as the Italians. So I want to dispel this notion that the Jews were just sort of like the money counters of the mob. The purple gang were very feared, very feared guys. And Lansky, I just want to just piggyback off your point and let people know this. And Ben, you can hit the siren here. Myer Lansky had direct ties into the Bernsteins. My great aunt married Myer's uncle. My great aunt is Myer's goddaughter. So lots of family photos from back. What are the great things, when they talk about Luciano's genius in creating modern organized crime? Part of his genius was not discriminating against, like not keeping it clannish to the Sicilians and the Neapolitan. He said, we got great Jewish partners, let's work together. So Myer Lansky, though not inducted into Kosanostra was a very powerful associate. So this idea that you're on this, and the same thing happened in the 70s and 80s and 90s with the Soviet Jews and Kosanostra. They didn't take a backseat to them. They weren't the, I mean, guys like Francis, he testified and gas-fied, okay, so, oh, they were kind of afraid of us. Well, talk to Boris about that. Boris had a few sit-downs with these Italian guys where he was like, you want to go to war? And I would say, Boris, why didn't they tell the guy, like a maid guy was kind of flexing with Boris and Bensoners and saying, you want to go, Boris says, you want to go to war? I said, well, why were you so fearless? He goes, because look at the Italians. They got kids in college. They got legitimate businesses. I'm a Russian, I got nothing to lose. I barely have a life here. I've only been here. I don't even speak the language. So I love the fact that the Jews and Italians have partnered together, but I also want to stand up for my Yiddish, what we would say, our, I don't know, our Cajones would be the hoodspot, right? Exactly. That Jews were not just the financial wizards. We were some, as were the Irish, every group has produced some lethal killers. And one of the brains in Brighton Beach was named Marat Balagula. Now he was more a brainy guy. He had an economics degree from Odessa. Boris was the muscle. And he was a, he's a smart guy for the muscle, but he was, he was the muscle. If he came with his gun and if he came with his knife or whatever it was, people paid. His usual thing. I wanted to make was that just going back five minutes was that Lansky, like you say, was no bean counter. I mean, Lansky probably, if you got into his FBI records and I've seen some of them, I don't have an exact number, but they put hit the murder contracts that he put out on people. You're talking dozens, if not hundreds of people that were murdered at the behest of Meyer Lansky. So he was- Go read that, go read- Any stretch of the imagination. The most powerful labor racketeer in the history of the United States was Louis Lepke Boakhalter. The only model was- Yeah, it got the literature. Now I will not give the spoiler because you guys haven't finished, but like at the end of the book, I talk about how Lepke, who was Lepke? Well, one of his siblings was an optometrist. Yeah, there was a pharmacist. One became a famous rabbi. The difference between the Jews and the Italians is there was generally one black sheep in the family who became a gangster and quite a few others who went on to like the traditional Jewish careers in medicine or law, whatever. But Lepke personally killed people. Lepke personally, I mean, I think his first stint was like 13 or 14 years old or like shooting a cab driver who refused to pay the shakedown. So yeah, these guys, we're like any other group, we have our psychopaths, you know, we have our guys. I mean, there's a reason, I always love this when people say, oh, bugs, you know, bugsy. I mean, powerful guys in the underworld are often considered crazy. So the word bugs, bugs, we're right on it. Back in those 20s, it just meant crazy as a bed bug. A crazy killer is a guy that you cannot, you know, you cannot hand him in. He might just shoot you for looking at him wrong. So yeah, crazy, bugsy, seagull. He liked to be called Benjamin, not bugsy. He knew that was an insult. Crazy Joe Gallo. There's usually a crazy guy. Boris was probably called crazy. I don't know, in Russian, if he was actually called crazy, but he was usually that guy that anything could set him off and he would do it in a public place without consequences. Nearly slid a kid throughout in a public restaurant. I wrote about that in the book where just the kid insulted him and Boris grabbed the steak and was gonna cut the kids throughout openly. And I said, you weren't worried about witnesses? He goes, no, but I was worried because at that time I did not understand that the state of California has death penalty. Also, I did not have the millions it would take to create a new identity. I was so young in America. I did not understand all the... I said, not that it's wrong to kill a guy in public, but just you better know where it has the death penalty. You better know how long it takes to create fake passports and go on the run for 10 years. Not a guy that has a conscience about anything bad he ever did in his life, according to him at least. He says, I feel no guilt. I would live it again, but yet he got tattooed on his stomach and giant Hebrew letters. God forgive me. So there's a cognitive dissonance for you. I said, you said you regret nothing. So why was it so important to get this tattoo that said Hashem, the late name of the Lord, forgive me? Some interesting disconnects in what he says sometimes and what his actions are. So anyway, that was a huge digression from... It's actually fine because you anticipated one of my talking points and Scott and I were texting last night actually about this very point, something that was very striking to me. And Scott, I mean, we were literally texting about this last night was how you really rooted this story within the Boris's ethnic spiritual background because we talked about the Italian mafia. The Italianness, for a lack of a better term is really important to that narrative. And you see similar thing with Irish gangsters. But I agree with you, at least I think this is what you're saying. And this is what I was texting Scott last night about is that it seems like when they're talking about the purple gang or Bugsy Siegel or even the Russian mobsters, they'll say, yeah, they're Jewish, but it's just sort of like, they just happen to be Jewish, but they're just really gangsters. And I was really struck by how you had this like connective tissue. Like, no, actually the fact that they're Jewish is an important part of the story. And it's not like you're trying to be politically incorrect and say, oh, like, you know, all Jews are gangsters or something, all Italians are gangsters. That's not the point, but you don't necessarily want to detach the two things either that you're part of the same story. Well, one of the key things that I do have to say though, and I felt a little bad because when I have written about Jewish organized crime, like Israeli organized crime, I wrote a series, it ended up on like their storm or websites, you know, like these neonettes. Because even the Jews admit what great criminals they are, right? But this is the truth. And Scott probably knows this. Because life was so restrictive, so many Jews, there was a lot of black market activity. They estimate that by the 70s, when there were few true believers in the Soviet system, go look at old videos of like Brezhnev, he looked like a wax figurative. Nobody really believed. The Communist Party officials were trying to line their pockets. You had Gazak Boris with his like no-show jobs. You had all sorts of black market factories. A lot of the Jews were involved in the black market. Flash forward to the oligarchs of today, Roman Abramovich. There's many of the guys, Putin is many things, he's a gangster and is a killer, but he's also not anti-Semitic. He has a lot of Jewish friends and he made a lot of Jewish guys billionaires. A lot of them had their money in the black market and it's not