The Most Dangerous Mobster in the World

According to the FBI and Israeli Intelligence, Semion Mogilevich rules over an arms-trafficking, money-laundering, drug-running, and art-smuggling ‘Red Mafia’

By by Robert I. Friedman

In two posh villas outside the small town of Ricany, near Prague, one of the most dreaded mob families in the world savagely murders its terrified victims. The mob’s young enforcers, trained by veterans of the Afghanistan war, are infamous for their extreme brutality. Their quarry, usually businessmen who have balked at extortion demands, are repeatedly stabbed and tortured, then mutilated before they are butchered. The carnage is so hideous that it has scared the daylights out of competing crime groups in the area.

The torture chambers are run by what international police officials call the Red Mafia, a notorious Russian mob family that in only six years has become a nefarious global crime cartel. Based in Budapest, it has key centers in New York, Pennsylvania, Southern California, and as far away as New Zealand.

The enigmatic leader of the Red Mafia is a 52-year-old Ukrainian-born Jew named Semion Mogilevich. He is a shadowy figure known as the ”Brainy Don”–he holds an economics degree from the University of Lvov–and until now, he has never been exposed by the media. But the Voice has obtained hundreds of pages of classified FBI and Israeli intelligence documents from August 1996, and these documents–as well as recent interviews with a key criminal associate and with dozens of law enforcement sources here and abroad–describe him as someone who has become a grave threat to the stability of Israel and Eastern Europe.

”He’s the most powerful mobster in the world,” crows Monya Elson, who is listed in classified documents as one of Mogilevich’s closest associates and partners in prostitution and money laundering rings. The Brighton Beach­based Elson, who once led a pack of thugs and killers known as Monya’s Brigada, is currently in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan awaiting trial for three murders and numerous extortions. (…Full Article)

 
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ESKOM and Electricity: The Truth

By The Real Realist

Sitting comfortably in my exile, I looked on aghast as the very worst of my predictions came true over the weekend, when Eskom failed to supply the mining industry with sufficient power to keep operations running. My mind flashed back to a story I wrote on the original ‘Why South Africa is Crap’ blog, which preceded this one, about when I visited Cape Town and was handed an ‘Eskom passport’ telling me how to save power and when power cuts would be etc. etc.

So I can’t say I was particularly shocked – I mean, after all, who would really have expected anything else? Who, apart from the demented liberals, would have ever thought that South Africa would end up any different from the rest of Africa? Not me.

Chatting by phone to Whites still in South Africa, I was struck by three things: firstly, their passive acceptance of it (“we will get by’) — for which I just feel disgust; secondly their crazy idea that buying generators will help them out of this mess (you clots, what happens when the petrol and diesel supplies become so intermittent that you can’t power your generators. And Don’t think it won’t happen, it will); and thirdly, the most astonishing thing (in fact, the only thing about this whole affair which did astonish me) was the claim that the power outages were occurring “because South Africa’s economy is booming and power production could not keep up.”

Now that one floored me. Crikey, of all the strange excuses I have ever heard, that one was the best.

The reality is that Eskom’s production has been dropping, directly because they have fired all the competent Whites and appointed Blacks – or, in many cases, no-one, in some sort of strange belief that skilled Whites were not necessary to keep things going. Hau, the machines, they will work without the White racists, was obviously the rationale. (more…)