#4 Brighton Beach: How the Russian Mob Set Up Shop in Trump’s Buildings

The Russian mob didn’t take over New York in some cinematic gunfight. They just walked in. Through the same door as Soviet Jewish refugees. And nobody stopped them.

In 1974, Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.[1] It tied U.S. trade with the Soviet Union to their willingness to let Jews and other persecuted citizens emigrate. Noble cause, right? Open the gates for people fleeing oppression. And it worked. Since 1975, more than 500,000 refugees from the former Soviet Union have come through that door to the United States.[1] Most of them were genuinely good people looking for a fresh start. They settled in Brooklyn, particularly in a neighborhood called Brighton Beach. “Little Odessa.”

But the KGB wasn’t done with them yet.

Reporter Robert Friedman, who covered the Russian mob for years, wrote that as the Soviets were opening the doors to let Jews out, they were also emptying their prisons.[2]

Wait. Where have I heard this before?

Hard-core criminals got passage to America hidden in the wave of legitimate refugees. It’s the perfect cover. Who questions a Jewish refugee? The paperwork says you’re fleeing persecution. Nobody digs deeper. Nobody thinks “wait, this guy might be a Soviet intelligence plant or a career mobster.”

By the early 1980s, Brighton Beach wasn’t a community anymore. It was a criminal headquarters.

The first real boss was a guy named Evsei Agron.[3] He started running an extortion racket in the emigre community, squeezing money from business owners who had no idea who they could trust or where to go for help. By 1980, he was pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a week.[3] Just from extortion. His enforcers were the Nayfeld brothers, Boris and Benjamin.[3] They were brutal. People called Agron the “Godfather” of the Russian mob in America.[3] They meant it as a description of what he was willing to do.

Then in May 1985, someone put two bullets in Agron’s head while he was waiting for an elevator in his Brooklyn apartment building.[3] Who ordered it is still debated. Some sources point to Agron’s successor, a guy named Marat Balagula. Others point to a rival named Vladimir Reznikov.[5] What’s not debated is that Boris Nayfeld, Agron’s own bodyguard and chauffeur, was a suspect - the police questioned him and gave him a lie detector test, and he’s always denied any part in it. He knew the routine. He knew when Agron would be vulnerable.

Balagula took over and decided that extortion was small time. He wanted to think bigger.

So he created a scheme. Gas tax evasion.

Here’s how it worked: he set up a chain of fake “burn companies” to dodge the state and federal gas taxes - and when the IRS came looking for its share, every address led to a phone booth or a vacant lot.[5] Every time, the state and federal government lost the tax revenue. Every time, his operation made a fortune. By some estimates, Balagula and his crew were moving 150 million dollars worth of fuel per month through New York.[5] And they were pocketing an additional 30 to 40 million dollars a month in unpaid taxes.[5] All of it was flowing back into the organization, and a lot of it was flowing into their legitimate-looking businesses and real estate.

The scale was insane. And it was just the beginning.

While Balagula was running the gas scam, another Russian figure was getting embedded in New York’s legitimate economy. His name was Semyon Kislin.[8] He ran an electronics store in Manhattan, Joy-Lud Electronics, near the Flatiron Building. Sounds innocent enough. But his store was a magnet for Soviet diplomats and KGB officers looking to buy American consumer electronics they couldn’t get back home.[8] He was moving merchandise for intelligence operatives.

Then Kislin pivoted. By 1992, he’d started a commodities trading firm, Trans Commodities, and he was in real estate too.[8] Legitimate real estate. The kind with politics attached. He was one of Rudy Giuliani’s top backers in his 1997 re-election campaign, and he sat on New York City’s Economic Development Board.[14] He hosted fundraisers. He was a Trump contact.[6]

This is where it gets specific.

The FBI had a 1994 intelligence report on the Russian mob organization headed by a guy named Vyacheslav Ivankov.[14] The report listed Kislin as a “member/associate.”[8] Not someone who did business with them. Not a casual contact. An associate. In their criminal network.

The report also alleged that Kislin’s company had co-sponsored a Russian crime boss for a US visa.[8] That he was a close associate of an arms smuggler.[8] That he was connected to money laundering operations.[8]

Kislin denied all of it. Said he’d been thoroughly investigated and never charged. Fair enough. But the fact remains that the FBI thought he was connected enough to list him in an official intelligence report on the Russian mafia.[8] That’s not nothing.

And Kislin wasn’t alone. There was a whole network of Russian organized crime figures embedding themselves in New York’s neighborhoods and businesses.

There was a social club in Brooklyn called El Caribe. It wasn’t much to look at. Just a place where people gathered. But from the 1970s through the 1990s, it was the actual headquarters of the Russian mafia in America.[4] Both Evsei Agron and Marat Balagula ran their operations out of an office there.[4] According to Talking Points Memo, those two were the leaders of the Russian mob in the United States, and they literally ran their criminal organization from El Caribe.[9]

Who owned El Caribe? A doctor named Morton Levine. And who had a stake in it? All his nieces and nephews.[9] Including one named Michael Cohen.[9]

Michael Cohen. Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.[6] His “fixer.” The guy who would later go to jail for campaign violations and tax crimes.[10] His family owned a piece of the building where the Russian mafia headquarters operated.

By the 1980s, the Russian mob had spread across the United States, with operations established in major cities from New York to Los Angeles.[2] They were organized. They were ruthless. And they were looking for a way to legitimize their money.

Real estate.

Specifically, high-end real estate in Manhattan.

