The Underworld Podcast - The Car Bomb Wars of the Israeli Mafias

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

Car bombs, shoulder-fired missiles, grenades and hits across 5 continents; the Israeli mafias that rose up in the 90's and fought each other for control of gambling and drug rackets for the following decades are among the most sophisticated in the world. At one point, they controlled 80% of the world's global ecstasy trade and partnered with street gangs in Los Angeles to distribute. The Alperons, Abergils, Rosensteins, and Abutbuls had no problem going after judges, politicians and cops. And when they weren't busy killing each other over bottle recycling rackets in Israel, they established global networks of drugs and gambling across Europe, Asia, and America. Danny is joined by Israeli crime reporter Ben Hartman in this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric. church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. U.N., must be 21 to enter. Yoni Al-Zam was only 22 years old, but he was already active in the most feared Israeli mafia operating in the country, also in Europe and America, the Abragio crime family. Unfortunately, his future wasn't looking too bright. He had just been convicted of the murder of another gangland figure in 2003, a crime boss that was allied with Zav Rosenstein, the main rival of his bosses.

Al-Zam was staring down a life sentence, and he made the unfortunate decision to turn state's witness against one of the Abrageal associates for the same murder he had already been convicted of. The Abrageals weren't exactly lightweights. They weren't scared to kill witnesses, and Israeli mafia figures have a long history of targeting anyone who got in their way.

Police, mayors, judges, prosecutors, it didn't matter. Alzum, though, was said to testify not only against the associate, but against high-up figures in the Abrazil family, including some of the four brothers who ran it. It was December of 2005, and figures in the Israeli underworld had been fighting a costly war that shocked the country. Bodies were dropping all over as rival families made-in-broke alliances, trying to gain control of various gambling, extortion, drug, and waste-managing rackets.

The families were no joke and punched well above their weight. They controlled the global ecstasy trade, were active on. five continents and killed people all over the world, sometimes using high-tech car bombs. One had even aligned with the Latino street gang in Los Angeles to take on La M.A., the Mexican mafia. It's like something out of a grand theft auto plot line, and law enforcement couldn't really do anything about it at the moment. The rival families were vicious, but they were also sophisticated and smart, especially the Abra Giles, led by Yitzhak, aka Big Friend, which is just like a really solid mafia nickname. Possibly one of the great

criminal prodigies to ever operate. They had slid under the radar for a bit, but a 2003 bombing in December outside a money change booth in the cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv that killed three civilians, but failed to take out Zev Rosenstein, the other top mafioso in the country, made for a lot of pissed off news reports and pissed off statements from politicians, as the government decided it was time to do something about all the mafia guys just running wild. Rosenstein actually survived the bombing, earning him the name the wolf with the seven lives. Zev actually means wolf in Hebrew for all the assassination attempts against him that failed. Al-Zam's testimony was going to help strike a major blow against the aborigines.

He was set to testify in a few hours when he started coughing and wheezing in his cell. Something was clearly wrong, and he was taken to a hospital nearby. Right before midnight on the same day, he was pronounced dead. Cyanide was eventually found to be the culprit, and somehow, despite being isolated in a maximum security prison, he had been poisoned. It was a clear message from the Israeli Mafia dons. They were the ones in control. Boom.

Cold open. That's how we're doing it. Welcome to another episode of the Underworld podcast. I'm your host, Danny Gold. Sean is sitting this one out. And I'm joined here by Ben Hartman, who has covered organized crime in Israel for years to tell the story of the Israeli mafia wars

of the last few decades. And let me tell you, these Israeli mafia guys are wild. So welcome, Ben. I know you cover this for a few years. Tell us a bit about it and kind of what you're doing now. So these days I write about cannabis for a living, full-time marijuana reporter, I guess you put it, cannabis research, science, legislation, and culture for a website called canigma.com. And we also have a podcast, the Cannabis Enigabba podcast. But prior to doing this, the world of cannabis, which is a little bit of a nicer world, I covered organized crime

and crime in general at the Jerusalem Post for about about seven years. And then before that, I was a reporter, I was a editor and reporter at Harz.com in English for about three years. The Israeli world of crime, prior to me being a journalist, being a reporter and covering, it was always pretty fascinating. You know, in the same way, obviously, that you're interested in organized crime and that people who listen to this are and watch movies about crime are. But it's also beyond all that kind of lurid aspect of it, I think organized crime in Israel, the story of it here and how it plays out, it says a tremendous amount of out this country and the story of the country and how these people got into that life and how we got where he are. So I'm sure we'll get more into that.

But it's great to be on here. Yeah, thanks for coming, man. Thanks for doing this. Half of the research I used, I think, was written by you. So it made sense to have you come on. Yeah. Good call. Yeah, we're going to talk a bit about the luridness too, because that to me,

I mean, the level of sophistication, the car bombs, the viciousness, the global reach, the insane rivalries and the just absurd characters involved. Like, it kind of puts the New York Mafia Wars of the 80s to shame. Like, the more research I did, the more shocked I was. It's funny about that in Israel with organized crime because on the one hand, Israel is a country with crime and violence and murder and all that. It's nowhere near places in the States, certainly not, for instance, your episode about St. Louis. There's no comparison in terms of the public safety and the murder rate and gun violence, certainly.

But at the same time, the methods that you see with organized crime here, you often don't see in the States. You know, guys using shoulder-fired missiles and remote-controlled bombs and stuff like that, you're not going to see that in St. Louis or in other places in America that have other crime problems that you don't have here. So it's this kind of strange sort of dichotomy you have here with Israeli organized crime and Israeli, you know, low-lives in general. Yeah, it's something else. I mean, the stories, we're going to tell some of these stories. We're going to get into the various families and the wars that have been fought. And like I said, we're using a lot of Ben's work here, but there's been some great work in the times of Israel, in Tablet from Asaf Gore and Douglas Century and a few others. And this is going to be a great episode because I think both Jews and anti-Semites are going to love it, you know? Let me get this out the way real quick, too. We're not here to really talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You're in the wrong place. That's kind of not what we do. And I just, you know, I reported in Israel during the Gaza war and stuff in 2014, 2015, everyone's going to hate you no matter what you do. So I think it's best, just not to care. But if you want to be angry about that, go ahead.

But we're just not really going to talk about it. Definitely. I would say for anybody who is so inclined, who does care about the conflict, perhaps something optimistic here, the world of crime in Israel and Palestine is one of the places where you see the best cooperation and coexistence between Jews and Arabs. There is obviously, you know, they feud from time to time, but, you know, there's beef and there's bloodshed and whatnot. But crime and the pursuit of money, that's somewhere where Jews and Arabs can definitely work together and live together. So through organized crime, we're working on coexistence.

So there you go. And it's also, you know, and it's not because, you know, these guys don't care about religion or anything like that. A lot of these guys are, you know, they may be right wing, they may be involved and, you know, they may be religious and all that. but it's just not something that's going to get in the way of their business. It's just, it's a beautiful thing when, when a Jewish guy and an Arab can unite and kill their enemies over controlling, uh, recycling bins, you know? Like, it's, it's what we really hope to see in the future of the world is people like that uniting, uh, over their differences. Maybe not murdering people over, over a bottle recycling, but, you know, it is what it is.

Yeah. And if you can do it while helping the environment, I think that's, that's also, uh, that's, also, yeah, why not? Little sign-out, too, there's been a lot of talks about the Russian oligarch mafiosos that have moved through Israel. We actually talked about it a bit in the Brighton Beach episode. When the Soviet Union fell and Russia opened up, you had a lot of these Russian mafiosos, some Jewish, some kind of faking it, who would later try to get a foothold in Israel and use it as a big place to transfer and launder money.

They mixed in some human trafficking, but for the most part, they didn't get too involved in Israel itself. apparently, according to Misha Glenni's McMafia, a fantastic book we've mentioned a number of times, they also struck a deal to not let things get messy in Israel. I think it's one of the funny things writing about organized crime in Israel over the years. I would say whenever I talk to an American reader and that that's what I do or that's what I write about, probably nine times out of ten, the first thing they would say was,

oh, is it the Russians? The assumption was that there's mafia in Israel. It must be the Russians. And that was always a really curious thing to me because they're not the ones who run it. They're not the ones who are in charge of that. And I think if somebody here's organized crime and they don't, you know, they assume it must not be the Jews here who's doing it. Then I think it just, you know, it says more about them than the country. It says, well, it says you must be new here.

