Monya Elson
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Monya Elson (May 23, 1951) is a Russian-American mobster involved in counterfeiting, drug trafficking and other criminal activities in the Russian-Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn as well as suspected of ordering the deaths of Elbrous Evdoev and members of the rival Vyacheslav Lyubarsky organization.
Monya Elson, native of the Jewish ghetto in Kishinev, Moldova, began his criminal career as an expert pickpocket, moved on to extortion, and then-after emigrating to New York in 1978-18).
After his arrival in the United States in 1978, Elson was among one of many Russian criminals operating in Brighton Beach (otherwise known as "Odessa-by-the-Sea") during the early 1980s and 1990s. It was during this time that he expanded his racket into credit card scams because Americans did not carry cash.
In another of his criminal rackets, together with dissident writer Yuri Brokhin, Elson would rob honest jewellers. Dressing up as Orthodox Jews, replete with paste-on beards, side curls, long black coats, and black hats, they would ask to see a variety of expensive diamond stones. While Brokhin babbled in Yiddish, distracting the shop owner, Elson switched the diamonds with zirconium.
As he began rising to prominence within the local underworld, he would be the target of several attempts on his life beginning on May 14, 1991 when he was shot by a rival gunman for the attempted murder of Vyacheslav Lyubarsky. He was later suspected in the murder of Lyubarsky and his son Vadim who, returning from dinner with his wife Nellie, were ambushed by an unidentified assailant outside their Brighton Beach apartment and shot to death on January 12, 1992.
One of Elson's enemies, Alexander Slepinin, was found shot to death in his car on June 23, 1992. A suspect in the murder, authorities believed Slepinin death was retribution for the gangland murder of associate Efrim Ostrovsky.
Another Russian-born criminal, Elbrous Evdoev, reported to New York police that Elson had attempted to have him killed after being shot in the shoulder and hand on July 4, 1992. Evdoev would survive two more attempts on his life before his body was found frozen solid after being dumped in a snow bank near an auto yard in Pine Brook, New Jersey on March 6, 1993.
Several months later, Elson was shot in the forearm in Los Angeles on November 6 and, after being driven to a nearby hospital by Leonyard Kanterkantetes, was discharged shortly after. Only two days later, another attempt to murder Elson failed after an Armenian mobster was injured when the car bomb he had been putting under Kanterkantetes's car detonated prematurely.
In yet another attempt on his life, Elson was wounded along with both his wife and bodyguard Oleg Zapinakmine by Boris Gregoriev in front of his Brooklyn home on July 26, 1993. On September 24, only two months following the failed assassination, Zapinakmine was murdered in front of his home.
Yet another victim whose death Elson supposedly ordered was associate Alexander Levichitz, also known as Sasha Pinya, who survived an attack after suffering three shots to the head near the Arbat Restaurant on the evening of January 17, 1994.
Fleeing the country after being indicted in 1995 for the murders of Slepinin and others, Elson was arrested in Fano, Italy and eventually extradited back to the United States where he was tried and convicted on three charges of murder. As of 2005, he remains in prison.
[edit] Further reading
- Friedman, Robert I. Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
[edit] References
- Devito, Carlo. Encyclopedia of International Organized Crime. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005. ISBN 0-8160-4848-7