You can launder money through real estate in ways that are almost impossible to trace. You buy a property using a shell corporation with a fake name. You pay more than it’s worth. The extra money is the dirty cash you’re cleaning. The property gets sold again, sometimes multiple times. Each transaction adds another layer of obfuscation. By the time anyone looks at the paper trail, it’s hopelessly complex. One nonprofit’s count found more than 2.3 billion dollars laundered through US real estate in cases reported over just five years - and that’s only the cases that came to light.[17] The Treasury Department calls money laundering linked to Russia a significant threat and says Russians use US real estate to launder funds.[16] That’s not just Russian money. That’s global criminal activity. But Russia is a major player.[15]

Trump Tower was perfect for this. When it was built, according to reporter David Cay Johnston, it was only the second high-rise in New York that would sell to anonymous buyers.[15] Anonymous. No questions asked about who actually owned the apartment. Just sign the papers and move in.

In 1984, a guy named David Bogatin bought five luxury condominiums in Trump Tower for six million dollars.[15] Bogatin was a Soviet Army pilot who’d arrived from Russia seven years earlier.[15] He was also a leading member of the New York Russian mob.[15]

A few years later, in 1987, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme.[15] The same kind of gas tax scam Marat Balagula was running. After he fled the country, the government seized the condos.[15] It said he’d bought them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.”[15]

This wasn’t an anomaly. Since the 1980s, by reporter Craig Unger’s 2017 count, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned or lived in Trump Tower or other Trump properties.[15] Some of them ran actual criminal operations out of their apartments. And in Bogatin’s case, according to reporter Wayne Barrett, Trump personally went to the closing. That’s how money laundering works. You find a seller. You give them cash. They move the money through the banking system in a way that looks legal. The buyer gets a building. The criminal gets clean cash.

Meanwhile, in Russia, another figure was rising. His name was Semion Mogilevich.[11] He was a Ukrainian-born economics graduate - nicknamed “The Brainy Don” - who’s believed to run a multi-billion dollar criminal empire. The FBI has called him “the most powerful and dangerous gangster in the world.”[11] Agencies in Europe and the US have called him the “boss of all bosses.”[11] In 1995, Russia’s Interior Ministry named him the boss of more than 300 criminal associates in more than 30 countries.[13] The State Department says his organization was into everything: murder, extortion, sex trafficking, weapons trafficking, money laundering, bank fraud, corruption of public officials.[13]

In 1994, his group took over Inkombank, one of the biggest private banks in Russia. It collapsed in 1998 under suspicion of money laundering.[11] He got Israeli citizenship, according to the State Department.[13] Countless Russian mobsters did the same.[7] According to Jonathan Winer, who was the State Department’s crime expert under Clinton, “There is not a major Russian organized crime figure whom we are tracking who does not also carry an Israeli passport.”[7]

Career criminals. Murderers. Extortionists. All getting Israeli passports. They took advantage of the right of any Jew to become an Israeli citizen.[7] Which meant they could travel to the US, do business, move money, and have the protection of another country’s diplomatic infrastructure if things got too hot.[7]

It was brilliant. And it was working.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brighton Beach wasn’t just a neighborhood anymore. It was an operational base for an international criminal organization. The murders, the extortion, the money laundering, the real estate deals. It was all connected. It was all feeding into something bigger.

And that something bigger had found its way into Trump’s buildings.

In the next essay, I’m going to follow the money through something even more perfect for laundering than real estate. Something Trump built specifically for people with no questions to ask. Casinos.

SOURCES:
[1] Jackson-Vanik Amendment
[2] The Russians Are Coming! - New York Review of Books (2000)
[3] Evsei Agron
[4] Family Business: The Russian Mob in New York
[5] Marat Balagula
[6] Donald Trump, Russian Intelligence, and Eurasian Organized Crime Convergence in Brighton Beach
[7] The Russians Are Coming! - New York Review of Books (2000)
[8] Sam Kislin - LittleSis
[9] Michael Cohen Owned Piece of Mobbed-Up Brooklyn Social Club
[10] A Brief History of Michael Cohen’s Criminal Ties
[11] Semion Mogilevich
[12] FBI Wanted - Semion Mogilevich
[13] State Department - Semion Mogilevich
[14] FBI Tracked Alleged Russian Mob Ties of Giuliani Campaign Supporter
[15] Trump’s Russian Laundromat
[16] Treasury NDAA Report on Russian Illicit Finance
[17] Russian Money Flows Into U.S. Real Estate

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said Sam Kislin was an economic adviser to Rudy Giuliani - he was one of Giuliani’s top backers and fundraisers and sat on the city’s economic development board; that David Bogatin’s gas scam was Marat Balagula’s operation - it was the same kind of scam, run with other partners; and that Trump himself sold properties to all 13 people with Russian mob links - the record shows he went to Bogatin’s closing. It also said about 600,000 Soviet citizens came to the US - it was more than 500,000 refugees; that 100 to 300 billion dollars a year is laundered through US real estate - the report it cited counted more than 2.3 billion dollars over five years; that Balagula’s scam used fake export papers - it used fake “burn companies”; that Kislin moved to Brooklyn in the 1990s - he moved there in 1976; that a court said Bogatin’s condos were used to launder money - it was the government, when it seized them; that Mogilevich was worth billions and ran a Bulgarian bank - what the record shows is that his group took over a Russian bank, Inkombank; that the FBI called him “the most dangerous mobster in the world” - its words were “the most powerful and dangerous gangster in the world”; and its chart credited all of its numbers to BuzzFeed News - one is from Reuters.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so - Craig Unger for the count of 13 people, David Cay Johnston for Trump Tower’s anonymous buyers, the government for why Bogatin bought his condos, Talking Points Memo for El Caribe and Robert Friedman for the emptied Soviet prisons - and a few more now stick closer to the record on Agron’s take, Boris Nayfeld, Mogilevich, Jonathan Winer and the Jackson-Vanik law, with two source links repointed to pages that carry what they’re cited for.