While the cable devotes much time to that as well, its prime concern is the potential for Israeli crime to seep into the United States. Since it was sent, Israel’s Abergil brothers, who are accused of working with the San Fernando Valley’s Vineland Boyz to smuggle hundreds of thousands of ecstasy pills into the United States (occasionally via stuffed toy tigers), were extradited here. One brother copped a plea, admitting to extortion, and returned to Israel only last week; the other, whose alleged crimes include the murder of an Israeli drug dealer in Los Angeles, remains locked up stateside. One wonders if the cable, sent only a few months before the Abergils’ arrest in Israel, may have played any role in that affair (the brothers are mentioned). If journalism is the first draft of history, does that make WikiLeaks history’s director’s cut?

Israel: A Promised Land for Organized Crime? [WikiLeaks]
Alleged TA Crime Figure Meir Abergil Returns Home [JPost]
Related: Holy Land Gangland [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Israeli Brothers to Face Federal Music

This is the fifth and final installment in a five-part series about organized crime in Israel. Click here to read Part I, here to read Part II, here to read Part III, and here to read Part IV.

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.

We sat in his typically New York living room—sleek Swedish furniture, wall-mounted flat-screen TV, scattered remote controls—as Oved waxed poetic on the old underworld code.

“We always used to say, ‘Who controls Hatikvah controls Israel,’ Oved said. “Not Anymore.”

As we talked, the former mobster was showing his two daughters how to use an orange plastic golf putter on the plush living room carpet, gently stroking their hair. He had piercing slate-gray eyes, a shaved head, and the lean, sinewy build of a soccer midfielder. Only the battle-scarred knuckles and the knotted cords of muscle in his forearms give any hint at his serious martial arts training.

Nowadays, however, such training matters very little. Long gone are the days when an Israeli gangster like Oved could rely on gym-honed fighting techniques to strike fear into enemies on the street. Death these days comes via remote-controlled car bomb, or in the form of a motorcycle-riding assassin toting a silencer-equipped Sig Sauer handgun.

The authorities, of course, are doing their best to quell the violence. In the aftermath of mob boss Ya’akov Alperon’s assassination last November, the Israeli police began taking unprecedented steps to keep the underworld from devolving into a massive shooting war, arresting major mob bosses on relatively innocuous charges like unlicensed possession of firearms. Last December, for example, dozens of cops closed off entire blocks in Ramat Gan’s Diamond Exchange area and raided a restaurant where Nissim Alperon, Ya’akov’s brother and the family’s new boss, was dining with his lieutenants. The raid provided scant evidence–only a single unlicensed gun was found on the premises–but it gave police sufficient ground to arrest Alperon and his men for a while.

A few weeks earlier, officers tried the same tactic on Amir Mulner, the vicious young mob prince and the suspected killer of Ya’akov Alperon. Police raided Mulner’s apartment in a suburb of Tel Aviv, finding one illegal firearm and arresting Mulner and more than a dozen of his men. In statements after the arrest, police sources said they’d broken up a sit-down, convened to plan the murder of senior criminal figures.

But such pre-emptive measures have had only limited success. A few weeks ago, for example, two assailants on motorcycles sped up to 27-year-old criminal Rafi Ben-Shimol as he was strolling down King George Street in the heart of Tel Aviv. It was 8:15 in the morning, and Ben Shimol stopped to stretch in front of a bustling day care center. Ignoring the scores of parents and toddlers congregating nearby, the would-be assassins stopped by Ben Shimol and opened fire.   Fortunately, no one was hurt.   Next time, the outcome may be much uglier.

In the meantime, Israelis, a people divided over many crucial issues, largely agree that organized crime poses one of the gravest threats to their society, taxing the police, challenging the justice system, and terrorizing the streets. While rarely reported about outside of Israel, the new generation of criminals, young and ruthless, are emerging as the country’s biggest home-grown menace. If they are not curbed – an effort that would require not only major funding but also a collective effort on behalf of the population – the country may increasingly find itself tearing not from without but from within.