You must not have been here for long if you think it's not our guys doing this. Right. We're going to talk about what I guess you would call the homegrown Israeli Mafias. And they definitely had no such sort of peace deal. going on. In a WikiLeaks cable from May 2009, the U.S. Ambassador Israel wrote a message titled Israel, the promised land of organized crime. And this is a quote, five or six families have traditionally controlled organized crime in Israel. The Abrajil, the Abu Ghoutvo, the Al-Paron, and Rosenstein families are among the best known. But recent arrests and assassinations have created

a vacuum at the top. And I believe that newcomers like Molner, Shirazi, Cohen, and Domrani are closing the gap. So there's five or six of the main. families in Israel just mentioned here. And they're definitely not like the five families of La Costa Nostra, who at times had these sort of unity things and peace deals. In true Israeli family fashion, they all fight with each other. They all make alliances. They all fight their allies. And it's a bit hard to keep track, but I think we're going to start with the Alperones, if only because of their reality show, which sounds either made up or like it was on Quibi, RIPP Quibi, you were too pure for this world. Yeah, it was a few years back, it was a while ago, obviously, he's been

dad for 12 years, but it was called Pambachim, which in Hebrew was once in life or once in a life. And it was one of these sorts of shows where you'd have different celebrities, a different celebrity personality meeting with other different celebrities. So there was a model living with them at their home in Renana, which is a very kind of like nerdy, perfect little Israeli middle class suburb where kind of like dads who work in high tech live. And it's a very nice place to grow up. So it's not the type of place they usually associate with. organized crime. But that just kind of speaks to how much of a household name he was in Israel.

And today, also, if we could give her a shout out here, his widow, O'Houva Al-Paron, is something of a Instagram influencer these days. She does a lot of cooking stuff on, she's pretty well-known. So if you want to check it out, a lot of desserts and foods, kind of like, you know, Moroccan stuff cooking, but also a lot of baked goods. So check out of Huva Al-Paron on Instagram. Why not? She's been through a lot.

She's been through her life. She's not responsible for the things her husband did, even if she may have benefited from it, you know. Let's get her to add the episode, you know, let's get her to do some Patreon stuff. By the way, there's so much here that I think for the first time we're actually going to do a special Patreon episode with some of the other gangsters that we're not going to have time to sort of mix into these four main families that we're talking about. But yeah, the TV show, Auparon, like it wasn't, you know, America had growing up Gotti, but it wasn't like that because Aupon, was still an active mafioso while the show was going on. And the model has this

quote, you know, from afterwards where she says, quote, you see the Sopranos and it sounds sexy that some mafioso comes and charms you into the sunset. But in reality, it is the opposite. It is very intimidating, scary, not kosher. She said that to Yudiot Akrono,

one of the local Israeli publications. Right. Well, I would say that most people who are in Israeli organized crime, I would say most of them probably do keep kosher. sure, but beyond that. No, they do. It's the type of these guys, you know, they very often, more often not come from pretty traditional backgrounds.

So, you know, they might kill you, but they're not going to mix milk and meat. But I would say, even though these guys tend to be charming and have, you know, strong personalities in that way, like guys who are criminals very often do, as part of the psychology of that personality, I think what she said does hit on a point here. You know, the Sicilian mob and other mobs in the U.S. also aren't, you know, actually glamorous, but with the Israeli mob, it's definitely true. They don't have the same formalities and rituals

and getting made in a ceremony with a sword and a dove and all that type of stuff you've seen in movies. They also, their aesthetic is much more, you know, Hugo Boss T-shirts and La Cossed and bad sneakers. So it's not a lot of, you know, three-piece suits and, you know, $1,000 shoes and whatnot. It's a lot more informal, and a lot of these guys kind of look like scrubs,

and you wouldn't maybe what you would picture like a mafioso maybe coming from the states, let's say. That doesn't mean they won't kill you all the same that they're not sophisticated. They're very sophisticated a lot of these dudes. But, you know, like Israelis in general, with the informality, a lot of, you know, Israelis aren't going to put on a suit if it's not at their bar mitzvah.

So, you know, don't let that fool you, you know. I was going to say you go boss T-shirts and bad sneakers sounds like most Israelis I know, no disrespect. But yeah, Alperone, yeah, he had already developed a rep for being super accessible at the press, and hence the TV show. They actually called him Israel's Tony Soprano. So Yaakov Alperon is the boss, was the boss. He was born in a suburb of Tel Aviv in 1955 to parents who immigrated from Egypt.

And this is actually something you'll see a lot of with Israeli mafiosos that they're of North African descent. After 1948, when Israel was created, you had an exodus of Jews and countries. from countries like Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, who were sort of forced to flee their homelands. Israel was generally a very poor country, but these Jews were among the most marginalized and downtrodden in the country after they came. So they're a bit overrepresented in the crime families, because as we've covered routinely in the past,

poverty and marginalization lead to crime. Israel had this post-1960s development boom, and people like Yaakov-Operone, they were left in the dark. Yeah, so I think that's one of the mentioned earlier about when looking at crime, it kind of tells the story of the country. And I think that's certainly the case in Israel. It looks a lot. As you mentioned, it hits upon the racial and ethnic divisions in the country, how the country was founded in those years afterwards and the ways of immigration and what happened and where those people were put and where they were put to live and the types of jobs and opportunities that were open to them. And it's kind of organized crime in Israel, the story of and the history of it kind of hits upon the question of in Israel, you know,

Who gets a seat at the table and who needs to kick the door in and grab a seat or just burn the house down? So that's when you look at a lot of these type of guys in the stories and how they came up. They were in tough spots and a lot of these guys were going to do what they had to eat. It's also the fact that with those communities, a lot of those guys came from, especially back then, but also now to a certain extent. And especially in Arab communities with Arab crime, a lot of this has to do with places where the state is not, at its most functional, you know, neighborhoods that are neglected, where the municipal authorities, where the social services, where if somebody gets shot, are the cops going to come? And if they do come, are they going to either be, you know, under policing or over policing?

And so organized crime in Israel and the type of guys who have typically been at the forefront of it and also in the, you know, rank and file, their ethnic background and the stories of their families and also the stories of their communities and how crime was able to flourish in them, it has a great deal to do with the story of this country as a whole. I think that's something you see a lot in criminal groups that rise up, right? Is a lot of them tend to do so

in places where the state is not exactly at their most potent or at their most involved. It's something we saw in immigrant communities in the U.S., right? The Italians, the Eastern European Jews at the time, even in the 80s and 90s, the Russians, we talk about that a lot.

It's not just the Israel or what that happens, it happens all over the world. It's a pretty well-worn phenomenon. Yeah, and where there's a vacuum with the state, it's going to get filled by organized crime. And if you have, you know, if somebody gets shot in broad daylight in the middle of Central Tel Aviv, it's going to be a big story. If they get shot in broad daylight in the middle of Jaljulia, it's probably not. So all these dynamics add up and help create this situation. According to the LA Times, this is a quote from an article they wrote too. Organized crime blossomed here in the 1980s and 1990s, while security forces were focused on

Palestinian terrorist threats. By the time Israeli authorities truly began to grapple with the problem a few years ago, they faced a sophisticated global network of gambling, prostitution, and drug trafficking, with Los Angeles as one of its hubs. There was an assassination in Encino, alliances with violent LA gangs, and the establishment of an Israeli-directed drug pipeline from Europe straight to Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Alperon and his brothers started off. They were boxers, and they soon started demanding protection money extorting people that whole sort of, you know, commonplace origin story. Soon they were fighting for control of gambling rackets, extortion rackets, everything from sidewalk flower vendors to bottle recycling,

all sorts of rackets. There's rackets all over the place. And the bottling recycling one is interesting. Israel was actually a pretty socialist country and started to privatize in recent decades. And much like the sort of Russian oligarch grab in the 80s and 90s, once Israel started privatizing things like the bottle recycling stuff, you know, the kind of power. powerful bully types were the ones who took over. Ari Aalperon, who was one of Yaakov's brothers, he sees the government privatizing the bottle recycling, so he forms a company called the flaming bottle. And this is in the late 1990s, and of course, he's not going to play nice with the competition.

So he basically uses extortion and that sort of bullying method. Bullying sounds like such a weak word for this. You know what I mean. He fucking barges in there and he takes over. And now the other mob bosses, they see this. Yeah, yeah. It was definitely, definitely, there should have been, like, he wasn't just yelling at people on Twitter. You know what I'm saying?