rocket science. When they took this entire state economy and privatized it, somebody had to have a little bit of capital if you were going to suddenly like take over the national gas pipelines or something. Who had money? It was officially a state without private property, private enterprise. A lot of the Jews were in the black market. It was a survival strategy, but I mean, and that doesn't mean you're a violent criminal, but as Boris said to me, everybody hustled. Even his grandfather, who just was a cutter in a Carmen, would steal a little bit of fabric on the side to stitch up clothing. Everybody from the Soviet era told me that was the norm. So it was a society that normalized criminal activity. So there was a joke that's not in the book. Somebody said, yeah, in the Soviet times, we would say you're not stealing from your job. Look, what's wrong with you? Everybody pilfered a little bit on the side just because it was, I couldn't believe how bad life was. Like I would talk to, I had a really good translator around my age and he would say, Doug, in Moscow, like we got one bath a week. I said, you got to be kidding me. No, we got one bath a week and your mother would wash your clothes once a week. And I was like, huh, we didn't have deodorant. We had no idea how bad we smelled until we got to the West. But like, and there were just lines to get beef. I mean, life was crap. Life was shitty for most people. So you hustled, you did a little, if you wanted any kind of luxuries, any kind of Western things, you had to get it through illegal means. And almost everybody indulged in it and the tribute flowed upward to the highest level, which was called the nomenkotura, which were the apparatchiks, the highest level, probably several million people in the Communist Party, they were the guys getting the richest. So all that black market and stuff flowed up to the top of the food chain, which was kind of a mafia family called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Speaking of origins of organized crime. But yeah, but the Jewishness of these guys, one of the things I really liked about Boris, well, I had to find a few things I liked was when he went and got a star of David made, you know, I've got a little star of David, just for good luck. And you can't buy religious ornaments in the Soviet times. So he has one made up and nobody messed with Boris, but his friends would have Jewish faces and there's a very offensive, Zid is the Polish word for Jew. Yivre is the Russian word. And he said, if a guy ever said, Zid of sky of mortal, that means like, you have a kites mug, Boris Zid. I just go beat him straight away. Like I would have immediately, so I kind of felt like a defender of the faith, you know, like, I always respected a Jewish guy that was willing, because that's such an offensive thing that my translator said, yeah, if somebody said, Zid of sky of mortal, any Jew with any balls would have to defend themselves. Like that's just so insulting. It's like the N word plus. So the fact that Boris would fight for his friends and I kind of liked that. Yeah, protector. I mean, flip side is that, is that when you get to New York, they're shaking down the Jewish merchants more than anybody else, the diamond district, which is, but that's, I mean, the Italians, this is the black hand, most ethnic groups, once they come to the States, the easiest people to target are their own people. Right. I do all these purple gang talks, you know, for the last 15 years, I do them pretty regularly. And a lot of them are for Jewish organizations. And one of the first things I have to do in the talk is like de-romanticize and say a lot, oh, they were, they were protected, at least in terms, and I can't speak for what was going on in New York at that time, but in Detroit in the 20s and 30s, when the purple gang was at their peak and they killed probably 1,000 people in a 10-year period, 95% of those people were Jews. And the street taxes they were extorting were from Jewish businesses. They were not going into Italian neighborhoods and, you know, jumping into that, you know, into that fray and they were not preventing Italians from necessarily coming in to, it was, so they were preying on their own. Even when we tried when we were incorporated, you know, Burton Turcus, the prosecutor wrote this book, we're incorporated, that became a phrase. You know, a lot of people now say it was more or less labor racketeering hits. Most of the victims were Jews. I think the final one were Kit Twist, realist, you know, the canary that sang but couldn't fly. He, I think it was Leo Rosen. It was, you know, there was, these murders generally were, because Gleppke took over the Garmin District and the baking, all these industries that had been Jewish and essentially, you don't pay, first a Molotov cocktail, well, back then it was like acid in your face. In Boris's case, if they didn't want to pay, it was a Molotov cocktail. But it's 100% the same thing. Why? Because like the Diamond District, it's Yiddish speaking, Clanish Orthodox Jews. They're not going to go to the Cups. Very rarely they're going to go to the Cups. The Russian factories, now Russians love their smoked herring and all this stuff. So all these little factories and things, if you imagine people who came from the Soviet Union where the police were the KGB, you did not trust the police. You hated the police. They come to America. They don't trust the police. So a guy like Boris and Boris's boss, you say, I've grown, they come by and they say, you know, you want to keep your restaurant open. It's 30%, they're going to pay because they're not going to go to the Cups. And if they didn't pay, a Molotov cocktail came through the window. And if that didn't work, then something else happened. But it's just exactly the same as what happened throughout history. The Irish shook down the Irish. The Italians shook down the Italians. The Jews shook down the Jews. And rarely did they cross ethnic lines and go into the other neighborhood and shake. I mean, a Jew would not go. Boris actually was pissed off when this house of prostitution, they call them mamas, mamkas. They wanted Boris's protection. And the guy goes running to this Italian-wise guy. And that's why Boris said, you want to go to war. He goes, did you ever see a Russian come to the Italian community and try to get into an Italian dispute? This is a Russian dispute, Jewish Russian dispute. Leave it between us, me and this Sasha. And like, eh, it's never really, keep it within your own little circle, right? The neighborhoods of New York make that very clear. Like this is a Jewish neighborhood. This is an Italian neighborhood. But, you know, it's not something we should be proud of, but, you know, there's been Ken Burns documentary the last few nights about the U.S. and the Holocaust. And I have a lot of respect for Jews who fight. I do, the Israeli military, the Israeli commandos. And so these Jewish guys, they're fearless. The fact that they are willing to just take what's theirs. The downside to it is they're not nice, law-abiding American citizens. And the characteristic of every gangster I've ever met, and I know some of the made guys in the times, it's wanting it now, not having delayed gratification, feeling entitled to it. That crosses all ethnic lines, right? This sort of narcissism of, I'm gonna go take this now. I'm gonna, I deserve this. Whereas, you know, Boris's brother worked his whole life at an honest job. Boris couldn't do that. He was too impatient. Couldn't drive a taxi. He couldn't clean toilets in the doctor's office. He wanted to be the big shot. So it's all ethnic crime in the United States follows a similar pattern. But there are some distinctions with the Russians, which I'll get to after I let you guys ask them. I have a question. You remind me of something else that I just loved in your book. There are these lighter moments. It's a very serious book, but there's some lighter moments. And when you talk about Boris and his fearlessness, it's not just gangster stuff. One