[Liz]

Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NY, is considered a hot spot for the "Russian Mafia." In the 1970s, the most notorious leg of the Russian mafia served as a robbery gang for larger Russian crime syndicates in New York City. A crime boss from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NY denies having any connection to the Russian-speaking Mafia.

The major Russian criminal element in Brighton Beach was the international Russian mafia group, known as vor v zakone or "vory," and the first vory crime boss in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, was Evsei Agron, who controlled the area's crime during the 70s and 80s until his death in 1985.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s, many ethnic Russian criminals illegally entered the United States, coming primarily to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. The infamous vor Vyacheslav Ivankov, who dominated the Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, underworld until his arrest in 1995, arrived during this wave.

[Liz]

In 2003, Schumer welcomed Putin to New York City as the Russian oil company Lukoil opened its first gas station in Manhattan.

In a 2003 New York Post article, Schumer bragged of the new alliance to combat oil prices. “If Lukoil is successful and Russia is successful, then the price of oil will come down,” he said.

UPDATE On September 14, 2012 more than fifty Lukoil gas station owners in New Jersey and Pennsylvania temporarily raised their prices to over $8 a gallon to protest Lukoil's wholesale gas pricing. The owners are typically charged a wholesale price that is 5 to 10 cents a gallon more than their competitors and some are assessed an additional 25 to 30 cents per gallon based on their location.[30] According to the station owners this makes it difficult to be competitive with stations that sell more established brands for lower prices.

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REFERENCE Lukoil (/ˈluːkɔɪl/; Russian: Лукойл; stylized as LUKoil) is one of Russia's largest oil companies. It is also one of the largest global producers of oil.[3] In 2012, the company produced 89.856 million tons of oil (1.813 million barrels) per day.[4] Headquartered in Moscow, Lukoil is one of the largest public companies (next to ExxonMobil) in terms of proven oil and gas reserves. In 2008, "According to the data audited by Miller and Lents"[5] the company had 19.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent per SPE standards. This amounts to some 1.3% of global oil reserves. The company has operations in more than 40 countries around the world.[6][7] (HAT TIP IKI)

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LUKOIL'S EB SITE http://lukoilamericas.com/en/