"In a city teeming with ethnic gangs, Wilson quietly sits at the crossroads between Howard Beach and Brighton Beach, perhaps the only man to be identified by law enforcement officials as a high-level associate of both the Russian Organizatsiya and the Italian La Cosa Nostra. A twice convicted felon, Wilson--described in one confidential law enforcement report as a ''sophisticated fraud man''--is suspected by federal and state investigators of being involved in laundering and investing money for both crime groups.

Wilson's remarkable career--which began with hosiery sales in the Garment District when he was a teenager--has seen him traffic in diamonds, bauxite, trademarks, stolen checks, stock, aluminum, restaurants, letters of credit, and bootleg gasoline. During this span, Wilson has been the focus of at least eight criminal probes and has surrounded himself with Mafia bosses, Russian killers, captains of industry, corrupt lawyers, and, for good measure, an international art thief and one KGB agent. A former prosecutor who once unsuccessfully tried to ''flip'' Wilson against his criminal cohorts said enviously of the businessman: ''This is the guy who knows about the money.''
[ . . . ]
Records obtained by the Voice show that Wilson has served as Alex Zilber's financial adviser, co-owned a company with him, and was involved in one real estate transaction with the Russian gangster. Zilber, Wilson said, ''would only come to me for advice every now and then'' when business problems arose.

Wilson and Zilber were partners in a 1991 joint venture-- formed in conjunction with a large Ukraine-based manufacturer--to purchase bauxite for the production and sale of aluminum products across Europe and the former Soviet Union. The inclusion of Zilber in the deal could be attributed to his relationship with Russian gangsters in his native Odessa, where the manufacturing plant was located.

Before the arrangement collapsed in 1993 amid a flurry of lawsuits over the division of profits, the venture recorded about $500 million in sales--including many deals with fugitive financier Marc Rich. Bank records show that a Wilson firm, Bronx Investments, Ltd., received $7.2 million in wire transfers from the venture's New York bank account. Another $250,000 was paid in April 1993 to Merchants T&F, the Wilson firm that owns stock in Sloan's.

According to court documents, Wilson also lurked behind the scenes of the gasoline scheme that almost cost Victor Zilber his life. That illegal operation, federal prosecutors in New Jersey said, cost tax authorities more than $100 million in uncollected revenue and triggered more than $48 million in money laundering. The Newark probe resulted in convictions against a number of Wilson cronies, including Russian mobsters Arkady Seifer and Jacob Dobrer. Victor Zilber was also charged in the 1993 indictment but has been judged unfit to stand trial."

"Betar's most urgent activity was smuggling weapons to the Irgun. In the 1940s, Irgun's leader Menachem Begin sent several deputies to America to procure arms. Eli Tavin, Irgun's overseas intelligence chief, supervised the operation, using his position as educational director of the World Zionist Organization as a cover. In all, Tavin set up weapons procurement networks in twenty-three countries, as well as a number of self-defense units, including one in Shanghai to protect Jews still in Chinese displaced persons' camps following the Second World War. Tavin also masterminded Irgun's terrorist campaign against the British in Europe. On October 31, 1946, for example, he engineered the bombing of the British Embassy in Rome."

The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane;
From FBI Informant To Knesset Member
By Robert I. Friedman

Chapter: The Gerin Alperin Affair
(pp.182-183)

For nine months in 1975 and 1976, JDL extremists calling themselves the Jewish Armed Resistance attempted to emulate past glories. In New York, pipe bombs exploded outside the Iraqi Mission to the UN, the Polish Consulate, and the Amtorg office. Shots were also fired into the Soviet residential complex in the Bronx; into the homes of two Soviet diplomats in suburban Maryland; and into the Soviet Mission to the UN, piercing two fifth-floor windows in the Ukrainian section. On May 2, 1976, in the early morning hours before a march for Soviet Jewry in Manhattan, five low-yield pipe bombs caused minor damage to the American Communist Party national headquarters, two midtown banks that did business with the Soviet Union, a Russian-language bookstore, and a subway exit near the United Nations Library. On June 23, 1976, vehicles belonging to Pan American Airlines were destroyed by incendiary bombs. In Washington, D.C., a bomb blew a hole in the retaining wall at the State Department, shattering several plate glass doors and windows, causing more than $15,000 in damage. A JDL spokesman announced that the explosion was to protest the "sellout of Israel to Sadat."

