THE SIGNAL IS a crumpled piece of paper dropped out of the car window. We're parked facing a wall in the underground garage of a Ralphs in East Hollywood. Sure enough, in the rearview mirror, here comes Nicky weaving up behind us in a half crouch in case we're armed. He pops into the backseat, directly behind me. My contact, "Arman," a California justice system employee and palpably nervous, slugs the car into gear.

Nicky is in his mid twenties, close-cropped hair and beard, leading-man good looks. He wears his rugby shirt loose to cover the large-caliber automatic jammed into his waistband.

"Ask him anything," says Arman as we pass strip clubs and bail-bond offices. "He doesn't want to tell you, he won't."

Okay. What kind of stuff does he do?

"Anything that makes money," Nicky says.

Generally, Russian-speaking gangsters like Nicky are similar to members of other ethnic crime groups here. They represent a very small percentage of a community into which, when pursued, they easily disappear. What sets the ex-Soviet apart in the estimation of Larry Langberg, an FBI special agent in charge of the bureau's L.A. Russian Organized Crime squad, is education and a willingness to use violence.

"Whatever the shortcomings of the former U.S.S.R.," says Langberg, "they really educated their people well. Even with the language and culture problem, these Russians are intelligent and educated enough to figure our systems out. They pull stunts here that other groups aren't smart enough to even try."

According to Langberg, 65 percent of the crimes committed in L.A. by Russian-speakers involve fraud: bank, insurance, medical, staged car accident, phone cloning, computer--virtually anything.

"They operate in small units, cells," says Lt. Ray Edey, a Russian Organized Crime unit specialist at the Glendale Police Department. "But unlike other crime groups, like the LCN [La Cosa Nostra], they're very fluid and unstructured. One day it's cargo theft, the next it's credit card fraud--and they're getting into drug dealing, too. They'll do business with anyone. Race means nothing; neither does ethnicity. If you can make them money, they'll sit down with you. They're totally entrepreneurial and opportunistic, totally mercenary."

And violent.

In 1992, West Hollywood sheriff's deputies answering an idling-car complaint interrupted a blood-soaked Russian emigre, Alexander Nikolaev, wearing a Hefty bag as a butcher's apron, industriously hacking up two murder victims, Vladimir Litvinenko and Andrey Kuznetsov. "He'd already cut off the fingertips," says Det. Roy Nunez of the sheriff's department's Russian Organized Crime unit, "and stuck them in a beer bottle. He was doing his sushi number on the bodies to remove the bullets so we couldn't run forensics tests. The intestines were being flushed down the toilet." Apparently drawing the short straws in an argument over profits, the decedents had belonged to a gang conducting credit card "bumouts"--pirating cards and their PIN numbers and maxing out the accounts.

In Glendale two years ago, a running gun battle of 40 to 50 shots, purportedly over an extortion attempt, erupted outside the Mirage clothing store on Glendale Avenue, leaving two dead and one wounded. During the next week, routine traffic stops of luxury cars revealed Soviet-Armenian males wearing bulletproof vests. Two of the victims, afraid of retaliation, refused to testify at the trial of the six suspects, who were then acquitted. But usually, the M.O. is a touch subtler.

"They tend to involve themselves in crimes where they know there's not a lot of jail time," says Lt. Edey of Russian and Soviet-Armenian gangsters. "They'll walk into a bank with a $50,000 dummy check, but you won't find too many of them robbing one. They're more afraid of being deported. You know, why go back and stand on the cheese line? Once we grab them and they realize they've got a little problem with the State Department, they start singing. They'll roll over on murders."

But the murders themselves can be difficult to investigate. "A person gets whacked sometimes who has nothing to do with nothing except they're related to somebody who pissed somebody off hundreds or even thousands of miles away," says Tim Spruill, of the Glendale Police Department's Russian Organized Crime task force. "Family is really important to these people; think how much better it is to make someone responsible for the death of a beloved niece or second cousin and set the whole family against them. It's a mind game they play with each other."

Most of the heavy lifting for the violent crimes is done by the Soviet Armenians, large numbers of whom arrived in L.A. undocumented or overstayed their visas after the U.S. State Department began tightening the immigration spigot in 1991.

"Many of them can't adjust to life here or don't want to, so they go back to what they know," says Arman. "In Soviet Armenia, they think, If we dilute the orange juice we sell, we can work half as hard for the same money and have twice as much time to go rob someone. The U.S. was smart enough to destroy communism but not smart enough to figure out what would happen next.

"You are like house dogs," he adds. "We are like street dogs."

Tall and imposing, with a distinctly military bearing--his father was a KGB colonel--Arman trained as a diplomat and spy and is fluent in four languages. After coming to L.A., he eventually found work within shouting distance of his educational level but only after the classic immigrant horror stories: the 16-hour low-wage workdays, the visa problem that resulted in a four-month repatriation to Moscow and the constant attempts by those who knew his background to involve him in organized crime.