Like, he was going in there and he was, he was just mean about it, you know? And the other mob bosses see this, they see the easy money, and that's when one of the Israeli crime wars kickoff. And I just, I love the waste management aspect of organized crime, like the simplest industries, just being mobbed up, not even controlling unions, literally controlling, like, recycled aluminum cans, becomes this mafioso business that's fought over. Yeah, look, it's, I mean, it sounds funny when you picture it just as like recycling, but there's a ton of money in it. And also it's organized crime is well situated to do that because, you know, you can deploy a whole lot of guys to go around to a whole lot of restaurants and other types of places and they will give them their bottles quite quickly, you know? And so you're going to have guys who are able to collect those quite effectively. I think the bottle thing on a personal level, it's funny. Obviously, when you read about it, to me it was always kind of ironic or a little bit funny because,

not to generalize, but I will. Israelis tend to be, you know, there's kind of a problem with littering here. If you ever been to a park in Israel after a holiday, when people are barbecuing and all that, I mean, it's trash. So really, for the most part, the only people who are really taking recycling seriously in Israel is organized crime.

And for good reason. So back in 2007, they were working to pass a law to change the bottle deposit return to where would also apply to the big bottles of Coke. the 1.5 liter soft drinks, and this was to help poor families who drink a lot of coke and all that. A lot of people called it the Alperon law as a nickname, because obviously they were the ones to profit in a huge way. But regardless, even if they're looking out for their own interests, I think we definitely got to give it up for the Israeli underworld for being, arguably the country's greatest environmentalist, even if only in one very specific way.

But yeah, it's a funny story. It's definitely, it's always Earth Day with the Alperones, every day's Earth Day, you know? I mean, these guys, these guys are woke, you know, they're, they're uniting with Arab families, they're caring about the environment, like they are for, you know, they're just really, they're progressive. Yeah, ahead of their time. Ahead of their time. Yaakov Alperon had very little online clout, though.

I mean, he wasn't, he wasn't really on, you know, he wasn't, he wasn't there yet. Yeah. So they fought this bottle recycling war. all these wars start kicking off in the late 90s and 2000s, and it seems as if every family at one time or another was fighting a war with every other family. The Alperones were originally aligned with the Aborigils. They fought with the Rosenstein family and the Abu Bulls

and Amir Molnar who will talk about soon. Though soon enough, their alignment with Abrajil's turned sour. And I know this sounds like a lot, and that's because it really, really is, but we're going to get into all of it as much as we can. All you need to know right now is that the Alperones had a habit of escaping assassination attempts. That's the other thing too. So many of these guys escaped multiple attempts on them.

Seven, five, nine, not just the Alperones, but all the other bosses, too. By some reports, Yaakov had escaped three. Others had it at nine, but I think Ben, you said that was his brother who escaped nine attempts. Right. So Nisim Alperon was pretty famous for that. He survived nine attempts, if not more. Two of these are covered. I was at the scene, obviously afterwards, not involved in the planning, Nisim, if you're out there. one of them was a bomb that blew up on his car in his car on Menachem Began in one of the main streets in Tel Aviv and the other very close to the courthouse. The other was a bomb in his Jeep in Ramat Gan on Rashi Street. And he's one of those mob guys who, whatever his actual status in the underworld was or how big he was or not,

he definitely photographed well and was on TV a lot because he partly he had a voice like one of those dudes who has their larynx taken out and just speaks through a voice box. He's like, you know, very, like, you never forget this dude's voice. And he also looked, he very much looked at part of a middle-aged Israeli guy who may or may not do extortion work. He also, their family really likes horses. That's the thing that's well known about them. He made actually the international press, because he was in the Daily Beast, a colleague, a friend of mine, Nary Zilber, wrote about him because he, some dudes in the West Bank's and Palestinians stole one of his horses, a horse named Tony. assuming that's after Tony Soprano, not Tony Bennett, but I can't confirm.

Tony loved horses, too? Everyone knows. Yeah, he definitely did. So basically, it got stolen, taken to the West Bank. He made some phone calls, whatever, made some connections, and they were able to go out there in the middle of the night and get the horseback, which was a bizarre story. But it's also, again, it's that cooperation. And, you know, these guys are, they're looking out for their bottom line and making money and helping each other out. And also, that's kind of a cliche thing to a certain extent. like, you know, you get your car stolen, you can make a few phone calls, and somebody can find where it is.

In this case, it was a horse. It was Tony. Where is Daredevil? I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel television's Daredevil born again. So what's next? I'll be liberated. We're to take this city back.

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Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream. One story goes that there was a hit team after one of the Alperon family members at one point, but they ended up getting into a shootout with police because they were under surveillance. And I'm actually not sure if the shit had happened because the AP has a similar story about a 2004 hit that was supposedly targeting the Alperones that with these hitmen who had been flown in from Belarus. And this is a quote,

in the biggest catch, detectives last month arrested four men from Belarus and 14 Israelis on suspicions they tried to kill several mob bosses. In the apartment of the suspected hitman in a Tel Aviv suburb, officers found pistols, silencers, assault rifles, anti-tank missiles, explosives, night vision equipment, and hand grenades. They also seized disguises and makeup. Yeah, that's what, I mean, obviously that's a bit, um, that all seems like a lot of hearsay, you know what I mean? Um, yeah, definitely that would, that would seem to implicate them. One of the really strange things about that case, for those who are outside of the genre, one of the guys who was also being targeted was a man named Shoney Gavrieli, who was known as an organized crime figure.

In Israel, his brother was involved in casinos in Turkey. More notably, Shoni was the father of a woman named Inbal, Imbal Gavrieli, who served in the Knesset in the Israeli parliament on the Likud list. It was one of those kind of strange stories where she, was the last person on the list and it's always you know the last person just somehow gets in she magically made it onto the list in the le coup primaries because of uh family connections as it was described at the time um there was a good case a few years a while after that where she used her parliamentary immunity to stop police from uh searching her her uh from doing a search warrant on her dad but like at who valparone in some extent she also was on israeli survivor she was also on the

Israeli version of Kitchen Nightmares. She was also on another reality show. Basically, if you know Israel, there's, they're varying reality TV shows. There's also, it's a small country, and there's only about 20 actors, and each one of them is on about six different shows at one time, like all the same actors. So

she, like with reality stars, in Balgavrielli, this kind of alleged, you know, organized crime child, heiress, became a parliamentary and then a reality TV star. But her, you know, where that day got a little bit famous with some of the

the wider public was after that hit or that attempted hit with the Belarus guys. Yeah, we definitely have that in the U.S. too. I want to make fun of it, but we definitely have, I think there was like a married to the mob TV show and growing up Gotti and all that. So I guess it's a uniform. People love these stories.

I mean, I watched growing up Gotti. I watched it. Yeah. I liked that. There was haircuts. Who could forget. I mean, I went to high school at kids like that. But yeah, people love these stories,

which is why we're doing this and why you should pay us to keep doing this. Patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. We're going to have a bonus episode on all this stuff. So jump on there. Moving on, November of 2008, Opron's luck runs out. He's killed in a car bombing after leaving a courthouse or one of his sons was on trial for extortion threats.

He leaves behind seven kids and at his massive funeral, one of them is quoted as saying, I will send back that person to God. He won't have a grave because I'll cut off his hands, head and body. It's really like a family affair with Israeli crime families, as we'll see. Yeah, it's very heartwarminging.

I remember the day he was killed because I was at work, and it was one of those types of things, whenever there's a bomb or an explosion like that in Israel, the way they always describe it in Hebrew, is it like, is it nationalist or criminal? So is it nationalist? That means that it's a terror attack. If it's criminal, obviously, it's mobsters blown each other up. So typically when it's in a specific car and the driver's side seat is blown up by a bomb place there, obviously, you know, it's not a terror attack.

Obviously, it became very clear who, you know, very quickly that it was Alperon. And it's, again, in the middle of Tel Aviv, one of the busiest junctions in the whole city on Namir Boulevard. And he's right there. And I remember it was quite grisly. Like there were pictures sent in by the photographers from the scene. And it's like, yeah, about as grisly as you'd imagine, a guy getting blown up in his car. Not the way you want to go. No, not at all.

Close casket. The question is who killed him? And of course, because of all these wars, there's a laundry list of suspect. In fact, one day after he's killed, two members of the Abrazil family are sentenced to prison for conspiring to kill a different brother, Nisim, who we talked about just a minute ago. Because obviously the Alperones have a few with the Abrazils over many things, but also because a member of the Abrazio family was beating by the Alperones under a security camera at a busy intersection. So that was one of the weirder ones. I always thought that was a weird story because it was, where the spot it took places right next to the diamond exchange in Roman, one of the larger diamond exchanges in the world. And it's a, it's a giant tower called the Migdal Moshe Aviv,

which was the tallest in Israel at the time. I think it may still be. It's a very phallic, giant building. And a lot of, you know, it's got luxury apartments in there. And some mob types live there, and Abargil was living there at the time. And they were having some, they were supposed to have some sort of talk outside and somebody exchanged words. And then they just ran up on Yitzigabargil and just started hitting them. And it was Ariya Alpo and apparently was beating him up, who if anybody at home could look up a photo of Aria Alperon, at least in his prime, he very much looked like, I would say, the most goonish of the brothers. He just, he had that face of a guy who does that line of work.

