THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
1.
“See how it is now?” Ilan Benshoshan said. “Since all the assassinations started, every young mob guy goes everywhere with two bodyguards.”
We were just off Rehov Etzel, the main avenue of Tel Aviv’s notorious slum, Shchunat Hatikvah, inching our rented Mazda ...

On a quiet, affluent block in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, I joined Ilan, my guide to the Israeli crime world, on a visit to Oved, now retired from the “life” but once a high-ranking member of the Alperon crime organization. Oved is another product of Hatikvah, the rough neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv where so many of Israel’s mobsters grew up, a tough who used to train and spar with Ilan in the Mejiro gym in South Tel Aviv before the gym, mysteriously, burned to the ground. He used to work as a lieutenant to mob boss Nissim Alperon, he told us, but decided to leave Israel for good after one of many assassination attempt on his former boss’s life.

THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
This is the fourth installment in a five-part series about organized crime in Israel. Click here to read Part I, here to read part II, and here to read Part III.
“The daily pressure here is crazy,” a 27-year-old named Tal told me ...

For all the criminal activity in Hatikvah, the south Tel Aviv neighborhood that is one of the centers of Israeli organized crime, there’s nothing quite like Shabbat in the neighborhood. One cool Friday evening, Eli Waizman–the childhood friend of Ilan, my guide to the underbelly of Israeli society–insisted that I come spend Shabbat dinner with him and his Moroccan-born father on Rehov Roni, just off Etzel Street, the neighborhood’s main artery. Hatikvah was nearly silent on Shabbat evening. You could smell the sumptuous meals simmering on stoves and the children laughing in the little one-story, ramshackle homes. I mentioned to Eli that I thought the English translation of Shchunat Hatikvah had a beautiful ring to it—“The Quarter of Hope.”

In another indication of the increasingly ambitious and global nature of Israeli organized crime, a trend I’ve been covering in a Tablet Magazine series this week, an Israeli court ruled yesterday that the brothers Meir and Yitzhak Abergil, two of Israel’s most notorious gangsters, and a few of their associates will be extradited to the ...

Just before noon on November 17, 2008, a deafening explosion rocked Namir Boulevard in the heart of northern Tel Aviv. The chassis of a rented white Volkswagen was ripped open by a sophisticated remote-controlled bomb, and the car’s sole occupant, 53-year-old mob boss Ya’akov Alperon, was killed instantly, his mangled body tumbling from the fractured door. Two bystanders, including a 13-year-old boy, were injured.

The son of Moroccan and Yemenite Jewish immigrants, Ilan Benshoshan grew up on the streets of Tel Aviv’s Shchunat Hatikvah (literally “the Quarter of Hope”), long a breeding ground for Israel’s toughest mob bosses, bullet-scarred loansharks, drug-dealers, and junkies. And though he has lived in New York for over a decade, many of Ilan’s childhood friends stayed in Tel Aviv, rising through the criminal hierarchy to positions of power. Ilan himself scrapped his way out of the hood, becoming an expert kickboxer. For a week now, he has been acting as my translator, driver, and hypercaffeinated guide to the deadly precincts of Israel’s underworld, often invisible to outsider eyes.

Back in 1994, I found myself entrenched in New York’s underground hip-hop scene. Despite having been born middle-class and Jewish in the Canadian cowtown of Calgary, I considered myself as close to a rap maven as an Ivy League white boy could get. One day I had a newspaper assignment to profile Alan Light, a ...