of the things that I just loved in the book, and I can imagine this being on like a TV show or something, sort of like Sopranos asked, but for the Russians, that he comes to the United States, he can't speak English, maybe a few words. He can't read the signs, the traffic signs. The traffic signs, yeah. But he takes a job or he comes up with a scam so that he can get his taxi license. He's driving a taxi. He has no idea where he's going. The only place he can get to is Long Island. So every person that gets to the cab, take me to Kennedy Airport. He takes him to Long Island. Take me to the Bronx. He takes him to Long Island. All he could do was follow the picture. He could not read a word of it. All he could do was follow the pictures of the airplane. And I mean, this is the thing. You could buy a taxi license. You could buy anything. You could buy a graduate. I mean, there was so much criminal activity in Brighton. You could buy a graduate degree for a few hundred dollars. It was hilarious. Yeah, and there was intentional humor. I put some things in that book that I thought, it just sounded hilarious to me. Like, you're actually trying to drive a taxi without knowing, and that lasted about a week. Yeah, in New York City. But that was the thing I was gonna make. Russians, I mean, but remember, he's from Belarus. He was going like 5,000 miles off to Siberia to do these jobs. He was living above the North Pole briefly. You know, like, or not above the North Pole, sorry, above the Arctic Circle in Norilsk, in a town built on the gulag. Because of the environment that they came from, once they got to the West, if you notice, he's in Sierra Leone. He's going to Bangkok to get heroin. They are, I hate to say this, because it kind of fits into a Jewish stereotype that Jews are kind of, we were stateless people, according to Hitler, but we're glad and global. Like, Jews will go, we travel the world. Anywhere there were Jews, I would ask them, why were you in Antwerp? Well, that's the biggest diamond quarter in the entire world. Wherever there's Jews, there's diamonds. By the way, so people understand why are Jews with diamonds. Whenever we were being, Scott and I both know this, our families were like victims of pogroms. You needed portable wealth. You couldn't have your wealth in land. We often were, so diamonds were a great way to have gold. So anywhere there were diamond merchants, great place to shake down, great way to do heists. So they were in Antwerp. Then he ends up in Sierra Leone. Well, why Sierra Leone? Well, that's where they're mining the diamonds. So everywhere, but I actually thought, there's not many ethnic groups that would just go off. Like Boris is patrolling this deep rainforest with a machine gun to make sure that the alluvial miners aren't stealing the diamonds. And I thought, you Soviet Jews are pretty freaking fearless guys. You go anywhere in the world, right? And they also, they didn't have a problem just jumping on airplanes, even when he didn't have a green card and going back to Europe to do heists, going to Israel to do a diamond heist. They just got on planes and whatever they thought there was a job. I don't know if it was the conditions of the Soviet Union that made them that fearless or that reckless, but yeah, I've seen Boris do stuff that I just thought was nuts. Like, I mean, you don't know what you're doing. Like, why would you do this? But he just launches right in. And even to this day, when I talked to him on WhatsApp, he'll say, dog, I must go tomorrow to Kazakhstan and then to Siberia. And I was like, I don't know what you're doing. Providing protection, I'm not sure what it is, but don't tell me over WhatsApp, whatever it is. I know they're listening. Yeah, that was another part that I... So I'm reading the book and he's at this tough Russian mobster. He spent time in a Soviet prison system. So this guy's a tough motherfucker. And the one time I'm like, Boris, are you insane? Is when I'm reading your book and it says, now he goes to Sierra Leone. That was the one part where I'm like, Boris, no, no. That's not how you've gone too far. And the reason it happened was because he got shot with an Uzi and he knew who did it. He wanted to kill the guy personally. Now, two very notorious killers, the Gemini twins. People have read Murder, that's a very popular book, Murder Machine. So the two of the guys who were the hit men ended up settling this dispute. And Boris was so mad, that was my revenge. I wanted to kill this guy. He knew who shot him, but so the police are pressuring him. We knew who shot you, Boris. So first Boris goes off to Miami Beach to get laid. I'm like, okay, I was just shot with an Uzi. I don't think the first thing I'm doing is going to look to like have a nice weekend in Miami. But he says, you know, and then the next thing was Marat says, better we get you out of the country until this all dies down. I've got a diamond mind in Sierra Leone. It just, yeah, it was insane. But many of the things he told me were insane. Like he gets out of the Russian zone. And now you're still until 27 required to go into the Soviet army. So he's decided just so I'm not giving away too much. Boris was a sportsman. He started off as a wrestler boxer. And then he became a rower. And if you, if anything you could do for the Soviet Union that could win you medals in the Olympics, you would then go, you know, like the Red Army hockey team or you were, it was a high status thing for the Soviets to win Olympic medals. So Boris was on a, he had the master of sports classification. He said, I figured I'm going to go on the Soviet army and I'll just compete. And you know, these were guys that wore uniforms but they didn't have to actually go to, you know, and he anyway, he does his three years and he comes out and he goes, there's no way I'm serving the fucking Red Army. But while I was in the zone, I found a book on psychology and everybody said the best article to get out was article seven B, psychopathy. So I studied up all the symptoms. And when I came before the army shrink, I put on all the symptoms of a psychopath. And I said, okay. And then he says, the guy says, the shrink, we can't let a person like you carry a gun, you're a psychopath. And then I wanted to say, of course the more probable explanation. But my editor said, you don't know probably, just say possible. I said, okay, the most possible explanation is that the psychiatrist just said, disconnect from mother and father at early age, in prison by 18, psychopathy diagnosis, no serving in army. But yeah, I mean, a lot of times he would tell me these stories and I would say, I like your spin on that, but I'm gonna kind of tell the reader what I think is going on here. Yeah, yeah, I noticed that in your book, you sort of, the way you frame it is you're trying to be fair, but you're also like, my takeaway was like, but you're also like, but then again, it just could be that you were a psychopath. Right, that's what I was about to say. You could be the fact that you are a psychopath. Well, I didn't wanna, the two books that really influenced me the most were Paleighi's Wise Guy, and then I went back before that to Peter Mouse's Velocity Papers, which very few people read anymore. But just long sections of those books, you're just allowing the guy to tell his story, partly because it's so immediate. But the other thing I realized too, is that the more I put it into the third person and I interpreted and all this, somebody told me this, no Russian guy of this level has ever really talked to a reporter at this length. So I thought coming from the horse's mouth, and these are all professionally translated right down to the idioms that Russians use. I tried to get it very faithful. So I love the way, if you go back and read the Velocity Papers, it's not read much anymore. He just, he lets Joe Velocity, because this is the first guy that a made guy has ever, no, he was a low level guy, but he thought Vito Genevieve's gonna whack him. So he says, okay. And I think Peter Mouse was