Or let's say dresses for that job and definitely like he, you know, you can see how some kind of thing like a hot-headed instance, who said something, y'all are talking shit or whatnot. And then next thing you know, you got to, you know, bombs and whatnot. another main suspect is this crime boss, Amir Molnar, who happens to be an explosive expert. And when I say he's an explosive expert, I literally mean he was trained by the Israeli army as an explosive expert in the Golani Brigade, which is sort of, you know, this respected infantry brigade. Molnar was also the son of a police officer. He came up in like a street gang of sorts and fought a blood war against others in the 90s. In the early 2000s, a member of his gang decides to become an informant and fearing arrest. Molnar flea. Flee, overseas, which is something that seems to happen a lot with Israeli organized crime figures. They just kind of like dip out to South America, to Morocco. They're all over the place. And I mean, the Israeli police, Ben, you can tell us more. They seem kind of incompetent when it comes

to stopping these guys sometimes, both because their criminal justice system is weak and because these guys are smart. And it's kind of reminiscent to me of European police saying like Sweden, who are basically useless, for lack of a better word, when it comes to stopping organized crime and have a super lax system that always has these guys going in and out like a revolving door. Yeah. Well, I think when you look at the Israeli law enforcement, it's always been far down the ladder in terms of prestige and respect and funding. So you have, you know, obviously in Israel, all the prestige or whatnot is in the security services.

So there's Mossad, Shimbets, the IDF, the Air Force, everything. And then somewhere down that list you have the police. And then at the bottom you have the prison service. So they're already kind of Not a lot of Precise and a lot of respect put there And a lot of the guys also come from the same Neighborhoods as a lot of the guys they're fighting

Or they're going after And While there is There is a great deal of Professional talent In the Israeli police, especially when you get to those high level investigative units like in the Yamar, the Akbal, Laha 433

And that would not They have a lot of very talent guys and very advanced technological means at their disposal. The same stuff like the interior security services use and whatnot to fight terror. So they have a lot of good guys, but there's also a lot of not good. And it's not a corrupt police force like in a lot of other countries on that level. But there is a lot of problems with the professionalism, the ability to close cases, a lot of issues with sexual harassment over the years,

but also with organized crime, they've arrested a lot of guys, but arresting them and getting convictions is a lot different. And also there's been a big reliance on state witnesses, which can be very effective when you get informants like that and cut deals with them. But it's also, I always think it kind of indicates the fact that you don't have a lot of real kind of like street level and intel

and people on the inside and people who really understand and are tracking these organizations of what you're trying. to do is basically trying to flip guys and get cases that way. So and when it comes to them being overseas, I think that the ability to stop Israeli guys overseas, you know, first and foremost goes to the local cops, but it's also what their relationships are like with their Israeli counterparts. So the Israelis know some guys are looking for in the States. They have real good connections with their counterparts in the U.S.

They even have some of those guys stationed here permanently, like from the FBI. And if that country in question, has good ties with the Israeli authorities and has a good police force and that makes a big difference. But a lot of these countries that they operate in have their own problems with crime that are much bigger than ours

and have their own problems with their police force. Places in Eastern Europe, South Africa, places like that, Mexico, where a lot of guys go. So in places like that, you can kind of, you can dip into the scene and start a new life. Speaking of state witnesses, while Molner is overseas, the witness in his case, the guy who got flipped, survives one

assassination attempt, and then in June of 2004, two hitmen scale a building and kill him in his living room. So Molner returns to the country shortly after. The murder, of course, has never been solved. A few years after he returns, Molner and Alperon get into it. They have a meeting at a hotel, a sit-down to sort of negotiate a turf dispute, and one of the Alperones, I think Ben points out, it's the son, drawer who's supposed to be a hothead, ends up stabbing Molner in the neck. Yeah, you end up stabbing the neck. Yeah. That's kind of the moment where if he had any intentions of not following the same line of work as his dad, the moment he stabbed Amir Molnar and neck, now you've got to kind of, that's kind of now you've chosen that profession. I don't think,

you know, you're not going to go to a startup, you know, you're now in this life. Yeah, I'm no mafia expert either, but you got to imagine Molnar wasn't fond of that incident and wanted some revenge. Yeah. Anyway, a year later, Molnar goes on to become sort of immediate dark. Darling due to being a bit of just a wild guy. In 2013, a lawyer working a case against him, his car explodes, which is kind of standard procedure for Israeli mafia guys. But Molnar decides to represent himself in court after getting arrested, I think for something else, and he gives up his right to an attorney. And apparently he just kills it. I mean, he washes the prosecutors, he interrogates the hell out of the police officers taking the stand, and he wins the case.

And in another story, another incident, Moln was arrested and during the interrogation. interrogation, like in that room, he takes his schwanse out and just pees against the wall right in front of the detectives. He claims they didn't allow one bathroom break and had no choice. And of course, he gets released on whatever charge that was as well. You know what? Honestly, I would give them the benefit of the doubt on that. I find that there's a shortage of public bathrooms in Israel. You don't really find them as much as you'd hope to. But I would also say, I could see them hold them in there and not let them go take a piss, you know? That's definitely possible. I think with Molnar, part of his public persona was

always just quiet looking dude like he just a man of few words like he just seemed very in control of everything that doesn't mean he always was but I think him him more or less staying out of trouble for the most part considering everything he's done allegedly he's a very smart guy he's very sophisticated

he's been doing this for a long long time people fear him and aren't gonna talk about him and talk to the police and he's always had very good attorneys He was represented by a guy for a long time named Moti Kats, who also represented the Rosenstein and the Musli brothers. These guys have money, and they have loyalty when the guys are with, and they know not to talk. They know they're not like these new, younger guys, these mob heirs like Dr. Apereone, we mentioned, who, you know, they were born into a family that was set up and had money.

So they never had to make it on their own. That older generation was, not that Amir Molder is not that old, but the generation before, or whatever they got, they built their own way, and they did it themselves because they had street smarts and they knew how to stay out of trouble. So guys like him do a good job at that. I share one other anecdote about Amir Molnar, which I heard from one guy in the hip-hop scene in Israel

and another guy confirmed it at a party, but didn't want to talk about it. Apparently, about a decade of something ago, Amir Molnar flew Kulio to Israel to do a gig. The story from what I understand, And this is what makes it very believable to me because it sounds like such a kind of Israeli, a certain type of Israeli dude thing.

They just really liked gangsters paradise. We love that song. We love it. So some of his dudes flew, apparently flew him out here to do a show. It was at this club, but the promoters, it was somewhat, that's what I understand. I can't confirm that, but, you know, we're happy to talk about Culeo on this show too. That's the type of power you have.

have. If you can, that's the type of power. You can get, you can get Culeo on a commercial flight in, uh, you know, all these years later. Flying Cooleo out in like 2010 to perform that song, it's just like the perfect level of Israeli cheesiness, you know? Yeah. Like you got a, you got a middle age Israeli cheesiness. You got to respect that. No, I think, yeah, it's also, I mean, one of the, one of the, aspects of living in Israel is that you never more than, let's say, 48 hours from hearing this is how we do it by Montel Jordan somewhere. still, or I got five on it, but a loon is like, you're, you're still going to hear that.

So it's not surprising that, you know, Culeo still has a base, at least with that one hit, you know. Another potential suspect in the, in the murder and crime family we're going to discuss is the Abut Pools. So one of the operon brothers in Nisim, he's the one who was alleged to have survived the nine assassination attempts, was said to have been behind the killing of the one-time patriarch of the Abu Tbilts. Sorry, Abu-Bulz, am I saying that right? Abut-Bulis.

Abut-Pus. Felix, who was outside one of his casinos in the Czech Republic. There's that international reach again. The Israeli mobs, they run a bunch of European casinos. And the Abrageals may have also been behind the killing as well, as the Abraibals were engaged in a war with the Abrageals about international gambling rackets and drug trafficking routes in the U.S., Europe, and Israel.