The flurry of activity stopped when the FBI arrested twenty-one- year-old Steven Ehrlich, seventeen-year-old Steven Rombom, and Thomas Macintosh, a thirty-six-year-old convert to Judaism, as they drove across the Goethals Bridge between New Jersey and Staten Island with four pounds of gunpowder. Macintosh, who turned state's witness, testified against his friends and also implicated thirty-five-year-old JDL leader Russel Kelner and one other person in the spate of Jewish Armed Resistance terror bombings. The JDL men were subsequently convicted and received prison sentences. According to government documents, at least two dozen people were investigated for their roles in the JAR bombings, including Kahane, who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator.

Steven Rombom was a particularly tragic example of the sort of psychopaths Kahane attracted to the JDL. The violence-prone youth, who, according to court records spent eight years in psychiatric institutions from the age of six, joined the JDL when he was twelve years old over the frantic objections of his doctors and social workers who called JDL officials, begging them not to allow Rombom to get involved in the militant organization. Following Rombom's conviction, his mother spun into a deep depression. His father, Abraham, wrote to the judge pleading for his son's early release from prison, saying that "my marriage has been completely ruined. There is no interest in marital relations on the part of my wife. I cannot talk to her about any subject but Steven." As late as 1985, Rombom, who now works in New York as a private investigator, was handling security on the East Coast for Rabbi Kahane.
[ . . . ]

The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane;
From FBI Informant To Knesset Member
By Robert I. Friedman

Chapter: Every Jew a .22
(pp 121-123)

On May 12, 1971, Kahane and a dozen other JDL members were arrested by federal agents in New York for conspiracy to manufacture explosives. It was no accident that on the very next day Kahane publicly announced that the JDL was joining forces with another right-wing group, the Italian American Civil Rights League (IACRL). This unholy alliance was the first serious attempt to forge an ethnic fascist movement in modern American history.

The IACRL was founded by New York City Mob boss Joseph Colombo, Sr. to instill pride in Italian Americans and to counteract the notion that Italians in America were gangsters. It mattered little to Colombo's supporters that he had begun his career as a Mob hitman and worked his way up to control one of the five most powerful Mafia families in New York. For months at a time, Colombo and his followers, many of them burly teamsters and longshoremen, picketed FBI headquarters to demand among other things that the Bureau stop using the word "Mafia," which they declared was a myth created by overzealous federal prosecutors to justify their huge budgets. So powerful did the IACRL become that New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug, and New York Democratic Leader Meade Esposito, among other influential politicians, were guests at its parades, banquets, and demonstrations. Soon, IACRL stickers appeared on store fronts on Italian-American-owned businesses across the city.

On November 20, 1970, the IACRL sponsored a star-studded benefit at Madison Square Garden. Headlined by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. and hosted by "Tonight Show" emcee Ed McMahon, the event raised more than $600,000 for the IACRL. Ticket holders that night included Mafia heavyweights Carlo Gambino, Russell Bufalino, and Raymond Patriarca, as well as political luminaries such as New York Deputy Mayor Richard Aurelio and Paul O'Dwyer, former Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Colombo even set up a political action committee through the IACRL, which endorsed and contributed to political candidates in New York. For example, Colombo's "Mob PAC" vigorously backed Edward T. Pulaski, a Democrat from Staten Island, in his 1970 effort to unseat New York State Senator John Marchi, an Italian-American who had repeatedly denounced Colombo as a "low-life thug."

Colombo's lawyer, Barry Ivan Slotnick, first told the Mob boss about Kahane. At a late night dinner in 1971, Slotnick mentioned to Colombo that he was representing Kahane at his arraignment on bomb-making charges. Slotnick said that the rabbi did not have much money and would probably have to fight his case from jail. Colombo, who according to Slotnick was attracted to Kahane's tough Jewish image, showed up in court the next morning with a bondsman to pay the rabbi's $25,000 bail.