a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, and got access to him. And then he realized, hey, I mean, so Velocity was sitting there writing this kind of incoherent autobiography. Peter Mouse shaped it into a narrative, but he will occasionally come in and say, Velocity's version differs from the police reports. He doesn't do much more than that, because I think, I don't know. I hate when authors pontificate or preach to you. I like it. I assume most readers are smart enough to read between the lines. And when Boris says something that sounds far-fetched or self-serving or like narcissistic spin, they'll figure it out without me saying, hey, wink, wink. But yeah, I tried, by the way, I tried quite a bit of unambiguously funny moments because you had to lighten the some, by the way, some I left out because it just sounded, I was sitting with Boris and he told me, Doug, you know, in time of Gulag. So when Boris was born, his father was in a Gulag. These were brutal places in the Far East. When Stalin died, they did away with the Gulag system. There's still our work camps, but they're not called Gulags. But he said, Doug, you know, in the time of the Gulag, if two men are going to break out, they must take one of the newest prisoners who still has some fat on him. Like a guy might be a little bit, you know, meat on his bones. I said, why? He goes, it could be 5,000 kilometers to nearest civilization. So you might have to eat him. And he tells me this with a straight face. And I thought, what a bullshit. I said, such a bull. That's the single greatest anecdote I think I've ever heard. Listen, I tell this to a guy from Russia. And I said, Boris told me this joke because that's not a joke. We used to say it. It was a saying, like if two guys break out of the Gulag, they take one of the newest guys who's not starving to death. Because, you know, I mean, the distances, just look at the map from some of those places. It really is endless tundra, endless tundra to the next civilization. So I mean, maybe at some point in the 40s, somebody did it and killed somebody. But anyway, it's an expression people use. And I was like, okay, you guys are a hardened kind of criminal that I've never heard somebody say, yeah, you break out of Clinton down in Mara. You got to take the fat guy so you can eat him on. Very, very, very, it's a different level of savagery that they grew up with, I would say, in the Soviet times. I mean, life was cheap. I mean, Stalin killed tens of millions. I mean, Hitler killed tens of millions. Stalin killed tens of millions. Life was practically worthless if you, and especially what Boris said to me after he got out of the zone is that, you know, if you can't get a normal job, I mean, then you're, at any point, once he started stealing from the state, it really was, I mean, the article was, I forgot what it was about, but it was the supreme measure of punishment. They would threaten you with the firing squad. And that's not for violent crimes. It was just having too much cash that you couldn't prove you earned. Boom, you know, summary here in front of the military court firing squad. So that's what he told me he had emigrated was like, I felt the pinch was closing in. It was a matter of a matter of months, maybe months, maybe a year before I faced the firing squad. I had a few friends. I mean, we don't have many guys facing the firing squad in the United States, you know? So that's the other thing too, is that the risks and the consequences for these guys are just a different level, you know? And one thing I want to make clear to your readers, and I hope we get this series off the ground because I said, there's always ethnic crime waves, right? There always are. I mean, a lot of people coming from Vietnam, anywhere that there's Albanians like in New York, a lot of the little Italy of, I've been living near, you know, Belmont, Arthur Avenue. A lot of that's been taken over by Albanians. Just look at them out. Albania is the poorest country in Europe. So they're hungrier than the Italians. They're more willing to do, you know, have illegal card games and risk things. But Boris and his generation were the first crime wave in American history, I think, where the guys came over violent, sometimes with extensive criminal records, but also with university degrees. Like, you say I've grown Boris's boss, had a degree from the University of London grad. Marat Balagulla had a degree from the University of Odessa in economics. And I said, I can't think of another ethnic crime wave. And these were not like white collar criminals. These guys were violent. That had a higher standard of higher education. It certainly wasn't true for the Sicilians who came over the black hand. It certainly was, Meyer Lansky and those guys, they were just escaping the stettles. So, I mean, this was a very unique and it will never happen again because it required the collapse of this vast failing nation, the Soviet Union, which educated a lot of its people, but also created endemic criminality. So, as a period piece, I think it's, and as a criminologist, I think this is a really fascinating moment in American history when a bunch of guys came over who were deadly, savage, willing to use all brute force and murder, but also had read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and understood economic theory. It's one of the reasons. Perfect story. It's a perfect story, right. And it's one of the reasons that when the gasoline tax, if you guys want to get into that at some point, that was one of the greatest rackets. The feds, like, Francesi told me, because I talked to Michael quite a bit, if people know Michael Francesi's channel, he said, Doug, I had a dealership in Long Island of Mazda and they knew he was stealing. I think he said his operation. He said, my guys, my Russians, would bring me 10 to 12 million cash weekly. Two million went to Junior Perceco, his boss, the snake. And he said, Doug, by the way, two million cash a week to your boss buys a lot of loyalty. So he just factor out, he said, so that was my operation was hundreds of millions. And I'm just one guy. So it's billions. He said the FBI came to his master dealership and said, how are you doing it, Michael? We're gonna give you a pass. Like, just, we don't understand how you're doing it. And he said, yeah, right, you're gonna give me a pass. Guys, I can put you in a new Mazda. He said, they got so mad. But for 10 years, the feds couldn't figure out. It was a series of Daisy Chains and Francaisey. I told somebody about this the other day. I said, yeah, Michael Francaisey was a very smart guy. He actually went to St. John's. But I said, he told me he had 18 offshore companies in Panama, various things. I don't know if Italian American organized crime doing that much. That was the Russian guys with him who were already thinking globally, who were thinking of all kinds of money laundering scams. But it was such a complex Daisy chain. Yeah, he took some guys who understood economics, who understood what the Soviet Jews saw very quickly to survive were chinks in institutional armor. So the Russians are still pulling scams with Medicaid, Medicare, anything they see that's a weakness in the system. That's how they got over in the Soviet Union. And they simply applied it to the US where it's kind of gratuitous, because you can make it honest living in the US. But yeah, all sorts of hustles, anything that they see that's kind of bureaucratic where something can slip between the, what they exploited in the gasoline tax was this change in the law, which required the gas to be picked. The tax was supposed to be paid once a year. So all they basically had to do is create a series of movements of cash on paper, which never happened. And when the tax man came once a year, oh, it's a non-existent company, or it's an empty office. It's not that complicated, but the way they made it look and the paper trails really were hard for the IRS and people to figure out how was it working. Yeah, we've had shameless self-promotion. We've had