Russian Mafia Members Guilty of Murdering Boxer Sergei Kobozev - AFP - 7Dec01
Stefan Lemieszewski
Kobozev - AFP - 7Dec01
For those following the Tokhtakhounov case, but who might
not be familiar with the Russian Mafia in sports, below is one
example of some of the tactics that the Russian Mafia uses.
Stefan Lemieszewski
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Agence France Presse
December 7, 2001 Friday
Russian mafia members found guilty in murder of boxer Sergei
Two members of a US-based Russian mafia gang were found guilty of the
November 1995 murder of Russian boxer Sergei Kobozev, Manhattan's
federal
prosecutor said Thursday.
Prosecutor Mary Jo White said Alexander Nosov and Vasily Ermichine were
found
guilty for "their membership in a violent Russian organized crime group
known as
'the Brigade,' including participating in the 1995 murder and kidnapping
of
Sergei Kobozev" in Brooklyn.
The three-week trial in a Brooklyn federal court alleged the two men
first
shot Kobozev, a Russian emigre and internationally-known boxer, then
transported
him to the New Jersey home of a gang leader.
There, "Ermichine broke Kobozev's neck," and his battered body was
buried in
a garden.
The two gangsters quarreled several days earlier with Kobozev in a bar
in
Brighton Beach, the Russian quarter of Brooklyn, where he worked as a
bouncer.
Judge Robert Carter is to sentence the two men on May 6. They can face
up to
life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Kobozev had unsuccessfully taken on Argentine Marcelo Dominguez for the
World
Boxing Council's light-heavyweight world championship.
=========== ========== ========== ========== ==========
DG511
been helpful in sharpening a rather fuzzy picture.
Daria
Timing is everything.
Stefan Lemieszewski
DG511 wrote:
======================== ===================
You're welcome. There's more details on the Kobozev
"hit" by the Russian Mafia below.
Whereas the article below refers to the Russian Mafia
group in Brighton Beach as the "Brigade", it is probably a
misnomer. Professor Federico Varese in his book "Russian
Mafia" discusses the organizational structure of the mafia
as being composed of foot soldiers ("shestyorki" in the
Russian language), who are part of a crew or "brigade"
(in Russian the word is "brigady"), who in turn are part of
the larger "family" or "brotherhood" (in Russian called
"bratva"). The Solntsevo criminal syndicate is a "bratva"
or "brotherhood". Vyacheslav "Yaponchik" Ivankov who
is mentioned in the article, was the head of the Russian
Mafia's operations in North America (before being
imprisoned). Ivankov was part of the Solntsevo crime
syndicate, whose other leaders include Semion "Brainy
Don" Mogilevich, Sergei "Mikhas" Mikhailov, Grigori
Loutchansky, Vadim Rabinovich, and Viktor Averin.
Ivankov's Brighton Beach mob is sometimes referred
to as the "Organizatsiya" ( ie. the "Organization").
Robert I. Friedman has the best description of the
"organizatsiya" in Brighton Beach in his book "Red
Mafiya: How The Russian Mob Has Invaded America"
In the photo of Tokhtakhounov with Marina Anissina,
Pavel Bure, Joseph Kobzon and Mikhail Chernoy, et. al.,
[ http://www.rednews.ru/article.phtml?id=1298 ]
both Kobzon and Chernoy have been linked to the
Solntsevo crime syndicate of the Russian Mafia.
The Solntsevo is the largest and most powerful
Russian mob, having overtaken the Italian Mafia
(ie. "La Cosa Nostra") in USA, and operating in over
50 countries. They are also very influential in the
governments of Russia and Ukraine, having many
sophisticated members who got their training when
they were with the KGB before the breakup of the
USSR. (The KGB was the Soviet Union's CIA).
Stefan Lemieszewski
=====================================
http://www.mobmagazine.com/managearticle.asp?c=120&a=46
Mob Magazine
24Feb02
The Murder Of A Russian Boxer
It is a law of sports physics that to make your mark as
a boxer you either move up to heavyweight or die trying.