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL

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 one night at a house party in Yad Eliyahu. “People think it’s just the terrorism and war, but it’s the cost of living that’s killing us too. You get paid every month in shekels, but your rent, electricity, water bills are calculated on the U.S. dollar.”

A few years ago, a Tel Aviv cab driver committed suicide by setting himself on fire, and his last words were reportedly that he could no longer stand the economic stress of life in the Holy Land. Of course, what’s bad for the average working man is generally good for the underworld, and Israeli society in recent years has seen an explosion in gambling, loansharking, and teenage drug use.

Making matters even worse was the unprecedented wave of consumerism that has washed Israel since the early 1990s. As the Oslo peace process brought with it tremendous new financial investments, Israelis watched with awe as their country, once a quiet, socialist society, began displaying many of the attributes of rampant capitalism. Local hummus joints were overshadowed by rapidly multiplying McDonald’s franchises, small theaters were razed to make room for multiplexes, and enormous malls popped up in every town, offering Israelis more and more temptations to part them from their hard-earned salaries.
This, in turn, lead to more debt, more gambling, and more greed. Casinos, once limited to backrooms of seedy apartments in Tel Aviv or Haifa, became commonplace, with hundreds more mushrooming all over the country during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Israelis living in the country’s periphery no longer needed to travel to the big cities to dispose of their disposal incomes as crafty mobsters set up local illegal gambling dens and drew on a network of relatives and friends to attract customers and increase revenue.

Most often, the government’s response to the shifting economic reality was pushing further privatization. The banks, the national telephone company, even most kibbutzim, all went up for sale and were snatched up by hungry entrepreneurs. The Mafia was never far behind: Israel’s crime lords were quick to jump on the privatization bandwagon, grabbing hold of everything from newly privatized swaths of land to newly privatized industries.

Aryeh Alperon, for example, a member of the famed Alperon crime family, wasted no time when the government began privatizing the recycling industry in the late 1990s. He formed a company called Habakbuk Ha’lohet, Hebrew for the Flaming Bottle, and he used his underworld clout to terrorize competitors into submission. Not surprisingly, other mob bosses became envious of Alperon’s easy profits, and started competing recycling companies. Soon enough, empty bottles were cause for bloodshed.

But Israel’s gangsters found other ways to capitalize on the privatization trend, targeting the country’s newly minted captains of industry. Many of the young entrepreneurs who legally acquired control of the government’s former assets found themselves hounded by mob bosses. This was the same old game of extortion and protection on a far larger scale: instead of strong-arming small business owners into partnership, gangsters were now putting the squeeze on Israel’s new millionaires.

Alongside internal Israeli privatization, however, came the phenomenon of globalization. With international travel more common and cell phones and the Internet making communication more accessible, Israeli mobsters began looking outside the borders of their country for potential markets. Just as Colombian kingpins like Pablo Escobar were able to dominate the importation of cocaine into the United States by making use of long-standing marijuana smuggling routes, the new Israeli Ecstasy kingpins had a unique advantage over competing global mafiosi.  They owned the underground drug labs in the Netherlands and Belgium and already had an infrastructure in place for smuggling diamonds, often using strippers and ultra-Orthodox Jewish teenagers as drug mules on flights to New York and Los Angeles.

No one, perhaps, played the smuggling game more shrewdly than the Abergil brothers, the infamous crime kingpins based in the coastal resort town of Netanya. Earlier this week, an Israeli court ordered the extradition of the Abergils, alongside several of their colleagues, to the United States, revealing an intricate global network of criminal activity. The Abergils, the proud proprietors of advanced Ecstasy-manufacturing laboratories in Belgium, were suppliers looking for a distribution network, which they discovered in the form of the Vineland Boyz, one of Los Angeles’s murderous Latino street gangs. A clever smuggling enterprise was soon put in place – including such lovely flourishes as stuffing the drugs into toy tigers – and business was booming.