Felix was one of these original Israeli godfathers. He rose up as a gambling kingpin in the coastal city of Natania before expanding his reach into these European casinos. In the late 80s, he was apparently involved in a failed kidnapping attempt of a Nigerian minister in London. The minister was found in a wooden box supposed to be shipped internationally. Felix does six years. Regrettably, I could not find any more information on this and I'm thoroughly disappointed in myself. So that was, it's funny because that's actually a story that I wrote about in kind of a roundabout way,

because it's a very strange case that from what I've learned is very well known in Nigeria, were fairly well known, at least more so than in Israel. Back in about 2012 or 13, I was writing an article about a guy named Alex Barak, who was a childhood friend of Felix, and took part in that operation and that kidnapping. And he was arrested with Felix and did time in prison in the UK with Felix. The whole question is, why were they, who put them up to this? Why do they do it? But the reason I wrote about him was because Alex Barak, a few years, sometime after that, he was shot in a, assassination attempt in Tel Aviv, paralyzed from the chest down, and then he became this advocate for medical marijuana, and they named a strain a cannabis after him. So I wrote an article about him

for high times back then about the mystery man, organized crime, Mossad figure who inspired a strain of cannabis. So the story is real. They did try to kidnap this dude and put him in a wooden box. Why they thought it would work. I don't know. And why these are the guys who were at the center. I'm not sure. One thing about Felix, though, we talk a lot about how these guys are a bit not all that suave and at least what we assume from mafiosas Felix had the reputation back then

of actually being being a pretty slick dude he was part of that's the Moroccan the French thing and you know and but it was but it was the suits and the just the vibe he was kind of that guy a little bit he did he had kind of rare style for these sorts of Israeli dudes and he lived in Natanya, which is a Francophone city on the seaside. So he was, not that everybody there is that slick,

but he definitely, he was one of the dudes who did kind of have that, that classiness, as it were. Which makes sense. I mean, getting assassinated outside of casino in the Czech Republic, I feel like that's a classy way to die, as opposed to a car bomb outside of currency exchange. Yeah, that's how I hope, you know, that's what I'm... Yeah.

He gets killed in that war between the Abu Bulls and the Abrageals, two months earlier in Abrajiel had been gunned down in front of his family. Meanwhile, in December of 2005, four guys are caught after conspiring to kill another Abu al-Azzi by firing an anti-tank missile at his house. Somehow they only get between

28 and 37 months in prison. That's months, not years. It's also a very precise number too. 37. Yeah, yeah, 37 months. Asi ends up getting sentenced to 13 years in prison for running a criminal organization, extortion, arson, unlawful in prison.

and other financial crimes. So you mentioned earlier, or I mentioned earlier, about how the kind of dichotomy here, where you don't have all that high a crime rate or public safety like you do in a lot of other places, but the means of crime are more extreme often than other places. So the shoulder-fired missiles is a fairly common, I mean, not all that common, but it's certainly not unprecedented. A number of dudes who tried to do this, they've been used, you know, on a number of occasions for gangland stuff.

there was one back in 2012 I wrote about where these guys in Ashddo, the Magidish brothers were going to try to kill Shalom Dolmani and their whole idea because he lives on some big villa out in this Moshov, this rural community, let's call it. In the South, you can't really get up to his house

and you don't want to. So they were going to drive a tractor to some distance from the house, stand in the scoop or the tractor, raise it up, or somebody was. Stand in the scoop, raise it up, and then fire the missile. And hopefully hit him and not one of the members of his family. So that, you know, fortunately didn't, didn't go through. But these sorts of

means are not, are not rare here, certainly not grenades. Grenades are quite common. These things are easy to steal from the military, and that's one of the ways that the Israeli military can play a role in organized crime as being a good source of ammunition weapon unit, a country where guns are strictly controlled, unlike the U.S. Meanwhile, Charlie, who's another brother, he's engaged in what the press calls the Schwama War, which was the Abu Bulls fighting with the Abrajil's over what I think was the Schwarma racket, the grilled meat racket? Seriously, like the police shut down a bunch of Schwama restaurants owned by the mobsters after Charlie and a few others got shot in front of one of the restaurants.

And from what I understand, the Abu Bulls are mostly Dunzo these days, and I think most of them are in prison. Yeah, so, I mean, you know, it sounds funny, but if the price of Schwama just keeps growing up, I mean, Shurama is not a cheap lunch option anymore, you know? I mean, you're looking at 38 shekels just in a pita, so that's about, you know, $12 now for a sandwich. And one is not going to fill you up. Yeah, I think, you know. That's a crime in itself. Well, hold on.

Yes, A, it is. But I think not on that long ago was about 18. It was 15 when I first came here for Shwama in a pita, and it just keeps going up. I think it's now, it's well over 30 shekels. And so, yeah, if you can get in on that early, you're in good shape. with the abouple is they're one of those families that there's a difference between how well they are known to the Israeli public

and how actually powerful they are in that in the underworld and so there's somebody there was one of those families that everybody knows and has heard of and they've been on TV and all that stuff but they faded a while back you know after Felix died that was kind of that was that was the beginning and then of the end then I see again the son

the air who's not really up to the same level of his dad who was a self-made man that rings true in every one of these families pretty much. And then Francois Abuduil was killed. And then another Francois Abudu who was the son of Charlie Abutble. It's hard to keep it straight. He was arrested for murdering a kid at a nightclub, some kind of just innocent kid who got an altercation and this guy murdered him. And that was a huge case here and just brought a ton of heat on the family. And then it was pretty much just Charlie of Butbul running the show. And he took his own life

with years ago. And at that point, you know, I mean, they, they were already not able to really compete. You had a couple of Arab crime organizations moving in on that Natanya area and other guys, and it's just at some point, you know, your time's up. And that, so that family kind of, you know, their star has faded, let's say. When it comes down to it, though, in my opinion, I think in a lot of others, there are two Israeli crime families that really rise above the rest. And that's the Abra Gilles, who I mentioned a bunch, and the Rosenstein family. And I could do an entire episode just on the Abra Gilles because Yitzhak, the leader, like I said,

criminal prodigy, the likes of which I've rarely seen. He's the son of Moroccan immigrant parents, and he grows up the youngest of 10 siblings in the rough city of Lod and the projects in the 70s. And this is a lot from Ben's own reporting. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother worked a bunch of jobs that was never home. He had older brothers that were in and out of prison

and addicted to drugs. This is a quote, he told the court, I can remember that we were always lacking. If Abrageal is to be believed, his gangsterdom started at literally three years old, because honestly who remembers being three, when he started shoplifting and stealing food. He was allegedly

hiding guns, drugs, and, like, grenades for dealers and gangsters when he was five or six years old. He said he would use shapes and stuff to identify whose guns was whose when he hid them. That was his system. At 12, he graduated to running a stash house, selling hash and heroin with his brother. And at 14, he was smuggling drugs,

to the jail for one of his other brothers. 14 is also when he shot someone for the first time, a 33-year-old who wouldn't let him into like a rec center or something like that, some sort of teen party because he was wearing shorts. And look, I'm not condoning violence or saying bouncers sometimes deserve to get shot, but also sometimes bouncers

deserve to get shot. Yeah, I didn't think you can make a case for that in some instances. I think it's, with this particular case, it's, it's, to know, this is very much an Israeli kind of underworld cliche. Somebody stabbed some guy at a club who didn't let him in. bouncers get stabbed like that.

I mean, it's happened fairly, you know, a good number of times. There's also kind of, there may be arguably a racial component in that as well, because, you know, when you come up to the club, they're going to look at how you look and how you dress and your skin, and they're going to look also. If they ask you for your IID, on that ID, they can see your last name and where you're from. So by the name of that town and your last name, a lot of these bouncers are going to make a decision when they're not to let you in. But that's, I'm not saying that's not what happened here.

I'm just saying when these things do happen. It happens. Right. By 16, he's running multiple trap houses and importing drugs in from the Netherlands. I mean, this is like LeBron James level type of talent right here. This kid is a prodigy. He's also illiterate, but we'll get to that later. He soon becomes a boror.

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storeshiltails.com. To make obvious. Yeah. It's like the Israeli version of a Russian thief in law, the kind of high-level respected criminal who oversees other criminal disputes. And then he kills somebody, a pimp that allegedly threatened him with a grenade. He's, I think, 17 at this time. By the way, 17 and he kills this guy. So during the trial, his oldest child, childhood friend who was also engaged to his sister, betrays him and testifies against him. And according to Brazil, he never gets over that. He gets sentenced to 30 years, but ends up doing 12. But, Ben, my question is like 12 on 30. How does that happen? Right. So one thing in general about Israel, there tends to be not very serious sentences

for crimes, especially compared to the states. You don't have this sort of thing where a guy gets busted for trafficking and he gets a life sentence or a guy does arm. robbery with it you know and he gets 30 years no chance of parole you don't you don't have that and a life sentence is 30 years um and he i think him getting out early was was largely because he was 17 it was also because he he when he was in jail he was he was famous already he was famous on the street before he went into jail he was famous in prison and he became kind of like a guy of a movie who just sort of like ran the prison and had real criminals just kind of waiting on him as a young man you know, still a teenager.

