The immigrant invasion has degraded the glories of US democracy, and exploited our freedoms for fraudulent personal gain.
The New York Review of Books
November 16, 2000
The Russians Are Coming!
Review By RAYMOND BONNER
[DJ: Footnotes not included.]
Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America
by Robert I. Friedman
296 pages, $25.95 (hardcover)
published by Little, Brown
Robert Friedman's book is the first to describe in detail the Russian mobsters who have established criminal enterprises throughout the world. His prose sometimes makes it sound like a sequel to Pulp Fiction. A Russian killer in Brooklyn murders a boy, he writes, "by picking him up like a ragdoll with one hand and plunging a knife into his heart with the other." But more than any other reporter he reveals how sophisticated, ruthless, rich, and multinational Russian criminals have become.
Among other things, he writes, they have arranged the sale of military helicopters and a submarine for the Colombia drug barons, and they have acquired influence over the American National Hockey League by threatening players from Eastern Europe and Russia and extorting money from them. They have infiltrated the international financial system, rigging share prices and buying banks in Hungary, Israel, and California. Now they are expanding into Nigeria, South Africa, and Australia.
Investigators Say Fraud Ring Staged Thousands of Crashes,
By PATRICK HEALY, New York Times, August 12, 2003
"Law-enforcement officials said today that they had cracked an insurance-fraud ring that staged thousands of car accidents and then employed its own network of doctors, acupuncture therapists and fake medical clinics to bilk an insurance company out of $48 million.
Prosecutors and insurance experts said the ring was the largest of its kind ever broken in New York State. A grand jury on Long Island has issued 567 indictments, 86 of which were made public at a news conference here today. Those indicted included doctors, psychiatrists, chiropractors, dentists and nearly 20 bogus health-care clinics that were set up as part of the scheme to defraud State Farm Insurance, the Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas J. Spota, said. "It's one of the biggest busts in the nation in terms of its breadth, its scope and the dollars involved," said Robert Hartwig, the chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group. "We're talking about bringing down an entire network. It's analogous to bringing down a drug kingpin."
Mr. Spota said the ring used "runners" and "crash dummies" in cars that would cut in front of other cars, often driven by women with children or by elderly people, slam on the brakes, and cause a crash. The authorities said the investigation dates to 2001, when they received word from insurers who noticed the same names were popping up over and over on insurance claims. One runner was involved with about 1,000 accidents.
Although tales of insurance fraud are well known in New York, Suffolk County investigators and prosecutors said this network, which traces its roots to the heavily Russian Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, was especially large and complex. Mr. Spota would not link the series of frauds to Russian organized crime, but an insurance-fraud lawyer familiar with the case said the fingerprints of organized crime appeared to be all over it. Some profits from the frauds were channeled to businesses in Russia, while others were funneled into a Swiss bank account and withdrawn by Russian citizens, the authorities said."