MIAMI -- In the back room at Porky's, a pink-neon strip club on the
fringes of Miami International Airport, more than the usual adult
entertainment was on offer.
Charges filed by federal investigators in Miami last month
allege that the club's owner, Ludwig Fainberg, otherwise known as
"Tarzan," was the middleman for an international
drug-and-arms-smuggling conspiracy.
During a three-year investigation led by the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), agents uncovered an alleged trafficking
network that shipped cocaine from Ecuador to St. Petersburg (the
Russian one), packed in cargoes of iced shrimp.
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The organizers, who met in a back room at Porky's, also bought
Russian helicopters and smuggled cigarettes, alcohol and
counterfeit money, as well as providing prostitutes for Russian mobsters.
Their most bizarre project was an alleged plot to buy a Russian
navy submarine to sneak South American cocaine up the west coast of
the United States to San Francisco.
What the case shows, the agents say, is that Russian Mafiosi --
police like to call them "Redfellas" -- have quietly established a
beachhead in south Florida, already home to organized crime gangs
from Jamaica, Colombia and Italy.
The invasion is likely to continue. Since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the tentacles of the home-grown Russian Mafia have
reached well beyond its borders to form alliances with other
organized-crime groups.
When the FBI opened an office in Moscow three years ago, the
FBI's director, Louis Freeh, estimated that there were 5,600
organized crime groups, with 100,000 active members, in the former
Soviet Union.
By official estimates, some 300 Soviet gangs had moved abroad,
and at least 24 of them had turned up in various American cities.
Kenneth Rijock, a Miami-based financial crimes consultant, has
been monitoring Russian organized crime for some time.
"They've got more money than God," Rijock said, "and they are
more ruthless than the 1920's Prohibition gangsters."
Apart from drug-running, prostitution and extortion, Russian
gangs in America are suspected of involvement in illegal arms
sales, money-laundering and highly sophisticated bank and financial frauds.
Many of them started work in New York, where they blended easily
with all the other immigrants. But in recent years they have moved
south to Florida for its warmth and its business potential,
including ties with Latin American drug-traffickers.
It is no secret that wealthy new Russian capitalists are
flocking to Miami, where they buy beachfront condominiums by the
dozen and invest in local businesses.
In Sunny Isles, an area of North Miami Beach that some Russians
now call Little Moscow, local condominium developers have taken to
printing their prospectuses in Russian.
Some property firms and immigration lawyers travel frequently to
visit clients in Moscow, and Aeroflot now has two weekly flights
from Miami. Russian charter flights go directly to the Bahamas.
Most of these Russians are hard-working and law-abiding. Indeed,
some of them say indignantly that the charges against Fainberg are
federal fantasy.
They complain that Miami's Russians are fast becoming the
targets of discrimination. New arrivals have been turned away from
local branches of some big national banks.
Another Russian with problems is Sergei Skobeltsyn, a
26-year-old multimillionaire from the autonomous republic of
Tatarstan, east of Moscow.
Skobeltsyn recently put down $8 million to buy three south
Florida strip clubs. He says he made his fortune back home in
natural gas, but Florida officials want to see evidence of his
income before he is granted a license to operate the clubs.
As for Ludwig "Tarzan" Fainberg, he emigrated from the Soviet
Union to Israel in the early 1980s. He then moved to New York,
where he kept a video-rental shop in Brooklyn's Little Odessa
district before heading for Miami and the sun.
Agents claim that Fainberg has ties to several Russian criminals,
including Vyacheslav Ivankov, an alleged Mafia "godfather" in the United
States, who was convicted last year on extortion charges.
Another of Fainberg's associates, Israeli-born Yakov Litvak, is
a former manager at Porky's. He went to prison two years ago for
masterminding an ingenious scam involving phantom petroleum
companies which sold black-market gasoline and diesel fuel in
Florida and Georgia (the American one), thereby dodging an
estimated $1.3 million in taxes.
Fainberg's lawyer dismisses the charges against his client as
"ludicrous" -- especially the idea that traffickers would seriously
consider smuggling drugs in a submarine.
But it would not be the first time traffickers have expressed
interest in Russian military hardware. Corruption is so bad in the
cash-strapped Russian armed forces that military equipment vanishes
into the black market all the time, experts say.
In the Fainberg case, DEA agents claim that agreement had
already been reached on a $5.5 million price tag for the submarine,
complete with a 62-man crew.