Brighton Beach - Brooklyn
Disco Freddy and the Kosher Nostra
Brighton Beach is a universe unto itself, with its own time, its own language, its own customs, for which it makes no apologies.
If you don’t get it, it’s your loss.
-Yelena Akhtiorskaya
Brighton Beach was once part of the town of Gravesend, one of the six Brooklyn towns established by the Dutch colonists in 1646.
In 1868, William Engeman, who made his fortune selling horses to both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, paid $20,000 for 39 prime lots and began building a resort. He named the neighborhood Brighton, hoping the imprimatur of the British seaside town would attract a wealthy clientele.
Engeman built a pier, several hotels, a bathhouse, a theater, a music hall, and a racetrack.
The area's fortunes took off when the New York and Brighton Beach railroad was built in 1878. Engeman’s most significant project, the Brighton Beach Hotel, with room to accommodate 5,000 people per night, was completed the same year.
In 1886, after a powerful high tide briefly connected the Atlantic to Sheepshead Bay, it was determined that the hotel had to be moved. The building, which was 465 feet long, 150 feet deep, three stories high, and weighed over 5000 tons, was raised up on a system of hydraulic jacks and, in sections of 20 feet, placed atop a grid of timbers spanning 112 railroad cars.
The cars were then slowly pulled along newly laid railroad tracks by six locomotives connected to the building by a latticework of rope weighing over three tons. The hotel’s final resting spot was 600 feet from its original foundation.
Lilliputian Opera Troupe
Like many of the other seaside towns of the city, Brighton Beach had its own amusement park. There was the Chase Thru the Clouds rollercoaster and attractions like the Brighton Museum with marionettes, midgets, and a "convention of curiosities" featuring the 10.5 pound Major Tot and the 660-pound Colonel Ruth Goshen.
You could entertain yourself with Francis Uffner’s Lilliputian Opera Troupe in the morning and go for a seaside stroll in the afternoon. The Brighton Beach Baths, built in 1907, offered swimming, tennis, Yiddish vaudeville theater, and a carousel.
In 1919, Brighton’s amusement park, like many of the amusement parks of that era, burned down. The beach remained a popular destination.
When the BMT line (today’s B and Q) opened in the 1920s, it made the neighborhood accessible to year-round residents. It also obviated the need for overnight accommodations, and the big hotels shut down soon after, with thirty large six-story apartment buildings taking their place. Jewish transplants from the Lower East Side, Brownsville, and East New York were among the first to occupy the new buildings.
Potato Bag Gang
The Great Depression and WWII took their toll on Brighton Beach and the senior population began to outnumber the younger generations. Rising crime rates and shuttered storefronts suggested the neighborhood’s best days were behind it.
Then, starting in the late 70s, a surge of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union began revitalizing the neighborhood. More than forty thousand Russian Jews settled in Brighton Beach, earning it the nickname “Little Odessa,” after the Ukrainian city on the Black Sea.
The Soviet Union was under pressure from the West to let Jews leave the country. While the vast majority of the new immigrants were bona fide dissidents looking for a better life, the Soviet authorities also took the opportunity to send over some of the worst Jewish criminals from the Gulag. They threw in some other non-Jewish criminals who gladly donned a yarmulke for the chance for a fresh start. Brighton Beach soon became the American seat of the Russian Jewish mob, the Organizatsiya.
One of the first well-known cons run in Brighton Beach was by a group of former Odessans known as the Potato Bag Gang.
Posing as merchant seamen, they would offer up bags of antique gold rubles on the cheap. While their sample coin was the real deal, the rest of the sack that their victims paid thousands of dollars for contained only old potatoes.
Kosher Nostra
The potato bag scam was only the tip of the iceberg. Other schemes included check forgery, Medicaid fraud, counterfeit Faberge eggs, heroin trafficking, and an extremely lucrative gasoline tax evasion scam.
One particularly memorable con involved two gangsters who dressed up as ultra-Orthodox Jews to steal diamonds. Donning prosthetic beards, side curls, long black coats, and black hats, they would enter jewelry stores run by Orthodox Jews and ask to see some diamonds in the display case. While one would distract the salesman with a rambling Yiddish monologue, the other would swap the displayed diamonds with zirconium. They called the con the “fastfinger.”
Their luck ran out at Midway airport after running the scam in Chicago. A Jewish security guard, thinking it was strange that Orthodox Jews would be traveling on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, tipped off the police .1
In the 80s, the Justice Department didn’t consider the Russian Mob to fall under the umbrella of organized crime and put little resources into policing it. The language barrier and the fact that the Russians were "far more secretive than the Italian mafia ever was"2 made infiltrating the crime network nearly impossible. Even in 1990, there wasn’t a single Russian-speaking detective in the NYPD.