Later, during an impromptu press conference with Colombo on the courthouse steps, Kahane told reporters that he welcomed the Mob boss�s support, and promised to �picket the offices of the FBI if Mr. Colombo asks our [JDL] help." Asked by a New York Times reporter to discuss the implications of an alliance between the JDL and the IACRL, Kahane replied: "It's human brotherhood. People of other faiths and backgrounds have come to help. It's the kind of thing which, had it been Blacks helping Jews, it would have drawn raves. The Italians are no worse than the Blacks."

As a lawyer for both Colombo and Kahane, Slotnick was pivotal in setting up a working relationship between the IACRL and the JDL. And as a spokesman for both groups, Slotnick unswervingly trumpeted the organizations' virtues on numerous radio and television talk shows, declaring that their leaders were victims of racial and religious persecution by the government. At the time, Colombo's legal problems were certainly severe. He was implicated in a $750,000 jewelry heist; indicted for contempt of court; convicted in March 1971 of perjury; arrested one month later for interstate gambling; indicted twenty days after that on charges of controlling a $10 million-a-year gambling syndicate; and finally, he was awaiting trial for income tax evasion. When I interviewed Slotnick in 1986, during a time when he was reaping enormous publicity for his defense of subway gunman Bernhard Goetz, the flashy, self-proclaimed "best defense attorney in America" was still promoting the divisive racial politics of Kahane and Colombo. "The major problem in this country," Slotnick told me, "is not Americans of Italian descent overrunning unions, but the one Goetz confronted in the subway. Goetz was surrounded by four people. That's organized crime too, and a much more important kind of organized crime to be battled than (former) U.S. Attorney [Rudolph] Giuliani's so-called [Mob] Commission. I'm more concerned about the [James! Ramseurs of this world than I am about the so-called Mob." * As for Kahane, Slotnick says historians will judge him as one of the great heroes of the Jewish people.

*James Ramseur was one of four Black youths who surrounded Goetz in the New York subway.

The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane;
From FBI Informant To Knesset Member
By Robert I. Friedman

Chapter Three: Betar; Path to Militancy
(pp 35-38)

Meir Kahane's militancy eventually found an outlet in Betar, the youth wing of the Revisionist Movement, which he joined shortly after his Bar Mitzvah in 1946. With its emphasis on violent street demonstrations, paramilitary training camps, torchlight parades, and myths of Old Testament heroes, Betar would be the model for the JDL.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky had organized Betar in Riga, Latvia in 1923, in response to the spread of virulently anti-Semitic European nationalist movements. Its twofold purpose was to train Jewish youth in self-defense and to prepare them for the fire-and-blood struggle that would transform Palestine into a Jewish state.

The Betar youth movement in America was incorporated on June 10, 1940, in New York City. That same year it opened a paramilitary training camp in the Catskill Mountains near Hunter, New York in a run-down hotel that was donated by a supporter. Jabotinsky died on August 3rd during a visit to the camp shortly after it opened. By the early 1940s, Betar claimed several hundred members in the New York area. One of its first U.S. leaders was Moshe Arens, who in the 1980s became Israel's ambassador to America and Israel's foreign minister.

Betar's most urgent activity was smuggling weapons to the Irgun. In the 1940s, Irgun's leader Menachem Begin sent several deputies to America to procure arms. Eli Tavin, Irgun's overseas intelligence chief, supervised the operation, using his position as educational director of the World Zionist Organization as a cover. In all, Tavin set up weapons procurement networks in twenty-three countries, as well as a number of self-defense units, including one in Shanghai to protect Jews still in Chinese displaced persons' camps following the Second World War. Tavin also masterminded Irgun's terrorist campaign against the British in Europe. On October 31, 1946, for example, he engineered the bombing of the British Embassy in Rome.

Tavin obtained weapons in the United States from Jewish GIs returning from the Second World War as well as from the Mafia. "Jewish veterans would come in with packages wrapped in newspapers and say: 'I heard I could give this to you for Israel,' " said Sylvia Zweibon, the owner, along with her husband, of a floor-covering store in East New York, then a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, where they stored arms. "At one point we had so many weapons we had to rent another store," added Zweibon, who was a member in Poland before coming to America.

