New Era
In Imported Scams
By JERRY CAPECI and GENE MUSTAIN
Daily News Staff Writers
The Globus Group's brochures boasted that its
top executive was the ideal person to help the
upstart Manhattan company make a fortune in
Russia by offering Internet services to businesses.
Alexander Flykshteyn was from the Ukraine. He had
been a jewelry importer and commodities broker. He
was an expert on emerging markets, and Russia was
such a promising one the company expected growth of
237% in just two years.
Nearly 800 investors were so impressed they
purchased about $7 million in Globus stock, driving up
its price and making Flykshteyn and the other mainly
Russian emigres behind Globus a bundle when they
secretly sold their shares.
Everyone else lost, said the FBI, which recently
accused Flykshteyn and his partners of securities
fraud, money laundering and other crimes in a scam
that illustrates the financial impact of Russian-emigre
crime and the finagling spirit that often drives it.
"These people managed a very organized criminal
operation against citizens who succumbed to
high-pressure sales tactics and in some cases lost
their life savings," said New York FBI Director James
Kallstrom.
The Globus Group was a house of cards allegedly
constructed on imaginary transactions, phony
documents and false promises - all practically official
pastimes in the old Soviet Union, where oppression
produced a society where it was often necessary to
deceive in order to survive.
It also produced a class of well-educated crooks who
have changed the geography and character of
Russian-emigre crime in New York since the Soviet
Union fell in 1991 and Russian immigration here
increased nearly 900%.
Where Russian-emigre crime was once largely
associated with Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, it now
turns up across the city, upstate, on Long Island and in
nearby states. Brighton Beach is home to about
60,000 Russians - but nearly a half million now live in
New York alone.
This dispersal decreased the limited role the few small
organized gangs in Brighton Beach had in the overall
scheme of Russian-emigre crime. With their violence,
the gangs sometimes resembled traditional organized
crime - lending credence, but not much validity, to
claims that they constituted a mafia.
Today all but the last of the gang leaders are dead or in
prison. Now, more than it already was, Russian crime
is more opportunistic than monopolistic, and more
deceitful than violent.
"The scam mentality some Russians have is from living
in a system that you had to beat," said Felix Andreev,
a Russian immigrant who heads a Brighton Beach
business group. "If you didn't beat it, you didn't
survive."
The experience shaped attitudes that have proven hard
to break. Many Russians, for example, think it's okay
to steal from the government.
In the Soviet Union, only people in power had access
to quality goods. Everyone else had to connive, leading
to a black-market economy that became as important
as the government-run economy. To trade in the black
market, people stole from the government, which
controlled production.
"A lot of people who come from Russia still have that
attitude," said Peter Grinenko, an expert on Russian
crime for Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes.
"People went to their jobs not to work, but to steal."
The attitude turns up in countless crimes Russian
emigres committed here before and after the collapse
of communism - from the overbilling scams used to
cheat Medicaid to the underreporting schemes used to
evade taxes on gasoline.
The Soviet experience also made many Russians
experts at illusions their former rulers once used -
fake identities, phony documents, shell companies.
When Vyachleslav Ivankov, the most important
Russian criminal of the post-1991 era, was arrested in
New York, he was carrying papers that identified him
as an official of the Russian airline Aeroflot and as a
representative of a Fifth Ave. company that was
supposedly in the film business.
FBI agents also found he had five passports at his
oceanside apartment in Brighton Beach: three with
Russian names, one Polish name and one claiming he
was a citizen of the United Kingdom.
At Ivankov's apartment, FBI agents also found another
common tool of Russian criminals - a set of papers
for incorporating a business.
The papers had been provided by a Russian emigre,
Alexander Yegmenov, whose specialty was instant
shell-company kits that Ivankov and other criminals
used for money laundering and evading taxes. In the
few years he was in New York, Yegmenov sold 3,500
of them.
He has pleaded guilty to related immigration-fraud
crimes and been sent back to St. Petersburg, but the
bogus shell company remains a main feature of
Russian crime.
Meanwhile, however, just in Brooklyn, schemes that
would have been admired by most people in the Soviet
Union keep coming down the pike.
In the last year, Hynes' investigators arrested seven
Brighton Beach storeowners for buying food stamps at
a discount from Russian emigre welfare clients and
redeeming them at full cash value.
They have also arrested the Russian emigre operators
of several medical clinics in Brighton Beach,
Sheepshead Bay and Sunset Park for helping stage
phony automobile accidents and filing bogus medical
claims.
A few months before those arrests, 20 more Russian
emigres from across the city were arrested for reporting
their cars stolen and collecting on insurance when in
fact they had sold the cars to cops posing as
chop-shop operators in a sting dubbed Operation Steal
Wheels.
Finally, two weeks ago, three Russians were arrested
for setting up a phony company on Coney Island Ave.
and selling fake international drivers' licenses.
"I had a case like that when I began investigating
Russian crime 20 years ago," said the
Russian-speaking Grinenko, whose parents came from
Moscow and Kiev. "Most Russian crime is like that,
and a lot of people doing it don't think they're doing
anything wrong."
Original Story Date: 042297
Original Story Section: Crime File |