But crime business, of course, is never without its glitches: American authorities became increasingly aware of the Abergil’s growing presence in the summer of 2003, when a cabal of gangsters affiliated with the family assassinated the poetically named Sami Atlas, an Israeli drug dealer living in Los Angeles they suspected of pilfering Ecstasy pills. Realizing the truly global nature of the Abergil’s enterprise, federal authorities launched a fevered investigation, logging hundreds of hours of wiretaps, interviews with witnesses and accomplices, and other forms of surveillance to bring down the Abergils. Last August, a Jerusalem Magistrate Court ruled to keep the Abergil brothers and two of their accomplices in custody for 20 days pending a formal request by U.S. law enforcement for their extradition. The custody was prolonged in mid-September. The brothers were getting antsy: During a hearing in late October, Meir Abergil, the alleged financial mastermind of the gang headed by his brother, shouted to the judge, Yitzhak Milanov, “Sentence us to death here and now.  I am the chairman of my nerves and my health.” Finally, this week, the extradition orders came through. The Abergils would face justice.

And yet, the global Ecstasy market the Abergils helped create is monstrous: in 2005, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime valued it at just over $16 billion.

With such newfound riches, Israel has begun to see rocket assassination attempts between rival mob crews, drive-by shootings with hit-men dressed like ninjas on motorcycles, and the sort of brazen daylight car bombings that took the life of Ya’akov Alperon.  And successful prosecutions are next-to-impossible, due to the abject fear of most eyewitnesses to Mafia crimes.

“We’re about five years behind the criminals,” Arye Livneh, head of the government’s newly created witness protection program, recently told the Los Angeles Times, noting that the program won’t even begin protecting prospective mob informants until next summer.  “This is a tiny place. It’s not easy to hide someone in Israel.” Israeli mobsters, then, have few other choices but to fight. Theirs is a war that has quickly dragged the entire country down a spiral of violence and bloodshed.

Tomorrow: The fifth and final part of Holyland Gangland: The Shape of Things to Come

Abergil Brothers’ Extradition Approved [Jerusalem Post]
Previously: Holy Land Gangland

This is the second installment in a five-part series about organized crime in Israel. Click here to read Part I.

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.

Within hours, the Israeli media was abuzz with predictions of a bloody chain-reaction—a full-scale mob war to avenge the assassination of Alperon, patriarch of “the last of the old Sicilian-style Israeli families,” as one crime expert described him.  A thick-necked ex-boxer and feared extortionist who’d risen from poverty in Givat Shmuel, an impoverished suburb of Tel Aviv, Alperon had just finished visiting his son, Dror, currently serving a prison sentence for extortion. Despite a well-documented list of enemies, and repeated assassination attempts against him and his brothers, Alperon had taken none of the security measures typical of the new breed of Israeli crime lords, eschewing bodyguards and bullet-proofed vehicles.  By all accounts, he was a ruffian of the old-school; in 2006, at a “mafia summit” held at the Daniel Hotel in Herzliya, sources say it was Ya’akov Alperon who personally stabbed one of his most bitter rivals, Amir Mulner, in the neck.

Law enforcement officials immediately painted Mulner, a young but fast-rising mobster known for his ruthlessness and explosives expertise, as the most likely culprit in Alperon’s murder.

A day after the car bombing, during a highly charged funeral at the Ra’anana Cemetery, one of Alperon’s sons was heard shouting his vow of revenge.  “I will send back that person to God,” he screamed. “He won’t have a grave because I’ll cut off his hands, head, and body.”

Meanwhile, outside the cemetery, scenes straight from The Godfather unfolded, as photojournalists were threatened and beaten by Alperon associates for daring to aim their cameras at the gathering mourners.

But the assassination was more than just a juicy tabloid story. Most Israelis realized that the bomb that offed Alperon had turned a page in the history of organized crime in their country, ushering in an era of unbridled violence.  A powerful explosion, in broad daylight, in the center of town, with no regard for innocent bystanders—this was new and shocking by the relatively tame standards of the Israeli mob.