Michael on the show before, and he spent a little time talking about this. And he even said, mentioned the Russians, that was one of the reasons why he felt that even his own father, not just Perseco, started to turn on him was, they felt that he was getting too powerful, not only accumulating so much money, but that Michael was starting to really like hang with the Russians a lot, some tough Russian dudes. And they were afraid that Michael was gonna try and take over the family backed by the Russians. He told me he would go on Thursdays to Brighton Beach. I think it's in the book. He said, oh man, and they had this supper clubs. The Russian supper clubs, they're crazy. It's like, I said that, I called it in the book, it was a fever dream of Western op dealings as filtered through a Slavic sensibility. It's like chandeliers and velvet and like Vegas show girls, like just for a regular dinner. They just, it took it over the top. So he said, yeah, they had these huge spreads with lobster, they love their lobster and their caviar. So he'd go out there Thursday, do his networking. What, like Boris will say, no, Francisi and the, it was a guy named IRLO. It was an Italian guy that came to him. Cause there had been gas bootlegging had existed for a long time. Carlo Gambino was even involved in gasoline vouchers, scams in World War II. That existed. But what happened was Markowitz, who was a Bulgarian person, three guys came to Francisi and they said, let's explode this. So Francisi offered them the protection. Boris told me, frankly, he said, yeah, we knew how to do it. The Russians knew how to do it. But the Italians had a lot of gas stations. They had all the unions, they had the waterfront. They had a lot of connections in the police. So it was kind of a joint venture. But what the Russians, I think the Italians would have done it on a small scale and what the Soviet Jewish brain brought was just exploding it in. Like Boris said, our innovation was to take a guy from Eastern Europe and actually have him as the front man in the company. So he's a real guy. This wasn't a paper company, real guy. But then when the tax man came, give him 100 grand US, which was a fortune. Just go back to Poland, just go back. And then they could never be speeded. They'll never be caught. That was a pretty good innovation, by the way. Like let's have a real person from the Eastern block be the front man in our little business here. And when the feds come looking for you because of the weak link of any scam like that is someone's going to talk, right? That ended up happening to Michaels. Michael went away, he was offering protection to Markowitz and Markowitz was killed in his Rolls Royce in Brooklyn. Like with a famous assassination and partly because he was giving some testimony or rumors where he was talking to a grand jury. Boom, boom, boom. But yeah, what's fascinating also is that so I have this Soviet emigre educational level but then communism collapses. So then you had these waves of killers for hire. Yes, over in the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union, there were a lot of top thieves-in-law gangsters getting assassinated by snipers, trained snipers. But you also have a few cases, they're in the book of these special forces guys who had been in Chechnya. They're broke. Fly them over to Brooklyn, 150,000 to do the hit. Boom, then fly back to Russia. So there by communism fell in 1991 or sorry, the Soviet Union broke into 15 republics in 1991. You start to have a lot of killers for hire coming over. Again, perfect business plan. Bring a guy from Russia, doesn't speak English, tell him who to kill. He's on the next flight back to St. Petersburg. Who's the FBI gonna talk to? So it's very, very, very, very clever people. It's a very clever group of organized crime, very clever and not afraid, a very good FBI task force. NYPD detective first grade named Richie Fagan. He told me, Doug, he was in a unit called OSID, Organized Crime Investigation Division. He said, we work, we try to work the Russians. Problem with the Russians is they would kill your whole family. Like if they, back in the 89, 90, if they thought you were talking, it wasn't like they'd kill you in the street. They'd kill your whole family. So it was so hard to get cooperating witnesses. That broke down a bit, but early on, it was so hard for law enforcement to penetrate because you had, you had the mobster himself, like Boris, I don't give a shit. I'll go to jail for five years. I don't, it's nothing. Like I get TV and I get great meals and I get to play basketball. And yet if he talked, well, your family might get killed. So they were, they put, they posed a real threat. I quoted quite a bit in the book, 1996. The Senate had a hearing with, you know, it was Senator McCain and Cohen, the threat of Russia organized crime in the United States. They had to have Senate hearings into this because they couldn't figure out how to combat it. Because the conventional methods didn't really work with these guys. Take that for what it is. One thing that, that reminds me of, would have made it so difficult. Maybe you could comment on this, something I'm really interested in. I think Scott is too, that the sociology of organized crime is. So if like with the Italians, if you're a made guy, right? There's, there's some status there. And that, that matters in terms of underworld politics. But with the Russians, and I'm ignorant about this. So I want to see what you think. But reading your book, I think of like the thieves in law. I'm thinking of those as like the, the made guys, but, but, but it seems like things were fluid. Like you had guys like Boris and other real heavy hitters in Brighton Beach that weren't thieves in law, but they would, they would, they would work with thieves in law. And so how did, how did that work? Because it seems like the thieves in law, I don't know how to pronounce the word in Russia. Is it not? Vor, Vor is according. Yeah. They had status, but, but they weren't, but they didn't necessarily call the shots. Can you explain that? Well, okay. So going back a bit, Vor is according, it goes back before Stalinist times. Thieves are, I hate to laugh about this with somebody. Thieves in law, it sounds like your mother-in-law. Let's say they're called thieves within a code or legal live thieves. They absolutely are like made guys. You're right in that they have a code. You cannot work an honest job. You cannot serve in the Soviet army. You cannot have relatives who's in the police. You're not even supposed to get married, not supposed to sell drugs. So they have all these restrictive codes and they settle all disputes in prison. In prison, they run everything. Out in the streets of Russia, they do too. What happened was, so Yves Sagron, who became the first boss in Breivich, he was a thief in law, which means he had been inducted into this elite society, but he lost his, you're crowned because you're kind of a king. He lost his crown. I think I called that chapter the uncrowned king. Another thing you can never do in the code of the thieves in law, in their code was lose at gambling and not pay your debt. It's called being a full-fledged, a deadbeat. So he gambled in one illegal game in Leningrad and they left him the money to pay it back. And then, you know, he was addicted to gambling. He blew it again and they said, you say you gambled and you didn't pay your debt. We took away your crown. But you say, Boris told me, it didn't matter. When Yves Sey came here, the fact that he didn't have a crown, he put together a tough crew. He had a lot more power. There were two or three real thieves in law in the U.S. but they didn't have his cunning. So the rules didn't apply in the U.S. Getting back to the made guy thing doesn't exist in Russian organized crime. Because you have to view it this way. The Sicilians and the, I guess, and the Comorra, they came up with these kind of military structure. Whether it goes back to Massaria, I don't know when they really started to use these terms, soldati, capo