Marat Balagula
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Marat Balagula (1943 - March 18, 2008) was a former Russian Mafia boss, and convicted felon. He has been referred to as "The Russian Tony Soprano".
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[edit] Early life
Marat Balagula was born into a family of Soviet war refugees in 1943. After the end of World War II, his family returned to their native Odessa, where his father, a former Red Army Lieutenant, was granted a prestigious job in a lock factory.
[edit] Black Marketeer
After serving his own term in the Soviet Army, Marat was placed in charge of a food cooperative where he launched into a lucrative career in the Soviet Union's black market. He would later boast of how, while assigned to the cruise ship Ivan Frankel, he used his post to smuggle Russian art work and antiques to the West while importing Western consumer goods. His actions were done in close partnership with corrupt Party officials. After marrying his wife Alexandra in 1971, he retired from the cruise ship and went to work running a Ukrainian food cooperative, which allowed him to rise to greater heights as a black marketeer. In later years, he would boast that Mikhail Gorbachev was among the Party officials taking money from him.
[edit] America
In 1977, Balagula, having read about Western Capitalism, decided to move his family to the United States under the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. After working as a textile cutter in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood, he learned of the large number of Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach and moved his family there. He soon went to work as a close associate of Evsei Agron, the cattle prod-bearing boss of the neighborhood's Russian Mob.
According to Robert Friedman's "Red Mafiya," Balagula began to find himself increasingly dissatisfied with his new employer. He surrounded himself with a crew of mobbed up Russian economists and math prodigies and closely cultivated his friendship with members of New York's Five Families. Balagula as one of the biggest Russian gangsters in Brooklyn operated a massive gasoline bootlegging operation through his associate Igor Roizman, and with Genovese crime family gangster Joseph "Joe Glitz" Galizia, which earned the men millions of dollars. He now owns two stores and a restaurant on Brighton Beach they are called "Brighton Bazzar" "Odessa(store)" and "Odessa (Restaurant)".
[edit] The Agron Murder
On the morning of May 4, 1985, Evsei Agron was shot in the head while waiting for an elevator in his Brighton Beach tenement. Although suspects were numerous at the time, many law enforcement officials now believe that Balagula was responsible. Balagula has denied this, insisting that Agron was always picking fights in night clubs and was probably killed for that reason.
[edit] Murder
On March 18, 2008, as Balagula was sitting in his automobile outside his home in Brighton Beach, an unidentified gunman fired six shots through the driver's side window with a Glock 17 handgun. All six shots hit Balagula, killing him instantly. Witnesses reported that the gunman tried to pick up the ejected shell casings before a car pulled up, driven by an older man, and the gunman escaped. New York City police officers recovered a total of three shell casings from the scene. The firearm, which the gunman dropped at the scene, was reported stolen in New Jersey over six months before the murder. The police recovered no fingerprints from the scene. It is assumed that Pyotr Novikov, Balagula's partner, took control of the businesses owned by the slain gangster.
[edit] References
- News & Notes, The Daily Texan. "Russian Mafia leader will be released from Bastrop jail"
- Friedman, Robert I. Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
- Devito, Carlo. Encyclopedia of International Organized Crime. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005. ISBN 0-8160-4848-7
