November 1–8, 2001

news|underworld

From Russia with Love

Global connections make it harder to track local mafioskis.

by Jim Barry

Boris Badeoff: Alexander Faynberg, pictured in this police mug shot, was the first Mob Tsar.

Several months ago two Russian gangsters walked into a Polish bar in Port Richmond. They looked out of place in a bar frequented by a new generation of Polish émigrés in their 20s and 30s.

A group of pretty Polish women and their American friend — a woman from Northeast Philadelphia who is married to a Polish immigrant — were seated at one of the tables, drinking Polish beers, chain-smoking cigarettes and talking about the time they all spent together at Temple University where they met five years ago.

The Russians mobsters approached the table and tried to strike up a conversation with the young women.

The Russians bragged that they lived in Camden, N.J., in an all-black neighborhood. They claimed that everyone, including the local drug dealers, feared them. They boasted about the money they earned from various criminal enterprises. They tried to impress the women by describing how they had killed a man by strangling him with their bare hands.

The women were not amused and emphasized the point by ignoring the Russians.

At the same time, a number of young Polish men at the bar — all wearing leather jackets despite the warm spring weather — mumbled among themselves and angrily stared at the Russians.

After a few uncomfortable minutes, the Russian gangsters backed off and strutted out of the bar.

The American woman, who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, told City Paper in a recent interview that, "these guys were cavemen. They thought that bragging about bloody, disgusting stuff like that would impress me and my friends.

"There are a few bad criminals in the Polish community in Port Richmond but mostly we ignore them. The Russians, on the other hand, none of us can stand them here! I went to high school in the Northeast and there was a whole gang of Russian kids that was connected to the Russian mob. They wore gold chains and had great cars. But to me they just looked like punks. There are a lot of Russian mob wannabes in Northeast Philly. Just ask my friend about the local Russian mob," she said indicating a beautiful blonde woman with big red lips and a long European cigarette dangling from her mouth.

The woman asked not to be identified other than as "Marja." Marja explained that she came to Philadelphia with her parents from Poland when she was 16. Marja's cousin, who is almost as pretty as her, is the traffic reporter for a local TV station.

After high school Marja began to date a young Russian who turned out to be a member of the local Russian mob.

"On our dates we went to the same restaurants every weekend. All of his criminal friends were there. All of them in expensive suits and with Rolex watches but nobody had a job. Everybody drank too much and there were beautiful Russian waitresses singing Donna Summer disco tunes in Russian. We always danced until four o’clock in the morning. My boyfriend had lots of money, beautiful cars and he never went to work. I always ask him what he does to make money and he say, ‘investments’ and laugh. He was never mean.

"He was not violent with me but I didn’t want to live as a gangster’s girlfriend. So then I wanted to break it off with him. He did not want to break it off with me."

Marja said that after she refused to see him any more her ex-beau began to stalk her. He smashed her car windows. He showed up at her job in the Franklin Mills Mall in Northeast Philadelphia. He called her on the telephone all the time and questioned her friends about where she went and who she saw.

"Suddenly he was very violent toward me. He threatened me and called me all the time. ‘I don’t want you to go with other men’, he said. I didn’t know what to do. Nobody wanted to deal with him. My father is a mechanic. He is a big man and he is not afraid of anybody," Marja explained. "But he told me to stay away from this boy because he was part of the Mafia and nobody wants trouble from the Russians."

Eventually her Russian boyfriend tired of bothering Marja and moved on.

"Sometimes I see him driving through Northeast Philadelphia on the Roosevelt Boulevard and I think, ‘He’s not in jail yet? He’s not dead?’ I don’t like to think that something bad will happen to him but I think it’s better it happen to him before he and his Mafia friends do something bad to other people."

Marja was approached by the FBI when she graduated Temple. They wanted to recruit her because she spoke Polish and Russian. "I thought about FBI," Marja said. "It sounded interesting. But I wanted to get a masters degree and now I don’t know if I would do it. The Russian Mafia is a very scary group to investigate, and being an FBI agent would not make me feel any safer."

Russian organized crime groups first appeared in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. The first known leader of Russian organized crime in Philadelphia, according to law enforcement sources, was Alexander Faynberg. Faynberg was born in Russia in 1932 and arrested for criminal activity several times when he lived in the USSR. After emigrating to the United States, Faynberg was arrested in California, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. Faynberg sometimes used the alias Alex Murro.

Faynberg ran several stores on Bustleton Avenue in Northeast Philly and police claim that local members of the Russian mob often met there to discuss mob business or receive their marching orders from Faynberg.

Faynberg was dead by 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and thousands of Russian gangsters made their way to the United States.

A law enforcement agent who has investigated the Russian mob in Philadelphia for 20 years told City Paper in a recent interview that, "when Faynberg was around it was easier to keep tabs on his group because there weren’t that many here. Now there are elements of at least six different Russian crime families here. Unlike the Cosa Nostra, these guys operate all over the country and all over the globe. The boss can be in Moscow, the crime family hit man in L.A. and the soldier in Bucks County. That makes it a lot harder than sitting in front of a store on Bustleton Avenue watching a group of hoodlums. This generation of the Russian Mafia is so much more sophisticated, so much more dangerous and so much harder to investigate. "