regime, you know, going up to boss and capo and all that. But they filmed that, they formed that as a hierarchy. Boris said to me they would laugh when they call, he said, when we read these articles calling you, say the godfather. He said, we only heard about the godfather in the movies. We don't use that word. We have this word starshi, leader. And after the leader of the crew, everybody's equal. The other thing that gives them a lot of power is the guy who is powerful is the guy that's bringing in the most money. And Boris said, what they also found funny about the Italians was these families and these ranks, because if Boris wants to do a job with this guy, Monielson, or he's free to go to a job with a different crew and put together, it was like kind of job to job. It is organized in terms of some code of conduct. And what Boris told me is the thieves in law, so the Vorizakoni back in the Soviet times would settle all disputes on a criminal level. So if two guys came, and this happened quite a bit in Brighton Beach, where you almost have them as a judge. Hey, look, this happens with Boris. Boris said this guy gets sent to LA to steal paintings. An antique stealer said, I don't know, let's say they were vandal painting through like multimillion dollar paintings. Well, they break into the apartment, they leave no fingerprints, they get, bring them back and the guy says, what are you trying to pull a fast one? These are counterfeits. These aren't real. And they said, it's not my job. It's not my problem, because Zoyle means like you, you son of a bitch, it's not my problem that they were. So they bring it to you say, and you say says, well, look, you sent them on the job. They didn't know if they were real or counterfeit. You still must pay them what you promised to pay them. So that's the role of the kind of thief in law or the leader is to keep some structure so that things just don't turn into all hell, by, you know, my word versus yours. So I would call those guys criminal authorities. They're more like judges and criminal authorities. And below that, every guy's free to move. I would say it's like a bunch of amoebas, you know, amorphously moving together, coming together for a job, moving, none of that structure. It doesn't have the hierarchy of the Soviet Union's, sorry, Afikosa Nostra. And, you know, that's a weakness, but it makes it very hard for law enforcement to figure who do you take out? Because clearly when the U.S. law enforcement wants to go after the mob, they don't want an associate. They want a guy who's on the chart. They want a maid guy. And they want that maid guy to talk. And once you had, well, Sammy the Bull, but also quite a few, I mean, it's gone up to. My guy, my guy, my guy foot before Sammy the Bull. Well, who's that? 89, Sammy flipped in 90. 90, and the guy that influenced Sammy to flip, he's in the book, I can't, a little, a little Aldarco. But once you, yeah, yeah, a little Aldarco. Yeah, but then you got Joe, you joined the theater, like you've got a boss willing to talk. I mean, I don't know who a boss can give up that the defense don't already want. But yeah, I mean. Ralph Mattali was the first boss to flip. He flipped in 99, but he, that's kind of, there's like an asterisk there because he wasn't really the boss at that point. But Masino was obviously the biggest American mobster to ever flip, and that was an 0-3. So here's the other thing. There's no America in Russia or in Ukraine. So it's there, like Boris talked, Boris, his arch enemy, Monia, they all give up something to just get out of prison. And it's, I know it's not like more America because Boris went right back to Brighton Beach to be a gangster. He, it's not, they figured out the American system. They figured out, give them some information that they need. So you don't do 30 years, 40, especially if Boris was busted for heroin trafficking. He's not gonna do 30 years. So he gives up information on Monia's operation. They're just conniving, man. They're just, Boris is a really good chess player, by the way, they figured it out. They understand if nobody else is gonna sit there and do 30 years, why should I? So there's no America and you don't get killed for having talked to the feds. But in the old system, that old system that you hear about that Gallaudy's book about the voting, that's the old fashioned. Those guys are not, but having said that, so if people have seen the very famous prison tattoos it's your old story. The two stars are signs that you were inducted as a member of the thieves in law. There was a filmmaker who wants to make this documentary on my book said, you know, Doug, it's funny, because I asked Boris, so Boris, what if you put a scorpion? What if you put something on you that you didn't earn? He goes, oh, I mean, you die, you can't do that. And this guy told me, you know, about five years ago in the suburb of Moscow, they found, there were a bunch of young guys, young punks that were showing up murdered in the trunks of cars and they couldn't figure it out. And then they realized, they had put the stars on themselves just to flex and try to get into nightclubs. And the thieves in law found out that these guys had put those stars and they got boom, boom, boom. So on that level, like, you don't see a Russian with those tattoos that tell this whole story, that's not taken casually. So the Russian criminal society is very deep, but it has none of the hierarchical structure or strict codes like the, I like that about the Sicilians, but has anybody really kept it? I mean, it hasn't held up, oh, never did it didn't hold up. Guys, when I wrote books about Italian organized crime, I would talk to, I wrote this book, one of my first books, it's called Take Down. And it was about the, how the Gambino's and the Genovese ran the garbage records of New York for 50 years. Going right up, so Jimmy Brown-Faiella was the captain. But it was funny, I would talk to these law enforcement guys who specialized in mafia and they said, get over that shit about having a button. Like there's guys who have a button and are broke. Then you got associates like Angelo Ponty. There are associates who are so much more powerful than made guys. Because of the money they bring in. So like a famous story, John Gotti, one of the last commission meetings, John Gotti wanted to tell Chin and he was afraid of Chin. He told us to tell Chin and I straightened my son up and Chin says, I'm very sorry for you. Meaning you put your son on a freaking chart for the FBI. Chin's sons were involved, Esposito and the guys in the waterfront, he never had them made because they could make a lot of money. Trust me, nobody mess with them because they knew they were Chin's son. So it's the savvy behind it, right? So, you know, you figure out, it's always a cat and mouse game between organized crime and law enforcement. I think law enforcement has a little bit of an edge usually, but it really depends on how ruthless they're willing to be. What would you say? I mean, this has gone way off the, I'm very digressive, I'm sorry, but this has gone off your original. But just so people know, there is, I would actually go to, as far as to say, there is no Russian mafia. That's just a term that's like, there are Russian speaking organized crime groups. I mean, I actually wanted to say what the FBI calls it, Soviet emigrate crime. And it's largely Jewish. Well, they wanted the word Russian mob in the sometimes. I was like, that doesn't ring too, too malifluously. Soviet emigrate crime in America, sounds like a treatise for a PhD thesis. People like those words, Russian mob, but the Russian mafia as a, it's not a mafia the way that the Sicilians or the Camorra or the Nagata. Those are mafia like systems. It's Russian, Russian organized crime is much more fluid. I would want to say it's not organized because it is organized, but it's just much more fluid. Yeah, there's some great stuff in the book about the interacting with the Italians. And this comes right out of the Godfather. There's a moment in your book where