- I have reported once or twice before on the Israeli involvement
in two major criminal activities, the global trafficking in women from
former Soviet bloc countries, and the mass production of Ecstasy narcotics.
-
- In Canada, a country which uses its immigration laws
to notable effect to suppress free speech and thought, as Ernst Zündel
-- who has languished for ten months in an immigration jail can testify
-- the same authorities seem to be remarkably lax towards such real criminals.
- A correspondent in Ontario reports this morning to me:
-
- Host Michael Vaughan of Report on Business Television's
(ROBtv) "Michael Vaughan Live" aired an interview with journalist
Victor Malarek on Nov 8, 2003. The interview had been shown live earlier
that week. Malarek had come on to promote his book The Natashas, subtitled
"The New Global Sex Trade" --the subject of his new book.
-
- During the interview, Malarek bemoaned the very lax Canadian
immigration practices that allow a notorious pimp to live in Canada with
impunity.
-
- To underscore his disgust, Malarek cited aspects of Ludwig
Fainberg's criminal history. What troubled Malarek was the seeming unwillingness
of Canadian authorities to act to deport Fainberg from Canada.
-
- In the book (see extract, left), Malarek had ended his
sketch of Fainberg thus: "Canadian Immigration swooped in and arrested
Fainberg in his comfortable Ottawa lair. He was labeled a threat to national
security and public safety, and ordered deported to Israel."
-
- But according to Malarek, Fainberg is still among us,
free to enjoy his ill-gotten wealth, notwithstanding an Immigration Canada
deportation order.
-
- Perhaps Elinor Caplan (above), the latest immigration
minister of our once great Dominion, can explain her indulgence of this
gangster. They evidently share the same religion, true, but in every other
respect she certainly has all the looks of the feminist battler for women's
rights. What has blunted the battleaxe?
-
- We invite readers to find and submit a portrait photo
of her Schützling, Mr Fainberg.
-
- Here's the sketch of Ludwig Fainberg's criminal career
as drawn in Malarek's study of the international sex trade, The Natashas
(Viking Canada: Toronto, 2003, pp. 51-57) ---
-
-
- Wanted to find out just how difficult it is to purchase
young Slavic women for the sex trade. It is, as I discovered, really quite
easy. All that's needed is a connection and cold hard cash.
-
- The meeting took place in an apartment in Ottawa, Canada's
capital city, on a brisk, snowy night in early January 2003. I was a bit
nervous. The man I was to meet was no ordinary low-level thug. Ludwig Fainberg
is a notorious Israeli mobster with a hair-trigger temper and a penchant
for extreme violence. According to FBI documents, he was the middleman
for an international drugs and weapons smuggling conspiracy linking Colombian
drug lords with the Russian Mafia in Miami. Fainberg's claim to fame was
that in the mid-1990s, he ventured onto a high-security naval base in the
far northern reaches of Russia. His mission was to negotiate the purchase
of a Russian Cold War-era diesel submarine -- complete with a retired naval
captain and a twenty-five-man crew -- for the Columbian cocaine cartel.
The price tag: a cool $5.5 million. The vessel was to be used to smuggle
tons of white powder along the California coast. The deal fell through.
-
- From 1990 until he was arrested and charged in Miami
in February 1997 for
- smuggling and racketeering, Fainberg ran an infamous
strip club called Porky's. The pink neon club on the fringe of Miami International
Airport was a magnet for Russian hoods and sleazy East European émigrés
with misbegotten fortunes and visions of untapped criminal proceeds.
-
- Fainberg's rise through ROC [Russian organized crime]
ranks is the stuff of Hollywood B-movies. He was born in Odessa, Ukraine,
in 1958. When he was thirteen he and his parents immigrated to Israel.
Later, he tried out for the Israeli Marines, wanting to become a Navy Seal.
He flunked basic training. Then he wanted to become an officer in the Israeli
Army but failed the exam. His over-inflated ego bruised, he decided to
try his luck elsewhere. In 1980 he packed a suitcase and headed for Berlin,
where he earned his stripes as a street-level goon in extortion and credit
card fraud. Four years later he set out for the United States -- a land
he fondly refers to as "the Wild West because it is so easy to steal
there!"
-
- He settled in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, which
had become the seat of the Organizatsiya, as the Russian mob is often called.
There he linked up with the mob and specialized in arson -- torching businesses
competing with those that were Russian owned. 1990 he moved to Miami to
run Porky's. Nine years later he was convicted on racketeering charges
and sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison. Since he had already spent
thirty months in jail awaiting trial, Fainberg was deported to Israel.
The next year he turned up in Canada with dreams of making it rich in the
flesh trade. Not long after his arrival he married a Canadian and moved
into a comfortable apartment along the Ottawa River with his new bride
and his ten-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.
-
- I entered the well-appointed two-bedroom flat and Fainberg
stared hard into my face as we shook hands. He's a burly man with a thin
goatee and short-cropped hair, and he was clearly sizing me up. I must
have passed. He gripped my hand firmly and escorted me to the living room,
which was outfitted with the latest gizmos in video and audio entertainment.
I sank down into a soft, black kid-leather couch while he retreated to
the kitchen to get a couple of imported beers.
-
- "You can call me Tarzan," he began as he burst
back into the room. With a proud boyish grin, he tossed me one of his business
cards. The cover of the custom-made two-fold card sported the caricature
of a mop-topped muscular man under the name of Porky's. The inside featured
a cartoon of an ample nude woman bending over in knee-high stiletto-heeled
boots. Underneath was his name -- "Tarzan Da Boss" -- and on
the opposite side "Welcome to Planet Sex, Land of Fantasy." According
to Fainberg, he was nicknamed Tarzan because he once sported a wild mane
of hair and acted as though he was straight out of a jungle. These days,
for travel and immigration purposes, he's known as Alon Bar. The former
strip-club owner legally changed his name during his last pit stop in Israel.
