Underworld

Ilan Benshoshan, former Israeli lightweight kickboxing champion, was my guide to the often impenetrable neighborhoods and illegal clubs of Israel’s underworld.

The seedy underbelly of Shchunat Hatikvah, one of Tel Aviv’s poorest neighborhoods, and formerly the center of much of Israel’s organized crime.

Heroin addicts abound on the streets of the Quarter of Hope. “There’s no connection between the name and the neighborhood,” Hatikvah-raised Eli Waizman said. “We say, ‘This is the neighborhood of No Hope.’”

Graffiti like this is commonplace in the rough Tel Aviv neighborhoods like Shchunat Hatikvah and Givat Shmuel: “The only good Arab is a dead Arab,” it reads, “Mavet L’Malshaneem”—Death to the Snitches.

The Russian Mafia’s massive white-slave trade is in evidence all over the seedier sections of Tel Aviv. The women are often brought in through Egypt, have their passports taken away, smuggled by Bedouins across the border into Israel, where they work in brothels or as call girls, and are even exported to Arab nations.

One night we were trying to get past the Russian doormen standing guard outside a “Health Club” when a hulking, shaved-headed goon demanded to see my ID. I showed him a New York State driver’s license. A bark came in heavy Russian-accented English. “New York! You a cop?” Ilan countered: “Yes, we know all your friends in Brighton Beach so let us the fuck inside.”

On a rain-slicked Ramat Gan street, Ilan and I were just going out to get falafel at 2 a.m. when a girl in her early 20s staggered into the street, walked up to our car, and with her pupils as dilated and dark as black dimes, she said dreamily in Hebrew, “Guys, want to party?” She wasn’t a prostitute, Ilan explained, just a young Israeli wildly tripping on hallucinogens.

It was the Alperon crime family that first realized that employing the typical neighborhood “gorilla” as muscle was starting to make the high-end clientele in their many casinos uncomfortable. Instead, they employed young thugs trained in Thai boxing, who could deliver a single kick strong enough to shatter any bone in a man’s body. “You take an average sized man with Thai boxing training, put him in a sports coat,” one former Alperon enforcer told me, “and you have a very discreet system.”

Ilan Benshoshan and Eli Waizman engage in Muay Thai sparring in Tel Aviv. A decade ago, when guys like Ilan and Eli were coming up, igruf Thailandi—that’s how the ancient martial art of Siam is know in Hebrew—became all the rage in Israeli mobster circles.