NYC Russian Mob Bust: Crazy Tales Of Chocolate Smuggling, Seduce-And-Drug Plots, Casino Hacks, Murder For Hire And More

NEW YORK, NY — If you thought the days of white, middle-aged mobsters with thick European accents and names like "The Kickboxer" and "Globus" cruising the streets of NYC in pimped-out SUVs and chunky gold jewelry were a thing of ancient city lore, fear not. According to three made-for-TV indictments unveiled last week by Manhattan's U.S. Attorney, Soviet-style gangsters are standing their ground alongside the city's new class of techies and freelancers and finance bros.

Hitmen. Burner phones. Snitches. Black-market cigarettes. High-stakes gambling in a Brooklyn "poker house." Corpse disposal plots. Seductresses hiding chloroform in their purses. Ten thousand pounds of stolen chocolate.

All these allegations and more can be found in the pages of three indictments and two criminal complaints filed last Wednesday by Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon Kim against an alleged "Russian crime syndicate" based out of NYC.

Kim is accusing more than two dozen men with elaborate Eastern European names and nicknames, ranging in age from 22 to 59 and mostly residing in Brooklyn, of carrying out "a panoply of crimes around the country" over the past three years or so — all at the bidding of their boss, 40-year-old New Jersey resident and Georgian national Razdhen Shulaya. (Scroll down for their names and a list of the nine craziest allegations against them.)

Shulaya, called "Brother" or "Roma" by his guys, is believed to have been the gang's "vor v zakonei" — Russian gangster speak for "thief in law." And 37-year-old Brooklyn resident Zurab Szhanashvili is believed to have been his top lieutenant of sorts.

Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague (and former NYU professor) who's about to publish a book on Russian organized crime, told Patch in a phone interview from abroad that Shulaya is a big name back in the motherland.

"He's a well-known figure," Galeotti said. "He was basically the protégé of one of the biggest guys in Russia, Zakhariy Kalashov."

Galeotti said he and other gang-watchers are still waiting to see if Shulaya's takedown "is going to have an impact on the balance of power in the wider Russian underworld."

The last Galeotti heard of the Shulaya was back in 2013, when he was reportedly arrested by Europol in a major crackdown on Georgian gangsters. So "within basically within four years," the expert said, "not only has he gotten out of jail and moved to Jersey, he has set up this whole network."

In browsing the new indictments, Galeotti said he was initially struck by what a "melting pot" of crew members Shulaya allegedly assembled — of Georgian, Russian, Armenian and even Central Asian descent — and what a "weird mix" of crimes they're accused of dabbling in, from "good old-fashioned gangster" stuff like thefts, heists, murders for hire and basement poker games in South Brooklyn, to more high-tech, computer-age stuff like fraud and hacking into casino machines.

"Organized crime culture is in transition," the Russian gang expert said — and the indictments against Shulaya and his alleged underlings, he said, tell the story of a classic Eurasian crime network "trying to find new niches" in a changing world.

Federal prosecutors are calling the network the "Shulaya Enterprise."

The group was made up of a series of smaller crews, prosecutors say, each of them tasked with carrying out particular crimes. Most of Shulaya's guys were born in the Soviet Union, then moved to NYC — but many maintained deep ties to Russia, Georgia and Ukraine, and traveled back often, prosecutors say. Shulaya allegedly also had men stationed in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Nevada and abroad.

"As a vor, Shulaya had substantial influence in the criminal underworld and offered assistance to and protection of the members and associates of the Shulaya Enterprise," the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office said Wednesday. "Those members and associates, and Shulaya himself, engaged in widespread criminal activities, including acts of violence, extortion, the operation of illegal gambling businesses, fraud on various casinos, identity theft, credit card frauds, and trafficking of large quantities of stolen goods."

Here are the names of the mob suspects.

• Razhden Shulaya, aka “Brother" or “Roma,” 40 (Edgewater, NJ)
• Zurab Dzhanashvili, aka “Zura,” 37 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Avtandil Khurtsidze, aka “the Kickboxer,” 33 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Akaki Ubilava, aka “Ako," 32 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Hamlet Uglava, 39 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Mamuka Chaganava, 38 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Mikheil Toradze, 36 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Avtandil Kanadashvili, 36 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Nazo Gaprindashvili, aka “Anna," 33 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Artur Vinokurov, aka “Rizhy," 37 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Evgheni Melman, 22 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Timur Suyunov, 28 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Zurab Buziashvili, 37 (Manhattan, NY)
• Giorgi Lomishvili, 29 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Azer Arslanouk, 27 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Ivan Afanasyev, aka “Vanya," 59 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Denis Savgir, 34 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Bakai Marat-Uulu, 25 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Andriy Petrushyn, 24 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Diego Gabisonia, 28 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Levan Makashvili, 28 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Semyon Saraidarov, aka “Sammy," 50 (Rego Park, NY)
• Vache Hovhannisyan, 30 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Denys Davydov, 32 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Erekle Kereselidze, 23 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Alex Mitselmakher, aka “Globus," 44 (Brooklyn, NY)
• Yuriy Lerner, aka “Yuri,” 44 (Brooklyn, NY)

And here the nine craziest schemes on their alleged rap sheet.