-
- The man is a consummate braggart. For the better part
of the evening he crowed about his illicit escapades and nefarious underworld
connections and boasted that his life would make a spectacular Hollywood
movie. He even talked about penning his memoirs. "It would be number
one on the New York Times bestseller list." But there's one aspect
of his life he probably wouldn't want revealed in any book. Fainberg relishes
putting women in their place. In one violent incident in Miami, undercover
agents with the FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency watched from a safe
distance as he chased a stripper out of Porky's and slammed her head repeatedly
against the door of his Mercedes until the car was covered. In another
episode, he beat a dancer in the parking lot outside the club and then
made her eat gravel. Clearly, he was no gentleman, and every woman in his
club knew it. Incredibly, he attributes this mean streak to his upbringing:
"In Russia, it's quite normal for men to slap women. It is cultural.
It is part of life."
-
- Fainberg prefers to see himself as an astute businessman,
and if there's a business he firmly grasps, it's the flesh trade. "It
can make you a millionaire in no time," he said, winking. His Canadian
dream was to open a strip club in Gatineau, Quebec. The club, across the
bridge from the nation's capital, would feature imported talent -- Russian
and Ukrainian strippers and lap dancers. When I met with him he was shopping
for a Canadian partner and trolling for an infusion of cash. I asked Tarzan
what he would bring to the deal. He recited his know-how and his unique
expertise in importing entertainment.
-
- After an hour I shifted the conversation to the issue
at hand: buying women. With an earnest, businesslike expression, Fainberg
said flat-out that it was an easy feat -- he could bring women in from
Russia, Ukraine, Romania or the Czech Republic. "No problem. The price
is $10,000 with the girl landed. It is simple. It is easy to get access
to the girls. It's a phone call. I know the brokers in Moscow, St. Petersburg
and Kyiv. I can call Moscow tomorrow and show you how easy it is. I can
get ten to fifteen to twenty girls shipped to me in a week." Clearly,
he had done this many times before.
-
- "They know exactly what they're being hired to do?"
I asked. "They're not being forced."
-
- "They know why they are coming and what they are
going to do. They will not be any trouble," he assured me.
-
- Guardedly I mentioned that while surfing the internet,
I had tripped on FBI and U.S. State Department documents that said he "likely
trafficked in women." That got his attention. As he shifted to the
edge of his seat, Fainberg's eyes flashed in indignation. "That is
bullshit. I never trafficked in women. I don't need trafficked women. Agents
in Russia are overwhelmed with women who want to do this voluntarily. If
you look at their living conditions in Russia, there is no way of surviving.
They live in poverty. At least this way, they can make a living. When people
need to eat, what are you going to do?"
-
- "Given what you've just said, they're not really
prostitutes," I interjected.
-
- Fainberg paused for a moment, mulling over my words.
Then with a laugh, he shot back: "My opinion is a prostitute is someone
who is selling herself.
- From that point of view that is what they are. It is
true they definitely do
- not want to do this. They are being pushed by their social
level of their life. They're getting pushed by necessity. They're being
pushed to survive. Then maybe they're not really prostitutes."
-
- He even held himself out as a Good Samaritan: "The
girls come here and they send some money home and the family lives. If
they don't come to work here or in Germany or England, their family suffers.
I give the girls a chance to earn money. For me, it is a business transaction,
plain and simple, but I am also helping these women out."
-
- "I've heard that a lot of these women have no idea
they're going into prostitution when they accept these so-called job offers
to work abroad," I countered. "In fact, I've read that a lot
of them think they're going to be waitresses or hotel cleaning staff."
-
- Fainberg held his fire.
-
- I find that difficult to believe. I was present on many
occasions when girls were being hired. Plus, at somepoint I had over twenty
girls from Russia, Ukraine and Romania who came to work in the States.
Maybe some of them don't know. But how stupid do you have to be that you
are going to a different country to work as a waitress or dancer in a club?
It is really stupidity. It's dumb. Women know what they are going for.
Sometimes when they realize their mistakes or they're getting hurt, its
easy to blame somebody else for being so dumb. I think they should only
blame themselves for getting into that.
-
- He grudgingly conceded that some of these women are duped.
"I think 10 percent don't know what they're getting into. Ninety percent
know exactly what they're going to do. What they may not know exactly is
the conditions or how much money they will get."
-
- "You don't have a problem with pushing women who
are absolutely destitute into prostitution?"
-
- "Look, that's what they can offer. Life is a business.
It's a trade. You want to give something for nothing? You can help once
or twice. But then ten, twenty or forty times? For that you want to get
something in return."
-
- "What kind of money are we talking here?" I
asked. "How much will it cost to bring a woman over, and what kind
of profit can be made?"
-
- "If it is run the proper way, the clean way, you
can have a good clientele and make a lot of money. You can buy a woman
for $10,000 and you can make your money back in a week if she is pretty
and she is young. Then everything else is profit."
-
- I asked about getting the women into Canada or the United
States.
-
- "It is so simple, so very simple," he bragged.
"You know after 9/11 how difficult it was supposed to be to get into
the United States? I will show you right now how easily we can get into
the United States and then come back, and nobody will ever know we were
in there." He went on to hint that certain Russian mobsters have connections
with Native gangs whose reserves straddle the Canada-U.S. border.
-
- A couple of days later, Canadian Immigration swooped
in and arrested Fainberg in his comfortable Ottawa lair. He was labeled
a threat to national security and public safety, and ordered deported to
Israel.
-
-
- © Focal Point 2003 David Irving
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