I think Boris, he basically says, I like the Italians, I work with them, I eat dinner with them, whatever. But I never trusted them. It might be a big... It's my opinion, I never... Well, cause he had a guy, so he had a guy that owed the money and Boris didn't want to kill the guy. He just wanted the money paid back. Actually, he didn't know Boris money. Boris, Boris's crew, they were known for money extraction jobs. And they would take 50, so many funny lines in the book. I was coming to him and say, Boris, Kapustu owes us a million dollars. What do you want from me? We're not the Red Cross. We're gonna think half. This is not a charity operation. So if they extract the money, they get half. But yeah, so this guy came, he was Russian. He owed Boris's chase in a while over Brooklyn. He guys getting away, flying backwards in traffic. And then these two wise guys who are, I think with gas pipe. Yeah, they were with gas pipe. But gas pipe case, it was a... He was even feared among... Like he was just a serial killer. And he died of COVID during, I think doing 500 years because he broke... He had a witness protection deal, but he broke every rule of it. Just a total psychopath. And these guys come to Boris and say, don't kill him, Boris. Boris says, why would I kill him? I need the money. He goes, okay, well, we're doing the job for him. So it was a, what are they talking about? A bust out. They had him as a head of a company. They were gonna run out the insurance and do everything. Just a Russian guy to be the front of the company. Boris is waiting. He gives him the word. Okay, I'll come and get the money when you're done with him. And then one day he reads in the paper. He goes, he's found in a trunk in Manhattan Beach near Britain Beach. And he used this Russian expression. The more has done his duty, the more can go, which is from a fellow. And I mean, Russian is a very literary language. So I had to keep that in the reason. You really said the more has done his duty, the more can go. And he said, after this, I never trust Italians because they promised me I would get my money. But I'm sure the Italians don't trust Russians either because I, yeah, I'd like that to be a big thing if we do this documentary of just showing, it's this, cause it's kind of, oh, macho flexing. I'm sure neither one of them want to go to war with each other. The Italians have a more disciplined military structure. But I would say the Russians are crazier. And I mean, I think David J. Scott had pretty right in that Pine Barrens episode. Yeah. I mean, you know, this guy, this guy had been special forces in Chechnya and Paulie Walnutza goes, he'd been with the interior, interior ministry in Chechnya. And Tony's trying to tell him on a break-in phone. He goes, I guess he was in the interior decorating Czechoslovakia. And Chris says, well, the department looked like shit. Cause the department looked like shit. But I mean, I mean, that showed two wise guys who had no clue how to, they're running around in their Bruno Maile's shoes, in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. And they got a guy who's been a Chechnya special forces guy who's not afraid to freaking live in the forest and kill them. That's not inaccurate. That's not inaccurate. They got that right. But he was also accurate in showing that Boris would come to this guy and say, launder this money for me. Because Boris has told me, there's so many complex ways that the Russians launder their money. I mean, it's beyond offshore. I mean, the major Russian oil company, the second biggest oil company in Russia, Luke Oil, has I think 200 commercial stations in the Northeast US, Luke Oil. I've been told it's a money laundering front. I mean, I can't prove it, but that it's just a venture for money laundering. It's so complex how the Russians and the oligarchs have figured out how to launder their money. That I'm sure that Italians have come to them and said, you got better ways than us, figure it, show me your Panama companies. I'd like to ask Michael Franzese if I talked to him again. Where did you get all these Panama company ideas? Because I'm pretty sure you got it from Markowitz and some of these, these Soviet emigrants that had already been doing it with other. They are very, very good at scams. They are the ultimate guys with scams. And I mean, and some are basic, like pickpocketing. I mean, this just gets into the sociological stuff. I always wondered, you know, if you think about a pick pocket to us, it's like, you know, the Romani people, it's like it's so low level, like a pick pocket, right? But in the Soviet Union, there was no credit cards. There was no assets in the bank. You just had cash. So the master thieves were the guys that could figure out a way they would cut your, like you told me, his boss, Yves Agron was a writer. I said, what do you mean he's a writer? Well, he could take a coin or a, he could cut your pamphlet with a, it's called writing letters and steal your money. Well, okay, so now you bring that skill to the US, they would go, they called it Smenka, which is a quick switch. You got a diamond that's really worth $30 or $60,000. You go down to the diamond district, you have a cubic zirconium that looks exactly the same. You let the diamond dealer appraise it, look at it under the thing, and then you do this quick switch, which only a pick pocket or a magician can do. And you've kept your diamond and you've gotten $60,000 for a piece of worthless glass or whatever, zirconium. So all those hustles and schemes and scams, I don't know, I think the Russians figured it out than anybody else. Cause they were used to scamming each other in the Soviet Union, by the way, like everybody was ripping off everybody. It was just a way of doing business. No, I noticed that in your book, like even with some of the Russian guys were scamming each other. And then, and a lot of the times Boris had to be the guy who steps in and picks a side and says, okay, like you got to cut that shit out. But even the Russian gangsters were trying to scam on each other. Remember when he gets scammed at the beginning of the book, you couldn't take any money. So Boris had made maybe the equivalent, like he was an underground millionaire, but all his money was in black cash. He hadn't, you couldn't take anything with you out of the Soviet Union. So we bought a couple of small diamonds and then he gets duped into buying, his sister-in-law tells me, yeah, it's called the blue Mauritius. It really is worth millions of dollars. It's one of the rarest postage stamps in the world. So the only way foreign things would come into the Soviet Union was through Odessa. Odessa was called Mama Odessa because merchant marines used to come through there. So Boris hears this legend, you know, somebody comes and says, I've got this blue Mauritius. It is worth like hundreds of thousands of dollars once you get to Austria. Well, of course it's a counterfeit. So anyway, I looked at Boris and I was kind of like, what are you, Jack in the beanstalk? Like you traded everything, you know, you traded everything for, and his sister-in-law said, yes, there were 12 of them in the world and Boris bought the 13th, you know, like he put everything into this. But, and I was like, who would rip off Boris? But the thing was when the Soviet Jews were leaving, nobody knew communism was gonna fall. Everybody was looking for a way to hustle these people before the left, because they thought they were never gonna come back. You're never gonna see me again. So even if you were afraid of a guy like Boris, you try to rip him off. And then once he got to Brighton Beach, everybody was ripping off everybody. But as Boris proved by sticking his gun in a guy's mouth, it's like, you just have to show that you weren't the guy to get, it's called a loch, a sucker. Everybody was looking for a sucker. And it was very cutthroat. Yeah, it's a fascinating world. And I encourage our readers to check out the book. We're gonna have to start wrapping up now, even though there were about a million