Before his mysterious disappearance in November 1995,
cruiserweight contender Sergei Kobozev seemed to
have mastered the sweet science. A few years after he
emigrated to Brooklyn from St. Petersburg, Russia, the
31-year-old Kobozev was set to bag his second major
cruiserweight belt and $100,000 to boot. But a few
months before his bout, he was brutally murdered by
New York's roughest Russian mob crew.
Even now, after two of the three men accused of his
murder were recently convicted in a Manhattan federal
court and details of Kobozev's death finally emerged,
no one but the killers knows the full story. The fact that
Alexander Nosov, Vasiliy Ermichine, and Natan
Gozman—the three men indicted for the murder—
worked for Brighton Beach's Russian mafia group
called the "Brigade," and that Gozman is still at large
only seems to fan the flames of rumor on the boxing
scene. "When he got killed, I was shocked. I got the
feeling in my gut that there's more than meets the eye
here," says Tommy Gallagher, Kobozev's former
trainer at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. "This guy was
a moneymaker. They're going to tell these guys to
whack this kid? There had to be something more to it."
There definitely was more to Sergei Kobozev than
his violent end. He first earned his rep fighting for the
Soviet national boxing team at the Seoul Olympics in
1988. When he moved to Brighton Beach in 1991 he
was part of a wave of Soviet bloc boxers recruited by
Gallagher to go pro in the States. If it can be said that
Gallagher's "Russian Invasion" briefly took American
boxing by storm in the early '90s, then Kobozev was
the thunder.
By the time Kobozev absorbed his first loss to
cruiserweight challenger Marcello Dominguez in October
1995, he had won 22 consecutive bouts (including one
against current WBA heavyweight champ John Ruiz),
among them 17 knockouts. Norman "Stoney" Stone,
Ruiz's longtime trainer, remembers Kobozev as "a tough
kid." "There's no doubt he could have been a heavyweight
contender," Stoney says. Of course Gallagher agrees,
saying, "He was so easy to work with. He was a great
boxer."
When Kobozev disappeared on November 8, 1995, it
was such a mystery that his common-law wife, Lina
Cherskikh, and Gallagher even consulted Russian
émigré psychics about it. The psychics hinted that he
might have left Cherskikh for another woman. Weighing
in at 190 pounds and just a little over six feet, with blue
eyes, light brown hair, and clean-cut good looks, Kobozev
sometimes "got into trouble with women," says one friend.
Kobozev apparently didn't need the money he earned
from his weekend work as a bouncer at the Paradise
restaurant, a hot spot in Sheepshead Bay's Russian
émigré community. A close friend says Kobozev kept
his job at Paradise "for the broads."
It took nearly four years for Brooklyn homicide detectives
and the FBI (news - web sites) to discover for sure that
Kobozev hadn't gone on a romp. His corpse turned up
with a broken neck in March 1999 in a shallow grave in
the backyard of a home owned by Alexander Spitchenko
of Livingston, New Jersey. As it turned out, Kobozev lost
his last fight during a confrontation with hoods in an
auto-body shop on East 15th Street in Brooklyn.
Spitchenko, after making a deal with authorities, laid
out the story in court.
Spitchenko, who arrived in Brighton Beach in 1991, was
not only a master extortionist; he later became the Brigade's
No. 2 man in New York. By Spitchenko's own account given
at Nosov and Ermichine's trial in early December, the
Brigade (headed by famed godfather Vyacheslav Ivankov
until 1995) ran "hundreds" of protection scams on Brighton
Beach businesses. "We strong-armed people and
collected money, extorted, stole, did counterfeit credit
cards," Spitchenko explained to a hushed courtroom.
When the Brigade's victims refused to cooperate,
Spitchenko offered a solution: "We beat them up."
The Brigade's operations added up to a smorgasbord of
petty theft, prostitution, and, most importantly, protection
rackets. In one extortion case described by Spitchenko,
he and Ermichine raided a Brooklyn clothing retailer and
made off with $3000 worth of high-quality suits. The heist
was only one part of an elaborate ruse the Brigade deployed
to force the petrified store owner to accept their protection
scheme. Soon after the robbery, Ermichine returned to the
store with Spitchenko in tow. "I had a baseball bat on me,"
Spitchenko told jurors. "The owner of the store was hiding
from us." He said he shouted at the owner, "If we catch
you, we'll break your legs."