And he was just a master manipulator. So he had, and it's one of the more bizarre stories, he built up a friendship with the warden, and he convinced the warden that, you know, he was changing his ways, a kind of classic story. And he actually convinced the warden to take him to be on a TV show, because that's the other thing. Not just bad, not just low sentences, really criminals get a lot of furloughs, which I in general tend to be kind of in favor of. But either way, he, on a furlough, they took him to be on. this primetime TV talk show and you can find it on YouTube.

It's him being interviewed about how he has changed his ways and now he's a student of philosophy. He even read a poem that he made. And then not long after that, he gets released and becomes, you know, the most feared criminal in the country. So I think it's a case of a guy being 17 when he did the crime, doing 12 years, which is pretty good for Israel. And then just being able to manipulate his way out there. In prison, he stirs up like Ben said, a whole ton of shit. stabs people, and he becomes his boss, and he also meets a guy called Shmaya Angel. Anil, Angel? How would you say his last name? Angel. Angel. He's a much older first

generation Israeli gangster. He died at 51 of cancer in 2004. He was serving a life sentence from a situation in 1982 where he killed two of his drug trafficking partners. He was considered one of Israel's most dangerous prisoners, and once got a prisoner who was set to testify against his wife, stabbed 131 times, despite being held in a guarded cell. So Shemaya takes this guy under his wing and also teaches him how to read. And as Ben has reported, he's fond of Ayn Rand, right? Yes, Ayn Rand and Nietzsche. Also, Sidhartha by Herman Hess.

I haven't read the book, but he, in his testimony in the big 512 case against him, he talked a lot about these books. And Nietzsche, he said, thus spoke Zahars. Lussela changed his life behind bars. I don't know if that's an indictment of Nietzsche or not, but he really said it made a big difference in his life, and that's how he learned to read with these books. So I don't know if Ayn Rand gets any of the blame for this, but...

I think it definitely, it definitely does. I mean, Alice shrugged, yeah. Oh, so typical. You know, so typical. Of course he's an Ayn Rand guy, you know. Here's a quote from him. I was born into crime, grew up in crime, was breastfed crime, heard crime, did crimes. All of my life, I was in one giant bubble of crime.

There was nothing else, nothing, a pit and nothing that was connected to normal life. I knew the world of crime, the laws, rules, grammar, but the normal world. And as you can see, actually, you know, but the normal world or the question mark at the end of it, I phrased that wrong. But either way, as you can see, this guy, he loves doing crimes. And it's actually, it's all he knows. You know, he was a product of his environment. Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. I think definitely in the story he tells, which again, his life story got to take a little bit of grand assault.

But the story that he does tell and just the facts of being from a really large family with a ton of siblings, basically a one-parent household in Lodd in the 70s in Benyand-Rakovitt, like a box car building, they call him. That's a hard place now. That's a tough town now. So I can imagine what it was like in the 70s, how poor it was. I'm not saying a guy like that never had any other options, but I could understand why he somebody like that would feel like they didn't and would feel like he didn't have a chance. And also if you combine that with his natural talent and charisma, you can see how, you know,

he was destined for that sort of success. You can also imagine, like I'm sure you said another podcast, this type of guy like this, if he had been, if he'd grown up in a different family in a different neighborhood, he could have been, you know, he could have been a doctor, a lawyer, he could have been a politician. Fortune 500 CEO, you know, like, you know, his lawyer said he was extremely charismatic and all that. but he ends up getting released from prison. I guess he's 2930, and he just gets right back into it. He's importing drugs on a global level, killing people on three continents, you know, the usual. He wants to describe going into the underground casino business, and when asked what he brought to the table as a business partner, he answered,

I bring with me 13 years in prison. I bring with me Yitzhak Abrajil. In other places, if you lose money, you don't pay, okay, but when I'm a partner in the business, there was no such thing as not paying. So, you know, that sounds like the kind of person you want to be in business with, maybe if he's on your side. Definitely. Ben quotes a source in one of his articles as saying, until the Yitzhak Abrajillo, we didn't know about feuds between criminal organizations. We had local feuds, local fights between gangs, not organizations. Israel's anti-organized crime law was put in place in June 2003 because of him. He was in charge in Israel and also in Thailand, Spain, Belgium, and the USA. This is not something that we known before, and it's not something that has come back since. And you have another source saying, He's the most superior high-ranking criminal that has ever existed in Israel. In his personal capabilities, his personality, his disturbed psychopathic approach to life, and his intelligence and charisma. He is the most dangerous criminal that there has ever been here. Look, I would tend to agree with most of that.

One of the guys saying some of this stuff was involved in the state's prosecution, so maybe he has some sort of interest or he could be prone to kind of exaggerate a little bit. But there is something to that. I mean, you certainly had few. in Israel and murders between gangsters and criminals way back in the 70s, 80s, even before. And they were highly publicized. People knew about them.

They made the news and people got killed and the broad daylight and all that. But this was more gang-style feuds and crews on the street. It wasn't Israeli dudes having guys killed in Prague because of beef back in Israel. They're moving cocaine from Brazil to Montreal and ecstasy from Holland

to L.A. and murdering people in the States, Latin America, Europe, Africa. That type of thing you didn't have in addition obviously also to the technological stuff they have now that the the type of means they have at their disposal to to kill people and track people and all that is is quite good so that wasn't there before um and he's he's kind of the he's the guy who kind of built that and inspired that and he had the i guess you say he had the vision to be a uh you know to be a ground you know groundbreaker in that sense yeah i mean him the d a along him and zever yeah i mean him and zever

Rosenstein. They called them the Escobars of Israel. And it said that he was once at one point one of the top 40 drug traffickers into the U.S., which means he's competing with like all the Mexican and Colombian cartels, Dominican importers, things like that. His organization trafficked ecstasy, cocaine, hashis, and other drugs around the world, from the U.S. to Belgium to Japan, moving between Morocco, Spain, Belgium, and the U.S. itself. He and his brothers, I think there were three others that were actively involved, have been arrested and detained in multiple countries. I think they're still waiting on a five-year sentence for him in Belgium. And they're just truly this epic crime family.

And they really are something out of a plotline, like I said, in Grand Theft Auto. And I think we see that most when they team up with the violent boys, that's with a Z, a Latino street gang in L.A. that was sick of being pushed around by the Mexican mafia, La M.A. who, you know, control southern Los Angeles, or Southern California, I'm sorry, telling them what to do. You see, the Abra Giles had all this ecstasy, apparently even owning manufacturing labs in Belgium, but they needed help with distribution and protection in LA.

I mean, sure, they're powerful, but let's not they have a bunch of gang members and street dealers in the U.S. So this happens in 2000. They strike up a deal with the violent boys. The Fed start to catch on shortly after, though, because these guards start making way too much noise. In July of 2002, they bust a big exit deal in action

involving three groups of people, including some big Israeli players and their bodyguards who are carrying automatic weapons. Now, the big player in the U.S. for the Abrageals is this guy Moshe Malul. He's their man in L.A. And another guy by the name of Sammy Atlas was there too. He was in their ring.

Sammy, though, he's not exactly the most loyal, gets a little too smart, tries to steal a shipment of pills and sell it on his own. Moshe and his brother, they catch onto this. They fly to Spain to meet with the Abra Gilles who decide that Sammy has to die. Then the violent boys, they catch them in a cafe in California,

in Encino of all places, and they kill him in the parking lot. Unfortunately, one of the violent boys, Boyes also kills a cop in 2003, and that puts you on the radar. By 2005, 1,300 law enforcement officers are involved in a huge sweep to shut them down. Like, don't kill a police officer in the U.S. I've seen it with the NYPD. I've been on the scene shortly after it happens when someone shoots a cop, and they react like an army, like nothing else. You know, they will send the choppers. They will flood with officers way more than they need to try to set something happen. So that's,

that's kind of what happens there. And it's, again, it'll put you on the radar on a way you don't want to be. It's important to point out, too, that the Abrageals weren't just street thugs and drug dealers. Like, they were actually quite smart and sophisticated. They ran a huge money laundering and embezzling operation, stealing tens of million dollars from an Israeli bank. And I also kind of wonder, like, who does the paperwork for these guys? Because I don't, I don't think they're the ones doing it. So they had, with that, that was one of the bigger, that was such a huge story in Israel in terms of kind of a turning point in organized crime and just in terms of the massive amount of money that I put out there that was able to seed all types of things. The estimate I've read or I heard was somewhere between 250 to 300 million shekels, which comes out to about, now it's about 3.2 shekels of the dollar now.