other things I wanted to get to. And poor Bernie didn't say much. I'm sorry, Scott, I kind of stole the, I kind of stole that. Scott, Scott, I mean, I hate for the monologue, but I mean, I kind of know what people usually want to hear about this world. So even though you may have had other questions, but I mean, the idea of what made this group special, why did they want to do this stuff? This is like, going back to kind of what you said about some of your favorite kind of writing, and I've kind of learned about it in my writing as well as doing this podcast. Sometimes you just got to shut up and get out of the way and just let the person that you're interviewing or let the person you're writing the book with just do their thing. And you did your thing for, more than we could have ever asked. And I thought that every, I mean, every ounce of what you gave the audience has value and insight. And I loved it. This episode exceeded, well exceeded my expectations in terms of what we were gonna learn and being able to chop it up with someone as really as accomplished as you are. Well, thank you guys. I mean, my feeling about it is just keep it entertaining. You know, I mean, when I've done a lot of podcasts and radio interviews, I mean, you just don't want dead air. You want to keep the information going and the storytelling going. It's a very, very interesting complex world. I encourage people to check it out. It's different from what you would expect from a typical crime book because these are, it's a bit sociological at same places where I really kind of get into, well, what was the Soviet Union? I tried not to go too heavy on that, but you know, you still got your shoot-em-ups and what you expect from a true crime book. But yeah, respect to you guys. I mean, all gangster stories to me are inherently fascinating because we, somebody asked me like, why do you think we're just attracted to these gangster books? And I just said, well, give me a for instance. Well, there's that great scene in the Sopranos where remember, Artie is sitting there and there's a guy, he's checking out the competition. He's with Tony and there's some kids sitting with a baseball hat. And he goes, this really burns my ass. Fine dining establishment. Tony goes, you're not at a ball game. Take your hat off. I will not. Tony dislikes it. Every guy wants to kind of do that, right? And then the girlfriend looks and says, hey, he goes, how you doing? You know, everybody kind of wants that moment in their life, but then the flip side is when Fran says he says to me, my Russians would bring me, okay, we're some weeks 15, some weeks five, but on average, eight to 10 million cash. Give two million to my boss. Who doesn't fantasize in our straight lives, our regular law-abiding square lives of having like 10 million to pay your college tuition for your kid, to pay off your mortgage. Like it's just this, wow, what would I do with it? It's like a lottery every week. So we fantasize about it, but we don't want to do it. Nobody wants to go to jail. So there's this inherent mystique to organize crime because I don't know, it's not like we're talking about thugs and rapists and we're talking about guys who still wear nice suits and you want to be around them. God, I wish I had a couple of Russians who want to put shopping bags at $10 million. And I'd have a green life. Yeah. I'd have the fence talking to me every week too though, so. No, I hear, I know like my students, I teach crime classes and my students, especially the female students is kind of an interesting thing. I don't know what's going on there, but they're obsessed with serial killers. They always want to talk about serial killers. And I'm always like, what's wrong with gangsters? Can't we just go back to gangsters? Like, yeah, I'm not like, obviously I studied violent crime, but I keep it within the realm of gangs and organized crime. That's not my thing. Like the serial killers, things like that. So it doesn't have to be to me. It's creepy to me. I find that, yeah, the sexual serial killers like Bondi and those guys are just, I mean, I can't turn away when I start reading about it, but it's disturbing in a different level because I really do think with these guys, it is, a lot of times it is just business. I gotta whack this guy to be like, I don't dislike him. Boris, there's a radio host in New York. I couldn't, I didn't even know this for the book. Boris was contracted, we had coffee in New Jersey and I've heard this story. Save a Kaplan, he had the biggest radio, Russian language radio show in New York, but they met because Boris was contracted to kill him by his competition. And I said recently, yeah, in the 90s, it was very common for Russian business disputes to be settled with contract murder. But anyway, he couldn't catch up with them because it was before cell phones. He'd be getting like pages by the time he got to a rescue team. So save it to Jewish guys, Boris is the hunter and he's the, and they were having coffee and we're all sitting down together. And I said, is it really too Boris? You said, when you finally met him eight years later when you got out of prison, you said, you're such a nice guy, Sieve. I couldn't have lived with by conscience if I'd killed you. Did you really say that? And he goes, yes, I said it, but also the guy who ordered contract was already dead. So who's going to pay me? Like it makes no sense. I don't dislike the guy. It's very transactional. It was so very, it was so, like we've all heard the Godfather, it's, this guy's taking a very person. This is business. It really was their great friends to this day. And I said, I can't believe, but he's, Boris also looked at me and said, Sieve is very lucky guy because several times I caught him but too many witnesses knew me and stuff. I was like, wow, that, I mean, this is the stuff that people like to me. It's like, you like to hear about this stuff because you really aren't killing for or doing something because you hate the guy. It's business. And that's a very strange phenomenon. Does settle your business disputes with a bullet to the back of the head. So. I agree. And so our listeners, if they don't already, if they aren't already reading Doug's book, you want to plug your website so they can find out. Sure. You've published some things with Ice-T, wrote a book about choppa. We want to have you back on again, but. Oh, I could talk. Tell us about it. Okay, this is, these are the two latest. One is called Split to Z. They're both about crime. One is a cautionary tale about Ice-T and his best friend who went to prison for a murder, a robbery that went bad and became a murder. They're both my, my name is up there. Spell correctly. Doublestentury.com. It's all one word. Or just Google Doublestentury. I appreciate, and I've got email. If anybody has questions that I didn't answer, they want to hit me up. They want to threaten me or whatever it may be. But I'm a Putin's people have been calling me lately though. Yeah, check out the website. All my books should be up there. And I've covered the waterfront I've written about a lot of bikers, Jamaican possies. I'm looking for another ethnic group now, but I just, you know, we're running out of ethnicities here. I don't know about you guys. Your content is like, they're rushes. There's so many. Stay out when we're done. I want to talk to you about something off there. Okay, for sure. Thank you guys. I'll inform you for something you just said about. Okay. Well, thank you guys for having me on. And yet, please check out the website. And I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram, doublestentury.com. Feel free to hit me up. And I'm open to answering questions and debating and whatever else. Yeah, well, thank you, Doug. And thanks everyone for watching and listening. Please follow us on social media as well. We have our YouTube channel up now, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Please follow us. Please spread the word. Please read Doug's books. And I'm Jimmy Bucciolato. Scott Burns, we're out.