Evsei Agron, considered the original Godfather of the Russian American mafia, moved to Brighton Beach in 1975. Unlike other mafia bosses whose largesse won over their communities and only resorted to violence as a last resort, the diminutive, '“grandfatherly” Agron seemed to relish meting out punishments and never left home without his electric cattle prod, a device he wielded with sadistic impunity.
Agron ran his operations out of the El Caribe club in Mill Basin, owned by Trump fixer, Michael Cohen’s uncle. After surviving two assassination attempts, Agron’s luck ran out in 1985. He was shot in the back of his head while waiting for the elevator in his Kensington Brooklyn apartment, most likely on the orders of his successor, Marat Balagula, and at the hands of his own bodyguard and driver, Boris “Biba” Nayfeld.
Balagula, now in charge, was most known for running a gas tax scheme that scammed the federal government out of billions of dollars. The scheme, involving myriad shifting shell companies, allowed Balagula to keep the 9 cents per gallon gas tax for himself.
The 2 cents per gallon cut Balagula gave to the Lucchese crime family in exchange for protection from other Russian mobsters netted the Italian syndicate over $100 million annually, their second-highest source of revenue after the drug trade.
Tales of his enormous wealth began circulating in cafes and over dinner tables: he tried to purchase an island off the coast of South Africa to set up a bank for money laundering; he circled Manhattan on luxury yachts, holding all-night drug and sex orgies; he rode in a custom stretch limo, white and immaculate, with a black-liveried chauffeur and stocked with ice-cold bottles of vodka. “Marat throws around diamonds the way we throw around dollar bills,” 3
To be fair, it’s probably not that big a deal to throw around diamonds when you own a diamond mine in Sierra Leone. Eventually, the authorities caught up to Balagula, and he fled the country after being convicted of credit card fraud in 1986.
Boris “Biba” Nayfeld, the so-called Last Boss of Brighton and the man who most likely killed Evsei Agron, picked up where his former boss left off.
Biba set up a network trading diamonds for Thai heroin. The heroin was smuggled to Singapore, where it was packed in television picture tubes and sent to Poland. Then couriers brought the heroin to NYC on flights from Warsaw. Since Poland wasn’t considered a hotbed of drug smuggling like Bogota or Bangkok, the operation was extremely successful.
Nayfeld was arrested in 2016 for extortion. Today, he lives in Russia, serving out the remaining three years of his probation.
Sausage Immigration
In the nineties, after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., a new influx of Russians settled in Brighton Beach. Deemed “sausage migrants” (a term given to those looking to improve their material well-being) by the previous generation of dissidents, they gradually assimilated over “a shared love of kolbasa.”4
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
This week’s field recording starts off at the shore with the sounds of seagulls and travels briefly underneath the subway tracks on Brighton Beach Avenue before heading back to a rocky pier for an extended maritime meditation.
Grab some headphones, and you can channel this Brighton Beach sun worshipper reclined on that same pier in the late eighties.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
A few years ago, The NY Times published an incredible photo essay by Alexey Yurenev with accompanying text by Yelena Akhtiorskaya called, Welcome to Брайтон Бич, Brooklyn. I remember being blown away the first time I saw it and even more now that I know a little of Brighton Beach’s history.
Alexey was born in the USSR and spent a year photographing Brighton Beach, where he was living at the time. He currently teaches at ICP in the city. Here is a link to his site.
NOTES
Disco Freddy was the most well-known of the many eccentric characters that roamed Brighton Beach’s Boardwalk in the 70s and 80s. Brooklyn by the Sea, a short 1979 video by Arnold Baskin, has several scenes with Freddy - he’s the one with the blindfold on, waving a transistor radio and running in circles.
After several short dances, he often closed his performance by announcing that he was going to execute a very dangerous or death-defying stunt that had never been previously attempted. Using deliberate self-interruptions to build up the tension, he carefully positioned his jacket or a small used paper bag on the wooden boards of the boardwalk, smoothed it out, cleared a large space in front of him, backed away for a short distance, moved the crowd back, and finally donned a blindfold, took a running start, and jumped over the object, presenting the move as a remarkable achievement.5
The opening sequence from Andrew Nicol’s Lord of War shows arms dealer Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) explaining how his family pretended to be Jewish to be able to emigrate in the 70s.
During his second stint in prison, Boris “Biba” Nayfeld became good friends with his follicular inverse, disgraced former Illinois Governor, Rod “Blago” Blagojevich.
Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America by Robert I. Friedman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/06/24/russias-new-export-the-mob/6719d1b7-9fe9-4470-bb1f-f1fc452a986b/
Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America by Robert I. Friedman
https://nymag.com/guides/everything/brighton-beach/
https://alchetron.com/Disco-Freddy
The zoning photo!!
That old Dodge (I think) in pretty decent condition looks like what my grandfather drove. Just one of many favorites in this post. And always, the history!