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The Russians Are Coming!
By Robert I. Friedman / 296 pages, $25.95 (hardcover) / Published by Little, Brown
The New York Review of Books November 16, 2000
Review written By RAYMOND BONNER author of Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America /

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 rag doll 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.

The Russian 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.

Russians in Brooklyn caught in $72 million Medicare fraud ($251 million nationwide Medicare mills' fraud)

Feds say this poster urged patients to keep mum about a $72 million Medicare scam. Pictured is Brooklyn resident Valentina Mushinskaya, who allegedly accepted a $1,500 kickback in exchange for allowing doctors to submit her Medicare account for 3,774 medical services over six years.

A Brooklyn medical office used a Soviet-era propaganda poster to tell Russian-immigrant patients to keep quiet about kickbacks they were getting for letting doctors submit thousands of bogus Medicare claims in their names, federal prosecutors revealed yesterday. "Don't gossip!" warned the Russian-language poster that prominently hung in the "kickback room" of the Bay Medical office on Bay Parkway -- where patients literally lined up for illegal payoffs of a couple of a hundred dollars or so each.

But not everyone kept their mouths shut. Federal authorities got several people to rat out the alleged scam and arrested dozens of doctors, employees and patients of Bay Medical and other Medicare "mills" elsewhere in Brooklyn and in Miami, Detroit, Houston and Baton Rouge, La.

It is the largest Medicare-fraud prosecution ever, totaling $251 million in funds swindled from the federal health-insurance program.

The poster's threats helped Bay Medical steal $72 million by submitting fraudulent claims, prosecutors said. Among those busted was 82-year-old Brooklyn resident Valentina Mushinskaya, who allegedly accepted a $1,500 kickback in exchange for allowing doctors to submit her Medicare account for 3,774 medical services over six years.

Prosecutors said Mushinskaya's doctors at Solstice Wellness Center in Rockaway Park fraudulently billed Medicare $259,902 and ended up being reimbursed $141,161 for those services, which the Ukrainian immigrant Mushinskaya never received.

After Mushinskaya was released on $35,000 bond, her nephew proclaimed she had no idea a scam was being perpetrated in her name. Seven other elderly patients of Solstice also were charged. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/hushin_russian_in_klyn_med_fraud_dwMigEMJQtPhYzWlvvIGpM