In New York, the 'father of the Russian mafia' died: who was Marat Balagula
Former Odessa resident Marat Yakovlevich Balagula, who served three sentences for debit card fraud and gasoline tax evasion, died in New York. He had a reputation as the “godfather of the Russian mafia,” which was mainly created for him by my late colleague Robert Friedman, author of the acclaimed “Red Mafia,” writes Air force.
Balagula, who turned 9 on September 76, died of cancer. As one of his former bodyguards told me, “he gave up chemistry.”
In the USSR, Marat ran a restaurant on the ship “Ivan Franko”, which Friedman, despite my protests, persistently called “Ivan Frenkel”. He traveled to dozens of countries on it and became rich from the resale of things bought there.
Balagula emigrated to the United States from Odessa in 1977 and settled in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, where he became a co-owner of one of the first Russian restaurants, Sadko, and then Odessa, where Willy Tokarev sang for many years. He was accompanied by Irina Ola, who later became the fictitious wife of Vyacheslav Ivankov, nicknamed Yaponchik, and who disappeared forever after his arrest in 1995 in the depths of the witness protection program.
On the subject: How Russian mafia captured America
Having sold Sadko in 1980, Balagula purchased a gas station in Queens, and then engaged in the wholesale sale of fuel, in which he achieved remarkable success: as one prosecution witness testified at his trial, there was a period when Balagula controlled all trade in “leftist” gasoline in area of Greater New York, where he employed up to 500 people. By “legal” gasoline we meant fuel on which taxes were not paid.
Tax evasion in the 1980s in the United States became a big criminal business that cost the treasury of the US states literally billions of dollars. The leading role in it began to play Soviet emigrants who did not invent it, but put it on a new level. Roofed their own bandits and Italian mafia clans.
For example, Balagula was under the patronage of the famous Lukese clan, whose killer Joseph Testa shot in June 1986 near the Odessa restaurant former Kiev resident Vladimir Reznikov (Vadik Reznik), who was trying to extort gasoline money from Balagula. Reznikov was the most successful “Russian” killer of that era and shot, among others, the writer and swindler Yuri Brokhin, as well as the first “godfather of the Russian mafia,” former Leningrader, thief in law Yevsey Agron.
Balagula readily admitted in an interview that his “business partners” dealt with Reznikov after he complained to them about him, but claimed that he had no idea that the “partners” belonged to Cosa Nostra.
At Brighton Beach, legends went about Balagula’s wealth and adventures, which were later retold by criminal journalists. In one of our conversations, he told me that the doors in his house cost 10 thousand dollars. Six months later, the Balagul said that he was just trolling me - in fact, the doors cost $ 500.
He actually pissed off. Say, he claimed in the same conversation that he had only $ 8 in his account at that time. But at the same time, he asked me to tell the journalist Friedman that he would pay him $ 100 thousand if he presented him with a photograph depicting Mikhail Gorbachev together with Balagula. The journalist claimed that Gorbachev was seen at Balagula’s birthday and that this was confirmed by his photograph. Balagula said that in Gorbachev’s life he hadn’t seen anything close.
The first time Balagulu was arrested in 1985 was not for fraud with gasoline, but for a scam with debit cards, in which he played only a peripheral role. The following year, the Philadelphia jury found him guilty.
Without waiting for the verdict, Balagula, released on bail of half a million dollars, fled abroad and over the next two and a half years managed to visit many countries, including South Africa and Sierra Leone, where he had an unsuccessful diamond business with Shabtai Kalmanovich, who He was subsequently convicted in Israel for espionage in favor of the USSR. The joker about Kalmanovich spoke invariably badly.
In 1989, Balagula (who later told me that he was simply tired of running and was no longer hiding) was detained at Frankfurt airport and extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to eight years in prison for a card scam and twice prosecuted for illegal gasoline. for which he received 10 and then almost seven and a half years. In particular, he pleaded guilty to tax evasion of $85 million.
In the late 1990s, when he called me from a Texas federal prison to the Odessa and Paradise restaurants because their numbers were on the approved list and mine was not, Balagula denied guilt and said that he confessed only at the instigation of a lawyer who misled him.
“I always paid taxes! - he said. “The companies from whom I bought gasoline did not pay.” Indeed, taxes had to be paid by shell companies opened in the name of shell owners, whom well-read Soviet emigrants called “Pounds.”
According to a widespread myth, Balagula led the Russian mafia after the murder in 1985 of the lawyer Eusebius Agron, although the deceased indignantly denied that I belonged to the criminal world. My relationship with the Balagula began to deteriorate in May 1998, when I called in the Brooklyn newspaper the thug Boris Nayfeld, or Bib, his comrade-in-arms.
Balagula had power in Brighton, which was explained to me by his wealth and proximity to the source of enrichment, that is, gasoline. People who made a living by evading the excise tax on fuel were referred to as “he is a gasoline worker” (less often “a column driver” - from a gas station) or “he is in gasoline.”
In the twilight period of Agron’s life, the household worker Balagula was much more influential than him and gave him a room in his sports club “El Carib”. Balagula was flattered that he had sheltered such a significant figure, but he already had much more weight than Agron, who had previously been mutilated by a bandit’s bullet.
On the subject: The last boss of the Russian mafia in New York asks to let him go home
Friedman wrote that Agron made $100 million a month, but Agron’s last life partner, singer Maya Rozova, who worked in the USSR for Oleg Lungstrem, told the author of these lines that only $90 thousand remained from the “first godfather of the Russian mafia,” hidden in the closet in a shoe box. Balagula was immeasurably richer, although he assured me that in his life he did not have two supertankers or an island off the African coast, which journalists attributed to him.
“I am not a beggar, not a beggar! - he said. - But not a multimillionaire, as they wrote! I've never had a million in my entire life. One! Do you understand or not?
I understood. But I did not believe it.
We met Balagula when the king of gasoline spent ten years and was passionate about writing world history.
“Now I am writing to Nicholas the First,” he said.
- And according to what sources?
— Encyclopedias, books. If I need a book, I write a request. And in Austin, the capital of Texas, they give me any book. The library here is very large, again - the Encyclopedia. I have about 10 books on the history of Russia, the book is entirely about Peter the Great. There is also about Catherine the Second.”
If Balagula completed his encyclopedic work, his fate is not known to me.
Read also on ForumDaily:
Mr. Jones: the story of a journalist who told the world about the Holodomor and interviewed Stalin
Green Gold, or How Avocado Has Become More Profitable than Marijuana
“Miami is ours”: why Russian businessmen and bandits settle in Trump towers
How Russian mafia launders money in America
How to recognize wine fakes without opening the bottle
Subscribe to ForumDaily on Google NewsDo you want more important and interesting news about life in the USA and immigration to America? — support us donate! Also subscribe to our page Facebook. Select the “Priority in display” option and read us first. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our РєР ° РЅР ° Р »РІ Telegram and Instagram- there is a lot of interesting things there. And join thousands of readers ForumDaily New York — there you will find a lot of interesting and positive information about life in the metropolis.