Israeli operatives trucked the weapons to docks in New York and New Jersey run by Mob boss Charles "Lucky" Luciano, a close associate of Meir Lanskyan impassioned right-wing Zionist, who, with other Jewish gangsters like Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles, contributed large sums of money to the Irgun. The Mob-dominated Longshoreman's Union helped the Revisionists sabotage weapons shipments en route from U.S. ports to Arab states as well.

Charles Kahane, himself deeply involved in the arms smuggling ring, encouraged his sons to join Betar. "Betar was my father's kind of ideology and I naturally gravitated toward it," said Meir Kahane, who made midnight trips to the Hoboken docks to crate arms destined for the Irgun in Israel. It was not without risk. In 1947, two of Meir's comrades were arrested in a Manhattan fur loft with 144 machine guns, 203 rifles, and 268 pistols. The young men were acquitted one month later thanks to their lawyer, Paul O'Dwyer. Despite this setback, between February and March 1948 alone, Tavin smuggled forty-three shipments of weapons from New York to Tel Aviv.

Meir and Nachman also raised money for the underground. The brothers rode up and down Brooklyn's Pitkin Avenue in a Betar sound truck that blared patriotic Hebrew songs and speeches by Jabotinsky, soliciting donations. "Ten big Jews would get out of the truck and put an Israeli flag down in the street," Nachman said. "People just pulled huge fistfuls of cash from their pockets and threw it on the flag. They were fighting with each other to throw the gelt [money]. You won't see something like that again until the Messiah comes!

"And I can remember dark moments, too, like when a cache of arms for the Irgun was discovered by the police on the roof of the Habad Synagogue [in Brooklyn]. At our house it was like Tisha B'Av [the commemoration of the destruction of the Second Temple] when that happened. My father's own Sha'arei Tefila congregation also raised money for an ambulance that people say went down on the Altalena [an Irgun arms ship that was sunk by the Haganah], although I haven't actually confirmed that."

(During the 1940s, the Haganah operated a separate, competing arms smuggling operation in America. Run by Teddy Kollek from Manhattan's McAlpin Hotel near Macy's department store in Herald Square, its key operatives included Hank Greenspun, the late publisher of The Las Vegas Sun, and Al Schwimmer, an Israeli arms merchant who would become involved in the Iran-contra arms-for-hostage negotiations.)

After Israel's creation on May 15, 1948, the Betar movement in America evolved into a right-wing, pro-Israel activist youth group, often holding noisy protest demonstrations at Arab UN missions in Manhattan. According to a high-ranking Justice Department official, these activities were coordinated by Moshe Rivlin, then Israel's vice-consul in New York. When contacted for comment, Rivlin said that he could not recall being involved in these demonstrations.

Kahane was usually at the forefront of Betar's militant actions. "He was a heck of a lot more radical in Betar than I was," said Allan's brother, Victor Mallenbaum, now a clinical psychologist in North Carolina who was part of Kahane's inner circle of childhood friends. "He was always ready to go and do some militant activity. He wanted to bomb a book store in Manhattan that sold pro-Nazi material."

In 1947, Kahane gained the notoriety he sought with his attack on the anti-Zionist British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin. "Allan and Victor Mallenbaum had run over to the market and bought a crate of vegetables," recalls Irwin Fleminger. "I remember the look on Bevin's face when we pelted him. He was absolutely shocked!"

After his arrest, Kahane was charged with assault. But Judge Morris Rothenberg gave him a suspended sentence. It was the first of what would be a long, unbroken string of light or suspended sentences that Kahane would receive from sympathetic Jewish judges in the United States and Israel. "The judge was very anti-British and sympathetic to Betar," Kahane later told me. It did not hurt that Kahane's father was then the politically well-connected president of the Flatbush Board of Rabbis, nor that Judge Rothenberg was the president of the Jewish National Fund in America, had an agricultural settlement in Palestine named in his honor, and had himself assailed Bevin in 1947 the same year that Kahane was brought before him in a speech to a national Zionist conference.