During the trial, Spitchenko gave detailed testimony on
Brigade operations and Kobozev's run-in with Nosov,
Gozman, and Ermichine on that chilly November afternoon
in 1995. The boxer had gone to the auto-body shop to have
his car worked on. Instead, he was the one who got worked
on.
Spitchenko and several other members of the Brigade
were indicted on federal racketeering charges in the spring
of 1999. In exchange for testifying against his friends,
Spitchenko copped to charges of racketeering and
accessory to murder. He got a plea deal that will reduce
his sentence and place his family in the Federal Witness
Protection Program.
Prosecutors used Spitchenko's testimony to support their
theory that when the hoods saw Kobozev at the auto-body
shop, the Brigade's 24-year-old bad boy Nosov was still
smarting from a bar brawl he was involved in that Kobozev
had broken up at Paradise a couple of days before. Defense
lawyers attempted to portray the brawl as an extension of
Spitchenko's rumored feud with the club's former owner,
Valera Zimnovitsch. A sources familiar with the case doubts
the prosecution's theory that Nosov's loss of face to Kobozev
at Paradise was the only motive for the killing.
Daniel Nobel, defense attorney for Ermichine, says a court
ruling on his cross-examination of Spitchenko prevented him
from countering the mob boss's testimony against his client.
"He's basically a dirtbag," Nobel says of Spitchenko. "But he
claims to have undergone this very radical change of
character since he was arrested." Though Nobel says he
considers the Kobozev murder a secondary element of the
much larger case against his client, he speculated that
Kobozev's relationship with Paradise owner Zemnovitsch
might not have been entirely innocent. "In his testimony,
Zemnovitsch described his relationship with Kobozev as
'friendly,' "says Nobel. "I would hazard a guess that if you
dig deeply enough you might unearth at least a friendly
relationship between Zemnovitsch and a lot of the people
the government is currently investigating."
Nakhman Gluzman, a worker at the garage where Kobozev
was killed, testified that the boxer did not seem surprised
when Nosov and his friends showed up. Instead of kicking
up a fuss, Kobozev allowed Nosov to throw an arm around
his shoulder and guide him to a small office attached to the
garage. In court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Buehler
attributed the false camaraderie to Kobozev's overconfidence
in his fighting skills. "As a professional fighter, Kobozev
probably thought he had nothing to worry about," said
Buehler.
The truth about what Kobozev and Nosov discussed may
never be revealed. What is certain, at least according to
testimony, is that in the heat of the struggle Nosov pulled
out a gun and shot Kobozev in the back. Minutes after the
shot, Gozman and Nosov hefted the crumpled boxer to
their Grand Cherokee and dumped him in the back. Still
conscious during the first few minutes of his journey to
his grave in Spitchenko's backyard, prosecutors said,
Kobozev "begged for his life." But a mercy plea to
Spitchenko's boys proved a waste of his breath.
After depositing Kobozev's black-and-white 1988 Chevy
Blazer just a few miles from the garage at a 24-hour
restaurant called the Petrina Diner, the men drove around
aimlessly for hours, according to testimony, while they
cooked up a plan to get rid of Kobozev's body. It was late
at night when they finally arrived on Spitchenko's doorstep
in New Jersey looking for a way out. In his testimony,
Spitchenko insisted that he did not take part in the actual
murder and that it was Ermichine who broke Kobozev's
neck. Whatever the case, that night in Jersey, Kobozev
was KO'd for good.
With Gozman still on the loose, the only thing Kobozev's
friends and family have to look forward to is Nosov and
Ermichine's sentencing in May. Seven years after the
boxer's death the only thing those who knew him are
certain of is that Kobozev did not go down without a
fight. "Even when he lost, he maintained his dignity.
He kept his head up," Gallagher said.
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