More in ‘organized crime’

• Twenty-six arrests were made on charges of child molestation in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community last year, versus one or two in years prior. That’s a good sign, the New York Times says, because it means child abuse in the community is finally being reported. [NYT]
• A Hamas-affiliated organization in Gaza—which is furious at Fatah’s waffling ...

On a quiet, affluent block in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, I joined Ilan, my guide to the Israeli crime world, on a visit to Oved, now retired from the “life” but once a high-ranking member of the Alperon crime organization. Oved is another product of Hatikvah, the rough neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv where so many of Israel’s mobsters grew up, a tough who used to train and spar with Ilan in the Mejiro gym in South Tel Aviv before the gym, mysteriously, burned to the ground. He used to work as a lieutenant to mob boss Nissim Alperon, he told us, but decided to leave Israel for good after one of many assassination attempt on his former boss’s life.

On the fourth day of the week, Tablet Magazine brings you the fourth part of Douglas Century’s five-part investigation into the current state of Israeli organized crime (here are parts 1; 2; and 3). Accompanying Century throughout his reporting was photographer Antonin Kratochvil, and accompanying Century’s article today is a slideshow of Kratochvil’s photographs of ...

In 2006, Douglas Century traveled to Israel with photographer Antonin Kratochvil, to report on the country’s shifting organized crime scene. Guided by a former mafia soldier named Ilan, they were shown Tel Aviv’s alleyways and sidestreets, its seedy clubs and the back rooms—all the often-invisible places where the mob goes about its business. The photos here are snapshots from their visit to Israel’s underworld.

THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
This is the fourth installment in a five-part series about organized crime in Israel. Click here to read Part I, here to read part II, and here to read Part III.
“The daily pressure here is crazy,” a 27-year-old named Tal told me ...

In Tablet Magazine today, Elissa Strauss celebrates the rich Yiddish lexicon for describing female genitalia. We present part 3 of Douglas Century’s epic report on the current state of Israeli organized crime (part 1; part 2). Apropos Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s attempts to argue that the Palestinian Grand Mufti’s alliance with Hitler during World ...

In another indication of the increasingly ambitious and global nature of Israeli organized crime, a trend I’ve been covering in a Tablet Magazine series this week, an Israeli court ruled yesterday that the brothers Meir and Yitzhak Abergil, two of Israel’s most notorious gangsters, and a few of their associates will be extradited to the ...

Just before noon on November 17, 2008, a deafening explosion rocked Namir Boulevard in the heart of northern Tel Aviv. The chassis of a rented white Volkswagen was ripped open by a sophisticated remote-controlled bomb, and the car’s sole occupant, 53-year-old mob boss Ya’akov Alperon, was killed instantly, his mangled body tumbling from the fractured door. Two bystanders, including a 13-year-old boy, were injured.