So it was about $70, $80 million. And this was, so it was because of two main inside guys, they had a guy named Ofer Maximoff who owed a lot of money to the mob. and his sister worked for the bank as their head of investor or deputy head of investment. So she was pretty high ranking there. So she was able to embezzle all this money for her brother. And yeah, it didn't well for her. She didn't have going to prison. But yeah, they definitely had a guy on the inside and they exploited her as much as they possibly could.

Look, I'm not going to get too far into it because financial crimes are for the most far boring and I barely understand it. But it seems like from this summary from the Times of Israel, they had these plans where they would push out loans to Israeli business people in the U.S. who were then extorted so they had to give up their businesses and just, you know, that sort of stuff, embezzlement, whatever. It's boring, but you get it. So unfortunately, though, the Abrazils were about to learn a lesson that many organized criminal has learned before, which is shit is different when you start fucking with the U.S., especially when you're doing so from a country that's an ally. Because the Abraziels, with the help of the Israeli government, were going to be put on trial

in the U.S. Yitzhak Abrazheimer's brother, mayor, they end up getting arrested in Israel in 2008. But we've kind of already covered how the Israeli criminal justice system is sort of inept and how these guys were wild enough to go after all the prosecutors

and judges and whatnot. We should also mention that there was another killing of a civilian in 2008 that shocked the country right around when this happened, which was a woman who was a social worker was killed in front of her kids and husband in an assassination attempt gone wrong

that led to another sort of coming to God moment for the country. So they were fed up with this stuff. Yeah, that was a huge, that was a huge statement. was Margarita Lauten. It was on the beach in Batyam, a place, just tons of people, families, all that all around. And that was one of those ones, like, you can't really ignore that. The Israelis figure it's better for these guys to go on trial in the U.S., face the U.S. justice system,

and then get sent back to serve out the remainder of the time in Israel, through to some legal stature that, frankly, I'm not going to bother to learn the specifications of. Here's the organized crime and corruption reporting project on it. Why try Abrazil and other foreign drug dealers in the U.S. The answer is simple in the Abrajio case. RICO and other U.S. legal provisions are tougher than any law Israel has to offer. Retired Israeli police commander Yaakov Barovsky, speaking to the Jerusalem Post in July after a botched mob hit left the young mother dead, said police were hamstrung by Israel's

current three strikes law, which stipulates that a file is not flagged with a suspect's connection to the crime family until his third offense. The Aboriginals are arrested in 08.8. They're sent to the U.S. in 2011, convicted, and then sent back to Israel. Israel to serve out the rest of their time for this particular crime spree in 2014. The Abrageals, though, they weren't the first Israeli Mafia to go through that process of extradition and trial in the U.S. That honor belongs to Zev, the Wolf with Seven Lives Rosenstein, who, if you remember, survived that bombing in 2003 and fought a vicious war with Abrageals

after they tried to expand into his gambling empire. The Abrageals actually met with a bunch of other crime families in Brussels in 2003 to discuss how to take out Rosenstein shortly before the bombing. One thing about the bombing, too, and why it was such a big deal. As, as, you know, as Ben talked about, this is Israel, right? They have their federal government back then focused on the Intifada, their suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, Hamas, all that all over. So to see, you know, in Israeli doing this during that time, people were pissed off. Yeah, it was definitely, I remember being here at the time, and it was, you know,

a bomb blast in the middle of the day in Tel Aviv. Obviously, you're going to assume the worst. And then it quickly emerged that it wasn't a terror attack. And then it became this sort of thing. It's like, we got all this other things to worry about. And we got to worry about getting blown up by a Jew in the middle of the day, randomly with no mourning. So it's like, we didn't have enough problems right now.

It's like in the middle of pandemic. Now you got, oh, by the way, now there's bird flu. It was like, well, we had this. We were doing with COVID, man. You know what I'm saying? So it was like another thing on top of that. And it was a similar kind of dynamic in 2013. You had this this underworld war with Shalom Dolmani and Bini Shalom and Ashkelon.

And Ashkelon is in southern Israel near Gaza. And so what they usually deal with in terms of explosions is rockets from Gaza when that happens. And then when they started having these car bombs there, the first couple of times they go up, people assume it's a rocket, or the first time at least. And so there's the same type of the dynamic. It's like, wait, we don't have enough problem dealing with these rockets and those sirens and those explosions and that trauma and that PTSD. Now these knuckleheads are going to be blown up each other in our neighborhood as well. Like, don't we have enough to deal with? So that dynamic really pissed people off.

And it got a lot more attention on these guys than they would have had otherwise. so not all that smart. Zev is the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants. He's born in Jaffa, which is just south of Tel Aviv. He dropped at a high school, starts working at an electronic store, which is just kind of, you know, quintessential Israeli,

so many guts and all that. That was the Sabra Price is right. I'm always happy when I've met somewhere or spoke to somebody who's actually seen that skit. It was so dumb, but it was classic. It was accurate in like a very specific way, like the Zohan one. It's completely ridiculous, but also it hit on something.

I don't know. It's hard. So he starts off during that time as a petty thief, soon got involved with running gambling rackets and illegal casinos near the old bus station neighborhood in Tel Aviv, which is actually a really interesting sort of hardcore run-down area, or at least it was when I spent some time there. I had tried to make a documentary about African refugees in Israel back in 2008,

and this whole area, it's a really tough, tough neighborhood, but kind of cool. What's that long street that's over there? It's called Navissanan, which is also the name of the neighborhood. It's, I would say it's got some problems and whatnot, but it's easily one of the most interesting and unique places in Israel, and definitely worth checking out. Yeah, it's full of restaurants and bars run by all the immigrants in Israel. So you have Filipinos, Chinese, they're trained, Sudanese, you know, all their shops, some Israeli Arabs, tattooed Russian gangsters sitting out drinking beers. But yeah, it's also, you know, it's super shady and full of drugs and prostitutes.

or at least it was back then. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a cede place and it's got a lot of issues. And it's, you know, but you're also safe there, you know, to walk around and take it in. You know, it's not like a lot of other places in the world. Yeah, no, it's cool. I like it. Rosenstein comes to prominence in 1993 when he allegedly took out a big time 70s and 80s gangster

Yehezekiel, Azlan, who was in. Jhezkel. Say again? Yeah, Hezkel, Azlan. I'm not even going to try. No, you did, I think you good. You were in the ballpark. He's in Iraq.

Yeah, I'm getting close. He's an Iraqi Jewish godfather whose face was deformed because he was shot nine times in a previous assassination attempt. What is with these guys? Like, what are they put in the water there? These guys just survive all that stuff. So it could be bad aim, you know? Like, I mean, yeah. Maybe that's user error.

You know, it's not just. But, yeah, it's kind of crazy. But yeah, he ends up in Messing a War with the Abrajeals and a bunch of the others and all that. Honestly, at this point, it's hard to keep track. everyone went to war with everyone, let's just say that. Even some of the guys we haven't covered. And in 2001, Rosenstein urters the murder of a competitor and a guy on a motorcycle guns down three people outside a beach club.

The Abrageals at one point, they think Rosenstein conspire with the Abbot Bulls and another family to have their brother. Yaakov killed in 2002. Remember, Felix gets gunned down outside the casino in Czech Republic in 2002. But yeah, that's what leads up to the bomb attempt in 2003. That kills three civilians and shocks the country. But that bomb attempt It misses him in 2003

Unfortunately for him He can't avoid the U.S. criminal justice system And he's Boston 2005 in Israel He was injured though He did get lightly injured in that In the blast And then drove himself to the hospital If you remember like Cameron

When he was robbed in Harlem And he drove to the hospital On the Lamborghini For the New York listeners But he But other than that I mean again He unscathed

And three other people Who weren't involved Did get killed So That's how Big deal. Yeah, definitely. Big deal.

When he's busted, it said that the Israeli mobsters control 80% of the world's exosy market. And if you were hitting the clubs in like early 2000s, shout out the Sound Factory, you would realize that is a lot of money. At one point, a bust of Rosenstein's people turns up 700,000 pills in one apartment in Manhattan in 2001. According to Douglas Century, quote, The new Israeli ex-C kingpins had a unique advantage over competing global mafiosos.