The Secret Army (1983)
By David J. Bercuson

Chapter 4: A Matter of Great Importance
(pp.44-49)

On a cold, snowy evening in Montreal, in early 1948, a party in a third-floor restaurant was interrupted by the ringing of the downstairs pay phone. Someone trudged up the stairs and called Joe Frank to the phone. Frank, a vice-president of the Zionist Organization of Canada, was worried. He had left instructions with his wife that he was not to be disturbed, and he knew that while he and the others were celebrating, a group of young men in a warehouse across the city were preparing a shipment of arms for Palestine. Something must be wrong. As Frank took the phone, he heard the voice of the local Haganah representative; the men had been discovered and the shipment had been seized. Frank listened, horrified thoughts of possible consequences racing through his mind. Who would be caught? How much did the government know? When would they come for him? He was more frightened than he had ever been before. (Frank's fears were groundless. Neither he nor any other Zionist leader was ever charged with the illegal export of arms.)

Canada, like the United States, had been a major supplier of arms for the Allies during World War II. When the fighting ended, it became a dumping ground for huge amounts of surplus weaponry. It was a natural target for Haganah arms- collection activities. Canadian war equipment was not easy pickings, however. Canadian arms-export policies were coordinated with those of the United States and the United Kingdom, and the Canadian government was anxious to help the British and the Americans keep a tight control on the flow of arms to the Middle East. Nevertheless, although Ottawa's attitude posed an obstacle for Canadian Jews determined to aid the Haganah, it did not stop them.

The Canadian supporters of the Haganah were a varied group. One of the men who had gathered in Sonneborn's office to meet Ben Gurion in the summer of 1945, and who was involved in the running of Aid to Palestine, the Canadian version of Materials for Palestine, was Samuel J. Zacks, a prominent Toronto businessman and Zionist leader. Several Toronto Jews had also been involved in early attempts to assemble and test a prototype submachine gun designed in the United States for the Haganah by Carl Ekdahl. The major Canadian effort to ship arms, aircraft, and other military equipment to Palestine was chanelled through the Victory Equipment &- Supply Company Limited, a shoestring operation run with one telephone out of a small, dusty office at 422 McGill Street in Montreal.

Victory Equipment had been established by several prominent Canadian Zionists including Samuel Schwisberg and Joe Frank. It worked side by side with Aid to Palestine (which collected non-military goods in Canada) and with the United Zionist Purchasing Commission, headed by Montreal lawyer Leon D. Crestohl.

The Purchasing Commission had been established by the United Zionist Council, the umbrella organization of Canadian Zionism. It was the ultimate source of funds for all purchases in Canada of both "white" and "black" supplies. It was vital, therefore, that there be a discreet connection between the Purchasing Commission and Victory Equipment. Walter Loewenson, secretary of the Purchasing Commission and secretary-treasurer of Victory Equipment, was the link.

Because Victory Equipment was ultimately responsible to Teddy Kollek's operation in New York, Loewenson laid down guidelines for Canadian purchasing and supply operations in consultation with Haganah headquarters at the Hotel Fourteen. Loewenson wanted Aid to Palestine to gather linen, food, clothing, and medical supplies; but what Loewenson referred to as "technical supplies and equipment" were to be reserved for the Purchasing Commission. He put the reason somewhat cryptically in a message to New York: "... this will give me better opportunities of mixing in, along with very harmless items, some things which it may be more difficult to get approval for, and for which we may not get [export] permits.... " What he did not add, because New York was no doubt already aware of it, was that Victory Equipment, not the Purchasing Commission, ultimately handled those "hot" items.

In the summer of 1948, Loewenson's place was taken by Joe Baumholz, an engineering student from McGill. Baumholz was a fast talker and good at making connections. He had volunteered to fight in Palestine, but his considerable organizational talents made him more valuable in Montreal. He too was the man in the central position--secretary-treasurer and sole employee of Victory Equipment and secretary to Crestohl's Purchasing Commission. Building on the foundation established by Loewenson, Baumholz worked out a foolproof method for financing Victory Equipment's purchases. The Purchasing Commission raised its funds openly from various Zionist organizations. However, Canadian currency-control regulations did not allow funds collected in Canada to be sent abroad, so with the funds Baumholz then bought supplies directly from different dealers and distributors. (Baumholz never dealt directly with the Canadian War Assets Corporation, which was responsible for selling war surplus equipment. He always bought through private dealers.)

