Douglas Century - The Last Boss of Brighton: Boris Biba Nayfeld and the Rise of the Russian Mob in America

Jeffrey L. Ward

For Marcia and Lena

POWER IS GIVEN ONLY TO THE ONE WHO DARES TO BEND DOWN AND PICK IT UP. THERES ONLY ONE THING THAT MATTERS, ONLY ONE: TO BE ABLE TO DARE!

RASKOLNIKOV IN FYODOR DOSTOEVSKYS CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

THE BASIC CREED OF THE GANGSTER, AND FOR THAT MATTER OF ANY OTHER TYPE OF CRIMINAL, IS THAT WHATEVER A MAN HAS IS HIS ONLY SO LONG AS HE CAN KEEP IT, AND THAT THE ONE WHO TAKES IT AWAY FROM HIM HAS NOT DONE ANYTHING WRONG BUT HAS MERELY DEMONSTRATED HIS SMARTNESS.

HERBERT ASBURY, THE GANGS OF NEW YORK

New York Times

One Is Killed and Two Wounded by Gunmen at a Brooklyn Office

FEB. 4, 1986

By Michael Norman

Two men fired automatic weapons through the side door of a wholesale gasoline company in Brooklyn yesterday, killing one man and wounding two others, the police said.

The shootings took place at 12:15 P . M . at the offices of the Platenum Energy Company at Avenue U and Batchelder Street in the Sheepshead Bay section.

Last night, the police were sorting out the incident and interviewing witnesses and the wounded.

According to the police, the office workers spoke Russian, and the authorities said last night that they were trying to determine if there was a link between the shootings and a Russian crime group.

Alice T. McGillion, the deputy police commissioner for public information, said there were a small number of people involved in crime with a Russian background, and were looking to see if its connected to that...

Asked about the assailants use of automatic weapons, one of which was identified as a 9-millimeter submachine gun, she said:

A machine gun is not normally what we see.

Five people were in the office of the red brick building when the gunmen knocked on the side door. They exchanged words in Russian with two employees inside, then fired through the door into the office and fled on foot down Avenue U, the police said....

The police identified the dead man as Elia Zeltser, 34 years old, of 2387 Ocean Avenue in Sheepshead Bay. He was pronounced dead at Coney Island Hospital.

The wounded, who were also taken to Coney Island Hospital, were identified as Boris Nayfeld, 38, of 161 Nevada Avenue in Egbertville, Staten Island, and Michael Vax, 27, of the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. Mr. Nayfeld was wounded in the right hand and was listed in good condition. Mr. Vax was wounded in the chest and forearm and was in stable condition.

From The New York Times. 1986 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

* * *

On February 4, 1986, as Boris Mikhailovich Nayfeldthe most notorious Soviet-Jewish migr mobster then active in the United Stateslay in the ER of Coney Island Hospital, recovering from the 9 mm bullet wound to his right hand, he spoke in heated tones, solely in Russian, to the assembled members of his brigada, or crime crew.

Boris had clearly seen the face of the gunman whod burst through his office door brandishing an Uzi 9 mm submachine gun; he knew exactly whod shot him through the hand and murdered his best friend, Ilya Zeltzerknown as Zelya. Boris had been standing only feet away as one of the Uzis bullets had blown Zelyas right eye out of his head.

There in his hospital bed, Boris laid out his plan to track down the shootera fellow Soviet-Jewish migr gangster, originally from Kiev. The killer was, in fact, a former friend of Boris Nayfeldsa well-known criminal in Brighton Beach and a man who, like Boris, had done hard time in a Soviet prison camp before emigrating to Brooklyn.

The conversation was overheard by someone who understood Russian, and two NYPD homicide detectives promptly came to interview Boris at his bedside, demanding that he give a witness statement, revealing the identity of the suspected murderer.

Boris repeatedly denied all knowledge.

He flat-out refused to cooperate with the open investigation.

Look, the cops kept pressuring me, but I wasnt going to tell them a word. I stuck to my story. Didnt see a face. Didnt know who might have done it. Didnt see shit. Why would I tell the musors a fucking thing? Thats not our way, Boris tells me today, thirty-six years after the brazen daytime attack inside his office on Avenue U and Batchelder Street.

Why talk to them? Of course, I knew who shot usId seen his face clearlyand, believe me, I didnt want the cops to catch him. I had every intention of tracking down this motherfucker and killing him myself!

I shouldnt be alive today.

That was one of the first things Boris Nayfeld told me when I met him four years ago.

On a sweltering Saturday in late June 2018, we sat outdoors at Tatiana Grill, a popular restaurant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, tossing back shots of Russian vodka chased by the warm salty Atlantic breeze, surrounded by young women from St. Petersburg and Kiev and Odessa who wore more makeup than clothes.

Known to his friends and family as Biba and described in the New York tabloids as the last boss of the original Russian Mafia in America, Boris had every right to marvel at the fact that he was alive and smiling and talking into my digital recorder. Hed survived multiple assassination attemptsshot point-blank by that Uzi submachine gun in 1986; he also escaped unscathed in 1991 when a grenade planted under his Lincoln Town Car failed to detonate. At age eighteen, he served three years of hard labor in a Soviet prison camp; after emigration to the United States, he spent a substantial portion of his life in various federal penitentiaries.

Now seventy-four, Boris is still an imposing figure with a shaved head, piercing blue eyes, and a burly physique covered in prison-inked tattoos. Four macabre skulls. A menacing tail-rattling scorpion. A massively hooded king cobra. A Star of David inset with a Hebrew Bible topped by an elaborate crown. To initiates in the world of Russian organized crime, the blue ink on his upper body can be read like a pictorial storybook, rendering Nayfelds entire rsum as a professional criminal: its a rap sheet that includes convictions as a racketeer, a heroin trafficker, a money launderer, and an extortionist. Hes also been suspected of orchestrating several high-profile gangland murders, though he was never charged or indicted and hasof courserepeatedly denied complicity.

Few of his contemporaries from the Soviet migr underworld in Brighton Beach made it to his advanced age. Many, though not all, died public and violent deaths. Boris is virtually the last mobster of his generation standing.

The ultimate survivor.

His life story offers us a window into a singular moment in modern historywhen a wave of Jews fleeing Soviet oppression in the 1970s arrived in the United States and, following in the footsteps of a previous generation of young hoodlums like Meyer Lansky, Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, and Louis Lepke Buchalter, applied both brains and brawn to making their fortunes as outlaws in America.

But that wave of Soviet migr criminals in the 1970s and 80s was unlike any that had come before. They were cosmopolitan, sophisticated, often university-educated men whod survived for years in the Soviet Union by applying their ingenuity and daring to bilk the corrupted state. They settled in the decaying South Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, for generations a haven for immigrant Jews, and refashioned it as their own Little Odessa.