They owned the underground drug labs in the Netherlands and Belgium, and already had an infrastructure in place, often using strippers and ultra-Orthodox Jewish teenagers as drug mules on flights to New York and Los Angeles. To give you a level of how high up the Israelis were in this trade, one Israeli gangster supplied to another, who supplied it to another, who then supplied to another, who happened to be the guy who supplied Sammy the Bull Garvano's ecstasy ring.

He was running out in like Arizona, I think, when he was supposed to be in witness protection. The Israelis also apparently supplied it to the guys who controlled the trade in limelight, which if you've ever heard about Peter Gation and Chris Pasello, Michael Alec, Clomland, all that good stuff is a really fascinating story, but also kind of like

maybe like the global ground zero for ecstasy in New York, in the States, maybe in the world at that time. But yeah, the Israeli police, they'd failed to get Zev locked up for years. So they took him in 2005 with the help of U.S. law enforcement for smuggling drugs into the U.S.

says the LA Times, in the 2006 prosecution of former ecstasy drug kingpin, Zev Rosenstein, in a precedent-setting arrangement, he was charged in America, arrested in Israel, and exorited, sentenced the 12 years in prison,

then shipped back to Israel to serve his time. And the Ford in 2008 wrote, the current moves by Israeli authorities stem from an amendment to Israeli law in 1999 that allowed the country to extradite citizens who reside in the country on the condition that they served their prison sentences in Israel. The Israeli government had previously adopted a law in 1978,

barring the extradition of its criminals because of what then Prime Minister Menacham Began described as a fear that the prosecution of Israeli criminals abroad would be tainted by anti-Semitism abroad. I mean, I guess I could see that. I think for sure. For sure, definitely. I mean, depending on where they are arrested, certainly.

But I think just from the standpoint of the criminals themselves or the suspects, it's much better to do that time in Israel. You know, Israeli prisons are pretty filthy and crowded and loud and don't smell good. and they've got some really rough guys in there too, but it's a lot safer than being in a penitentiary in the States. The conditions are better in terms of anything from solitary to everything else. Even murderers can get furloughs, regular furloughs in Israel. You can get conjugal visits quite easily.

All these things are much easier than they are in the American penitentiary system. And also for somebody like Abadjil or like Rosenstein, here they know who you are. Here your name actually has some weight. you're in a federal prison in Colorado, nobody doesn't know who you are or care. And they might find out who you are, but you're not really going to be a guy whose name strikes a lot of fear into their hearts. So for these guys, it's definitely in their interest to do their time here, near their families and near where their fellow convicts will fear them.

Also, you've got to imagine if you're an Israeli prisoner in an American federal prison, like, you know, the whole Aryan nation guys and the black nationalist guys, they're not going to be like a big fan of you? You know, it's probably, it's probably, it's probably, tough. I actually met a Colombian, no, he's a Venezuelan cartel guy who was Jewish and wearing a Yamika in lockup in D.C.

He was a high level Venezuelan cartel guy affiliated with the government. And he was like, yeah, people aren't, his English wasn't great, so we couldn't communicate that much. We exchanged letters for a while, but he was just like, yeah, people aren't, they're not so fond of me in here. And this was a dude who was like, you know, trained in the art

of defending himself and murdering people. I mean, I think it's, I think it's, for work that he working Oh, he definitely found God definitely found God in prison but he was not, yeah,

you know, this is one of the most powerful cartels in the world. But he was just like, yeah, it's not the best place to be right now. Yeah, it's going to be hard to find.

But, I mean, I remember being the only Jewish kid in school, you know, it's tough. So, yeah,

but I think if he think that's good that he's becoming more observant, that could help him, you know, just to kind of, you know,

past the time, if anything, and also get his life back together. But yeah, I assume, you know, like so many things in the penitentiary, it's going to be more strength than numbers. And if you're, you know, if you're well-known here, that's better for you

than if you're just a nobody there. As the Krispy Chicken Sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy.

Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just four. $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. VALY-3-26. VALY SOTUS. Only while supplies last the app for full terms. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Yeah, and just to give it an example of how tough it was to try these guys. In 2004 in Israel, there was a judge who was killed, I think, right outside his home, and that was right before Zav got locked up. Yeah, that was a big case back in 2004.

You know, Matashowon is quite a nice area in Israel, a fancy town. A judge named Adiazar. He was gunned down in his car in the driveway. I don't quite remember the exact motives for it, but it was a couple pretty bad dudes who did it. And that was one of these very shocking cases, obviously, when something like this happens. I mean, it's not every day a judge gets killed, obviously. So, yeah, a bunch of these families, they've been prosecuted, they've been broken up, killed all that.

And there are some other upstarts we're actually going to get into in the bonus episode for Patreon subscribers. But to add things, we have to mention case 512, which started in 2017. And if I'm not mistaken, is apparently still going on? It's the biggest case ever in Israel and involves the prosecutions of a bunch of the mobsters we talked about, including the Abrageals and crimes just going back decades. Here's Ben actually summing it up in one of his articles. Case 512 also covers two murders in Israel and Germany, two attempted murders in Japan and the Czech Republic,

and the manifold crimes associated with running a global drug trafficking, money laundering, and tax evasion network. As the investigation weaved its way around the globe over the course of 15 years, it took on a life of its own, eventually ensnaring more than half a dozen Israeli mob bosses from several different and rival crime gangs. indicted with Abrazil were amongst others,

his brother Mayor Moti Hassin, his former right-hand man, Avi Rujan, a major crime boss operating out of Renana, and Netanya Ma boss is Asi Abut-Bul and Rico Shirazi, rivals of each other, and Abu-Bul's case of Abrajil as well. And I think at one point, Rosenstein was actually called to testify against the Abrageals,

who remember I've tried to kill him multiple times, and he actually refused to talk. So there you go. Nice little coat of signs still being honored over there in Israel. But you've covered this case extensively. Yeah, quite a bit. It was, well, with Zev, in his case, you know, and I don't see any interest he could have had in testifying. He's going to be released pretty soon. I'll know what they would have got him. And I think if he wants to settle that with the barge on his guys, he's

not going to do it by testifying against him. It was, I would say, one of the crazy things about the case is just the way that it was, it wasn't just that it was, you know, taken down this organization. It was, it scooped up all types of guys who were in all different organizations and all don't like each other, a lot of them. A lot of these guys were rivals. And they all just, this case, it just sprawled and sprawled, and it had seven different state witnesses who were all very involved guys and not very good guys.

So it is definitely, I would say, that's not, you know, that's not an exaggeration. It would be the largest criminal investigation in Israel's history that does not involve Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like, other than the cases, the four investigations and counting, you know, outside the investigations against Prime Minister Netanyahu and his indictments, and those against former Prime Minister Ehud Olmer, who did some time in prison,

this would be the largest one, certainly in the organized crime world, just the scope of it, the resources they invested in, the names, all of these guys are big names, a lot of our names to people who are everyday people who don't cover this as journalists or don't live in that world, like a bunch of like the Bupils, like all these guys. And then there's a bunch of other dudes who aren't household names, are very real heavy guys and it just scooped up a ton of them now how many of them are actually going to get convicted and do any serious time is a whole other thing but it's definitely been a big one and um it's still ongoing obviously covid and the the pandemic has kind of screwed up the court

system a little bit but you know it'll wrap up pretty soon so yeah there's there's there's there's a lot we actually didn't get to a few more minor players ridiculous stories including something called the affair of the avenging police which is straight out of like a bruce willis straight to movie. Basically, a bunch of officers in a particular town felt like they were being left out to drive by their high command when facing down this mobster Michael Moore and his organization. So they took Maddoz into their own hands and put a pipe bomb under his car and threw a grenade at his house. And the whole thing backfired. They got arrested. We'll get into it. Patreon episode. Patreon.com slash the Underworld podcast. Thank you so much to everyone who's been

subscribing. We really appreciate it so we can keep doing this. I want to thank Ben a ton for his excellent reporting and for being a guest and everyone who was signed up for the Patreon going on. Like I said, we're going to get into more of this. There was just so many names that for the first time ever, we're not just doing an interview bonus episode. We're going to tell a story in there. It's definitely worth your time. Throw us some cash. Make it happen. Underworld podcast. Thank you so much. Ben, what's your, what's your organization again that you're working for right now? Yeah, so I write at Cannecoma.com. C-A-N-N-I-G-M-A.com. We also podcast the Cannabis Enigma podcast. Check us out. We cover the whole world of weed.

So come check us out. Canigma.com. Thanks, guys. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

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