"But I have this big security chief in my mind," says Arman. "My conscience."

Nicky, on the other hand, hewed to a different immigrant paradigm. Watching his parents work endless hours for little pay, he vowed to speed up the process for himself. "I could have gone to university," he says, "gotten a job in an office. But that was going to take too long. So I decided to make money the fastest way I could." Earning the respect of older Soviet-Armenian East Hollywood crime lords at the age of 14 by quickly and violently avenging an affront, he began working the usual white-collar frauds and putting together crews for extortion, kidnapping and street-level crimes like this one: A downtown jeweler is snatched into a van after a staged fender bender. Duct-taped and pistol-whipped, he's told his house has been invaded and, unless he coughs up the bypass codes to his store alarm, his family will be slaughtered. This is a bluff, but he doesn't know that. The robbery goes off smoothly, and the bleeding jeweler is dumped out of the van like a roll of used carpet.

Arman pulls over, and Nicky slips into the dusk falling on East Hollywood. He vanishes quickly. Both the FBI and the LAPD are looking for him. A month later, they will find him. He will be arrested on robbery and gun charges, with indictments pending on two murders.

DESPITE THEIR PROCLIVITY FOR violence, "the biggest danger these guys pose," says Lt. Edey of Russian-speaking gangsters like Nicky, "is not so much to public safety as to the economy. There are multimillion-dollar businesses going out of business and tens of millions being lost in taxes." Indeed, a 50-year-old tobacco brokerage went belly up after millions of packs of tax-evaded cigarettes precipitously drove down legitimate tobacco sales in L.A. and Orange counties. By evading excise taxes on diesel fuel, a Los Angeles Soviet-Armenian gang headed by a Rolls-Royce-driving, self-styled godfather, Hovsep Mikaelian, dodged $3.6 million in taxes in one year alone, according to the L.A. U.S. attorney's office.

As they become more assimilated, Russian-speaking gangsters are sliding into legitimate businesses like the textile industry and even the movie business--setting up low-profile production companies, laying out small-change development money for independent films, then closing up shop with freshly laundered funds. "They're good crooks, I have to give them that," says the Glendale PD's Spruill. "If they're stealing hubcaps, they'll make it into a big business."

But crime against Russians is also tremendously underreported by Russians, and crime statistics, broken down by race rather than ethnicity, are misleading, too, because Russian-speakers are not distinguished from other Caucasians. "Giving factual information to the police is not a popular Russian custom," says David Petersen, West Hollywood's public safety administrator. "There's a real reluctance to depend on the system because, in the former Soviet Union, the government was not there to help you."

According to Petersen and others in L.A. law enforcement, there is the perception among Russian-speakers that if you can get away with it, it isn't really a crime. Like the three West Hollywood ex-Soviets who installed charity coin-collection boxes here and in San Francisco for a nonexistent AIDS foundation. Caught collecting the proceeds, the three insisted they had no idea that what they were doing was illegal.

"The Soviet Union was a place where you lived by your wits," says Richard Anderson, a political science professor at UCLA. "And people didn't think that was bad. Russians are tough and sly because they were made that way by the system, which by the late 1970s was completely corrupt. The authorities were happy you were crooked. They encouraged it." The Russians, Anderson adds, "don't have anything but organized crime. It's their whole system."

Berdj Karapetian, president of the Glendale Chamber of Commerce, practically puts his head on the desk when asked about the effects of Soviet-Armenian gangsters on the image of all Armenians. "It's becoming harder and harder to go outside our own community to do business because of this new negative impression that Armenians are crooked and disrespect the law," he says. "A few years ago, in our own way within the community, we could have taken care of this. We could have made sure these people weren't operating here. Now, even though we know who these guys are, there's just too many of them, and also, they've begun to amass a lot of money and arms."

Youth gangs like Armenian Power and Armenian Bad Boys have taken root in Glendale and East Hollywood as Soviet (eastern) Armenians flock into these communities, once the destination of choice for diaspora (western) Armenians fleeing Turkish genocides before and after World War I. "Armenians have always helped each other, no matter where they come from," says Chahe Keuroghelian, an administrative associate to Glendale's police chief. But antagonisms running in both directions have cropped up between the original, now often quite wealthy, Armenian settlers and the newer, poorer, Russian-speaking arrivals--some of whom, it turns out, are not so poor, thanks to underworld connections.

According to Helen Levin and others, the Armenian community is better organized than the Russian-Jewish one, which has its own stereotyping problems. In early 1997, Russian organized crime ties were rumored for Mikail Markhasev, the convicted killer of Ennis Cosby, prompting Russian-Jewish emigre groups to protest that the media were stereotyping all Russians as members of organized crime. Nevertheless, the FBI has been quick to recognize the danger of the Russian Mafia after the J. Edgar Hoover regime allowed the early Cosa Nostra to flourish. "If we were to allow Russian organized crime the 20 to 30 years of unhindered growth allowed the Mafia," says Stephen Larson, an assistant U.S. attorney and specialist in Russian organized crime, "we'd find ourselves with a much bigger problem than we ever did with the LCN."