Note: All the stories below are merely allegations. They're pulled from three indictments and one criminal complaint filed last week by the U.S. Attorney and provided to Patch. The findings within were based on a joint, three-year investigation by the FBI, NYPD and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Large-Scale Chocolate Heist

In late March of this year, two of Shulaya's guys "arranged for the sale and transfer of approximately 10,000 pounds of stolen chocolate confections" that they somehow stole off a cargo ship. They forged invoices and bills to show to shippers, and at one point met with the buyer in Brooklyn to "coordinate the delivery."

Unfortunately for them, though, the person to whom they sold the chocolate to was an FBI informant.

Seduce-And-Drug Plot

Earlier in March, two more of Shulaya's guys plotted to employ a female member of the gang to seduce rich men, drug them with choloform gas until they passed out, then rob them of their money and valuables.

But again, unfortunately, Shulaya's guys made the mistake of letting an FBI informant in on the plot.

Casino Hacks

The gang got its hands on high-tech "electronic devices and software designed to predict the behavior" of certain types of slot machines — "thereby removing the element of chance."

When they found out some of these machines were installed at casinos in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, they then used their devices "to predict and exploit" the machines. They made more than $1,000 from this scheme on a single day in April 2017.

But yet again, their classic downfall: An FBI informant played a central role in the plan.

Murder For Hire

Bakai Marat-Uulu, one of Shuluya's younger guys, in his mid 20s, bought into a murder-for-hire plan proposed in May of this year by an FBI informant (seeing a theme here?).

The informant told Marat-Uulu and another guy that he had a business partner who stored "large trucks filled with contraband cigarettes," as well as a bunch of cash, in a warehouse in New Jersey. The cigarettes alone were worth maybe $1.5 million, the informant claimed. And he offered Marat-Uulu and his friend a percentage of the loot if they would help murder the business partner.

"I am ready to do it," Marat-Uulu said in a wiretapped conversation. "I can fire the first one."

The three men then discussed how best to dispose of the body. "Maybe you should disappear it," Marat-Uulu told the FBI informant. But he did have some suggestions, including 1) that the informant use acid to dissolve the corpse, or 2) that he cover the corpse with lime and bury it, so that "in a year, there won't be hair."

On June 3, somewhere along Cropsey Avenue in South Brooklyn, the informant gave Marat-Uulu and his friend an initial $1,000 each and handed off the Hi-Point Firearms 45 ACP pistol to be used in the murder.

But before they could go kill this imaginary New Jersey businessman, the U.S. Attorney intervened.

Cigarette Smuggling

Shulaya's guys were caught dealing hundreds of grams of cocaine and heroin, all sorts of fancy pistols, some stolen jewelry and at least one "Pelican Pete" slot machine — but contraband cigarettes were their bread and butter. They sold at least $100,000 worth of black-market smokes — and that's just the sales that investigators know about. Many of these sales were again made directly to FBI informants.

Hand-off points for the illegal cigarette cartons included Avenue X, Cropsey Avenue, Bath Avenue, Bay Parkway and 59th Street in South Brooklyn, as well as Atlantic City in New Jersey.

After-Hours Debauchery

The Shulaya Enterprise invested in an after-hours club in Brooklyn called the 59th Street Club, where their vision was that patrons would be able to easily purchase drugs to fuel all-nighters. The gang then tried to bribe local cops so they'd look the other way. (As far as we know, the club never officially opened.)

High-Stakes Poker Tourneys

In what Russian gang expert Galeotti called a throwback to the underground gambling scene in Brighton Beach in the 1990s, Shuluya held illegal poker games at a house on Brighton Beach Avenue. He named it, quite literally, the "Poker House."

And with the high-stakes poker games came some equally classic beatdowns of players who owed money. In February of this year, Shulaya and a group of his guys assaulted one of their own — Chaganava — at the Poker House because he failed to make "sufficient tribute payments" to the boss.

Then, a few months later in July, Shulaya also personally assaulted an FBI informant who had formerly worked as a dealer in the Poker House.

Their neighbors felt the gang's presence as well. At one point, Shulaya and his guy "Anna" tried to extort $100,000 from a shop owner on Brighton Beach Avenue.

Large-Scale ID Theft

Multiple members of the gang were caught with stolen bank details and other personal info about identity-theft victims. They were also caught with devices that could create counterfeit credit cards — and counterfeit IDs to match.

Cover-Ups

Shulaya's guys were a shifty bunch: They constantly tried to avoid detection by using "coded language" and burner phones with encryption apps or attached scrambling devices. And whenever possible, they'd meet in person to thwart the coppers from eavesdropping.

In the end, though, they ended up bringing at least three FBI informants into the fold — a large factor in their takedown.

Even after some members started to suspect one of these informants was cooperating with the feds, in part because his jail sentence had recently been cut short, they still kept him in the loop. The rest, as they say, is history.

This story has been updated. Lead image via Google Maps