For experts tracking the crime wave currently washing over Israel, the escalation in violence seemed nearly inevitable, the result of complex economic forces. Once a socialist country, Israel is experiencing the turbulent aftershocks of a rapid process of privatization, orchestrated, in large part, by the current prime minister and former minister of finance, Benjamin Netanyahu. Like all sectors of Israel’s economy, organized crime, too, found itself needing to generate more revenue and withstand fiercer competition.

For Israel’s mob bosses, the new economic reality also provided a host of opportunities to get rich quick. Vast swaths of government-held lands were privatized, allowing gangsters like Alperon to quickly move in and seize lucrative real estate before legitimate developers had a chance to offer official bids. Industries once run by the state, such as bottle recycling, were delivered into the hands of private entrepreneurs, with key mob bosses often elbowing out the competition and taking charge. And extortionists who once focused on helpless, small mom-and-pop stores in the hard-hit neighborhoods of Tel Aviv put on a suit and a tie and muscled their way into some of Israel’s most sterling boardrooms, forcing a long line of respectable businessmen into partnership.

While there is no reliable number, an analysis of press reports and expert opinions shows that whereas Israeli organized crime was once a limited operation–limited to three or four major cities and generating no more than several tens of millions of dollars annually–it has, in the last decade, flourished to a multi-billion dollar enterprise, with branches all across Israel and all around the world.

No one, perhaps, typifies this growth more than a stout, baby-faced mob boss named Ze’ev Rosenstein.

Before Alperon’s murder, the biggest news to come out of Israel’s Mafia circles in decades was the 2004 arrest of the Ecstasy kingpin Rosenstein, “Zevik” to his friends. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has branded Rosenstein “the worst of the worst” of international drug traffickers, and alleged that for years he’s been responsible for the distribution of millions of Ecstasy pills in the United States and Europe.

Law enforcement experts estimate that Israeli mobsters like Rosenstein control approximately 80 percent of the Ecstasy sold worldwide. In a sweeping investigation ranging from New York to Prague, Amsterdam, and Tel Aviv, the American authorities finally succeeded in charging Rosenstein with conspiring to distribute over 700,000 tablets of 3,4 Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, as Ecstasy is technically known. (That figure is just the tip of the iceberg: all 700,000 of those Ecstasy tablets were seized in just one Manhattan apartment in July 2001, and barely represent the tip of the iceberg of Rosenstein’s immense production capacity).

Naturally, the stratospheric success enjoyed by Rosenstein and his fellow bosses aroused deep envy in a new generation of aspiring gangsters, ruthless young men who were willing to do anything for a slice of the crime pie. Cities like Tel Aviv and Netanya, bustling with chic restaurants, nightclubs, and multimillion-dollar beachfront condos, have become the backdrop for a full-scale mob war, as the bosses of the country’s major crime families attempt to assassinate each other with increasing regularity.

To the uninitiated, the feuds and alliances of this war make it nearly impossible to follow. Israel has at least three major crime families–one run by Rosenstein and his protégé, Mulner; one run by the Abutbul family in Netanya; and one run by the Alperon family–as well as a host of smaller and regional organizations, such as Shalom Domrani’s crew, which controls most of the organized crime in the south of the country. These criminal enterprises are as likely to partner on complex financial deals as they are to order hits on each other’s bosses, creating an interlocking criminal web that is as confusing as it is rapidly changing. But as is the case in all other businesses, the bottom line remains the same: with big money up for grabs, Israel’s mobsters will stop at nothing.