Called vory v zakone ("thieves-in-law") in their own country, Russian organized crime figures adhere to a code that prohibits marriage, family, service in the military--and a livelihood earned from anything but skullduggery. "Russian organized crime groups operate in Russia somewhat the way our gangs do," says Det. Nunez. "They'll fight over territory, but they'll also join forces for specific scores." The FBI has traced funds wired from a Moscow bank looted by Russian gangsters to the purchase of an $11.5 million Beverly Hills mansion, which the bureau seized. Kidnapping/extortion plots now take place simultaneously in a Los Angeles furniture factory and the streets of Moscow. Last fall, the FBI recovered a $550,000 promissory note from a Pomona man and arrested Hrachik Khatchatrian, a Soviet-Armenian national, on charges of extorting the money from Armen Babayan, an Ontario furniture manufacturer, for the release of his father, kidnapped by Khatchatrian and others in Moscow. Russians have been apprehended selling Red Army helicopters and attempting to sell a Soviet navy submarine to Colombian drug lords. And most worrisome of all--the mushroom cloud that haunts all law enforcement--suitcase-size nuclear devices, according to former Russian security adviser Alexander Lebed, have gone missing in several former U.S.S.R. republics.

"`YOU'RE A COMMIE,' MY FRIENDS USED TO tell me," says Alex Gilinets, a young West Hollywood sheriff's deputy who arrived here with his parents in 1978. "So for a while there, I didn't even want to be Russian."

For all ex-Soviets here, regardless of religion or republic of origin, assimilation in L.A. is no day at the beach. Family hierarchy becomes inverted as children quickly pick up the new language and customs while parents struggle to survive. And without the extensive after-school sports programs available in the former U.S.S.R., the kids simply grow up too fast. For many, to become Americanized is to bow to the temptations of adolescent crime.

"Many Russian-speakers come as guests, work for cash and aren't registered," says Sveta Topchaya-Kravets, director of WMNB, an L.A. Russian radio station. "They have their own stores and communities but feel disconnected from the larger community. And they have no one to mm to to find out how to comport themselves." The local Russian radio and TV stations perform the same function for these new arrivals that settlement houses did at the turn of the century: They instruct the new immigrant on the niceties of becoming a native.

"Russians are considered aggressive and rude. But our language does not use as many pleases and thank yous as English," Topchaya-Kravets points out. "One of the things we're doing is trying to get people to use those words more."

Says Levin, "I hear this a lot at meetings--that Russians are rude, that they are pushing each other in the supermarket. Yes, they are. But it's because they can't believe that these items in front of them will still be on the shelves tomorrow."

Nor can ex-Soviet military veterans understand why they don't get G.I. benefits, having fought the same enemy we did in World War II. But Russian-speakers are very adaptable, and the education they bring with them helps. A WMNB community poll found that 96 percent of respondents had some college education and 50 percent had a B.A. In New York, according to Topchaya-Kravets, male Russians are cabdrivers, females are manicurists, but in L.A. Russians are more career-adventurous, and the resulting success stories here are many and varied. Eugene Levin, Helen Levin's husband, a former engineer, went from a data center job at Reuters downtown to ownership of an L.A. radio station; Mark Narovlansky, a former high school teacher from the Ukraine, was recently named a managing director of the MONY Group, the largest insurance consortium in the United States.

"We have educators, sports personalities, historians," says Topchaya-Kravets proudly. "Even doctors--although getting accredited here is very hard."

In any event, it's Friday night at the Palm Terrace, a Russian supper club on Fairfax. Tables are piled high with hors d'oeuvres and fifths of tequila, vodka and scotch, The restaurant draws a younger, less ostentatious crowd than Russian Roulette. High school girls in platform shoes and tight black dresses answer their tired-eyed, Russian-speaking fathers in flawless teenage English. The room features the typical brocaded walls and beveled mirrors and no shortage of good cheer among the families exchanging toasts and both-hands-on-the-face kisses. Above a table in the center set up for a birthday party floats a helium-filled balloon: the Russian bear.

Meanwhile, back in the former U.S.S.R., the economic situation is so dire that workers in one city are literally being paid in tombstones. "Jewish or Christian," says Marina Balabanova, an Odessa music teacher-turned-Los Angeles physical therapist, "everybody wants to leave now."

THOMAS CARNEY For his report on LA's growing Russian underworld ("Moscow 90210," page 112),Thomas Carney met up with career thug "Nicky" for an East Hollywood rendezvous."He had something I had seen with other criminals," Carney says."They have a glow to them because they usually have fairly short lives." And some of their biggest fans, ironically, are the cops charged to bring them down. "These criminals are good," Carney admits. "Many of them are well educated, and the cops are in awe." Carney's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Los Angeles Magazine, Inc.
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