When Victims Rule (pdf)

DRUGS AND DRUG MONEY LAUNDERING WITHIN JEWISH NETWORKS: THE ‘RUSSIAN MAFIA,’ ‘ULTRA-ORTHODOX’
MP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] strike a Deadly Blow to a Jewish
Criminal Organization.” The Jewish lobbying organizations argued that it was
inappropriate to note criminals by ethnicity (although the common nomer,
“Russian mafia,” garners little complaint from anyone), and that only seven of
31 arrested members of the gang smuggling drugs were Jewish. Claude Masson,
the assistant publisher of La Presse, noted in response to the Jewish attack that
all the leaders of the criminal group had been identified by police as Jews, and
added: “I think we’re playing with words a bit. I think we should be careful
about being so politically correct that we can no longer say what is happening
in our society.” [EISENTHAL, p. 4] (In 2001, Jacob Cohen-Shiri was arrested in
Montreal for a drug-related murder. A year earlier he had pleaded guilty to a
case of armed-robbery). [CHERRY, P., 5-8-01]
Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe, in their 1995 book Global Mafia. The
New World Order of Organized Crime, noted that
“In Toronto, Soviet gangs practiced extortion, gambling, loan-sharking,
and drug trafficking, much of it in conjunction with the Paul Volpe
group of the Buffalo La Costra Nostra crime family. During the 1970s and
1980s, various police investigations turned up Soviets, many of whom
said they were Jews who had immigrated from Israel. The men were treated
as run-of-the-mill bandits and the cases never got beyond the basic investigations.
In retrospect, police believe the Russian mob was behind
many of the crimes. The same held true in New York City, where Russian
gangs conducted ongoing crimes within the ethnic community, and expanded
beyond its borders into partnerships with the New York La Cosa
Nostra to whom they paid ‘an operating tax.’ It wasn’t until the breakup
of the USSR that thousands of gangsters flooded into North America,
many of them turning to the criminals living there who already knew the
ropes, the law, and the language. The immigrants connected with the local
former Soviet mobs and were quickly absorbed into the underworld.
They often formed their own more violent networks, demanding a larger
piece of the criminal pie.” [NICASO/LAMOTHE, 1995, p. 45-46]
In 2001, the Jewish Chronicle noted a similar story in Australia:
“Sydney’s Jewish community has been embarrassed about publicity in
the city’s two major newspapers about gang warfare to control the drug
trade in the Eastern Suburbs, where the majority of Sydney’s Jewish
population live. In a dawn raid last week, 40 police swooped on homes
across the city, taking in for questioning youths who were later charged
with kidnapping, extortion and robbery. The victims were described in
the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph as being members of
wealthy Jewish families. The leader of one of the gangs is also Jewish …
Stephen Rothman, president of Sydney’s Board of Deputies, told the JC:
‘We’ve told both papers that we are totally against ethnic labelling of any
kind. The Herald removed the Jewish tag in later editions, but the Telegraph
persisted and we will be taking this up with the paper.” [BEN-
JAMIN, H., 4-20-01]
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