Which explains, perhaps, the rapid breakdown in the unwritten code of conduct. Whereas mob bosses like Alperon took pride in walking around without bodyguards or guns, the new generation of thugs is enamored with ingenious and violent plots. In July 2003, for example, Israel police busted “Nikita,” a 17-year-old girl from Be’er Sheva as she was en route to carry out a mob hit. “I was supposed to get the gun and shoot [the intended victim],” she told interrogators. Later that month a gangster named Aharon Masika, a.k.a. “The Assassin,” was murdered on a crowded street by a gunman dressed as an ultra-Orthodox Jew. The faux rebbe calmly pulled a gun from his black frock and dispatched The Assassin with a point-blank shot between the eyes. More often than not, the hitmen rely on state-of-the-art technology: Yisrael “Alice” Mizrahi, one of the country’s most-feared mobsters, was killed by a remote-controlled bomb hidden under the driver’s seat of his Mercedes SUV—the police called it a “super professional job”—that sheered off the steering wheel while leaving the wheels and underbody of the vehicle intact.

A particularly violent reminder of Israeli organized crime’s descent into madness came on December 10, 2003, when a massive noonday explosion rocked Yehuda Halevy Street in downtown Tel Aviv, destroying a currency-exchange kiosk owned by Rosenstein. It was the seventh attempt on his life since 1996. The pudgy gangster escaped unharmed, earning himself a new moniker–The Wolf with Seven Lives–but the explosion killed three innocent bystanders and left dozens wounded.   The bomb was first thought to be the work of a Palestinian extremist, until Shlomo Aharonisky, the national police commander, told the nation it was the work of the underworld.

The Wolf’s luck, however, finally ran out. After Rosenstein’s arrest–he was the first Israeli crime boss ever to be extradited to the United States–a vacuum was created in the top ranks of Israel’s organized crime world, leaving a horde of wild-eyed Young Turks gunning for supremacy. The stakes were raised again. An all-out battle for the top spot commenced.

This, in turn, called for more desperate measures. Israeli mobsters decided to target not only each other but also the authorities that were trying to put a stop to their enterprise, something which gangsters had once considered taboo. In July 2004, Tel Aviv District Court Judge Adi Azar was shot dead at point-blank range outside his home in northern Tel Aviv by a gunman disguised as a security guard, who rode up on a motorcycle, pumped two shots from a silencer-equipped pistol into the judge’s chest, and then escaped into the night. It was the first time in the country’s history a judge had been assassinated.

In the intervening years, the risk to other jurists has only heightened.  Earlier this year, Haaretz reported that ten Israeli judges are currently under police protection due to death threats from criminals.

More than law-enforcement officials, however, it was the killing of innocent bystanders that most enraged Israelis. In the most sickening case of “collateral damage,” Margarita Lautin, a 31-year-old social worker, was mistakenly shot in front of her husband and two young children in July 2008, during a failed assassination attempt on gang members on the beachfront in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv.  The next morning, the front page of Maariv carried a single-word headline: “Enough!”

Reacting to the uproar, and responding to criticism that the authorities were incapable of dealing with increasingly bold and murderous crime families, the Israeli police has, in recent months, ramped up its battle against organized crime. In addition to forming a new national crime-fighting unit named Lahav 433, intended to coordinate intelligence and operational activities, the police also recently launched the country’s first witness-protection program and instructed police units previously designated to fighting terrorism to make crime their new focus.

Such measures, said Shlomo Giora Shoham, one of Israel’s premier authorities on crime and a researcher at Tel Aviv University’s criminology department, are essential.  Sitting in his small, shaded garden in the northern Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Hasharon–not far from the raucous scene of Ya’akov Alperon’s funeral—the dour, bearded Shoham railed against the breakdown of cultural values in Israel, particularly among the youth. “There was a time when the army was a great value,” he said. “But right now, there are almost no volunteers to the crack units. The Orthodox are the only ones volunteering.  The majority of Israelis are more or less law-abiding, but they are confused as far as values are concerned. The so-called war against drugs is completely lost. The highest rate of drug addiction is in the kibbutzim these days.  For most of the young, it’s pure escapism.  The gambling, the sex industry; they’re going for the quick kicks.”

The professor sighed. “There’s nothing to stop them,” he added. “There are no boundaries, no limits. And as Ivan Karamazov said, ‘If everything is possible, then nothing is true.’”

Tomorrow: Part III of Holy Land Gangland: The Quarter of No Hope