Victory Equipment was one of the many companies the Purchasing Commission dealt with but it was a company with a vital difference. When Baumholz, acting for Victory Equipment, bought bandages or blankets from legitimate suppliers he did it with the sole purpose of selling those supplies to the Purchasing Commission. When he billed the Purchasing Commission, he inflated the invoices. In this way Baumholz covered his costs and had money left to buy whatever military equipment he came across. Like Loewenson, he kept in constant touch with the New York headquarters. From headquarters he got lists of specific requirements; in addition he continually checked with New York to see if the radio sets, radar equipment, flame throwers, and Link trainers he had come across were needed and if the asking price was right.

The Canadian Zionists were lucky to have a key friend in the government. Alex "Sandy" Skelton was the son of the late Dr. Oscar Douglas Skelton. O. D. Skelton had been Deputy Minister of the Department of External Affairs and a senior foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. His son, Alex, a brilliant economist who had studied at Queen's University in the mid-1920s, had served on the Wartime Prices and Trade Board, and in other government agencies, during World War II. In the spring of 1947 he was appointed Acting Director General of Research in the Department of Reconstruction and Supply. In the summer of 1948 he joined the Department of Trade and Commerce as an Assistant Deputy Minister. Skelton--a hard drinker who could outswear any army sergeant--was also well connected in Ottawa's political and bureaucratic circles.

Skelton's father, who had died in 1941, had never shown any particular interest in or sympathy towards Zionism. Apart from some anti-British feeling no doubt inherited from his father, Alex himself betrayed few political sentiments. However, he was a close personal friend of Sam Zacks, whom he had met at Queen's, and of Moe Appel, who was one of the few men in Ottawa who could match Skelton drink for drink. The friendship with Skelton was important because, particularly after Skelton went to Trade and Commerce, he was able to arrange export permits for all sorts of questionable items. As Zacks wrote of him in October 1948: "... we have few better friends or more generous liberals than Alex Skelton."

Moe Appel was another genuine character. He had worked as a newspaperman with the Ottawa Citizen. In 1942, he had left a city editor's job to join the Reuters News Agency as a war correspondent in Europe. After the war he was editor of Reuters' North American bureau in New York City. He left Reuters in 1946 to serve a brief stint with the American Jewish Congress, and then returned to Ottawa as Public Relations Director with the Zionist Organization of Canada. Appel was a short man with a rough manner of speech who easily saw behind facade and pretension. He had earned much respect in the newspaper business and had formed many valuable friendships in his numerous days--and nights--in Ottawa's favourite press haunts. He knew most of the key newspapermen, politicians, and top-level bureaucrats in the Canadian government. And, of course, he knew Alex Skelton.

When Baumholz needed an export permit for a particularly difficult cargo, he called a special number in Ottawa and relayed his request to a Jewish lawyer who worked closely with Appel and Skelton. One such cargo (which was eventually shipped in the summer of 1948) was a number of Harvard trainers purchased by an Ontario scrap dealer. These were single-engine monoplanes, built for a crew of two, that were easily convertible to military uses. The aircraft in question had been used to train pilots during the war. In autumn 1946, they had been routinely transferred from the Royal Canadian Air Force to the War Assets Corporation to be sold for scrap. Baumholz needed a way to get them out of the country and a call went out to Ottawa.

When Appel learned of the problem he set up a meeting with the lawyer and Skelton. The three met at night at Appel's office at 46 Elgin Street. Appel had just moved in and there were, as he put it, "just enough chairs and a desk for whiskey". They began to drink and had soon consumed the best part of a large bottle. Skelton said little; Appel and the lawyer did most of the talking. The lawyer, normally not a drinking man, was soon sick to his stomach. Skelton was "doodling and doodling and doodling", Appel remembered. In the midst of his doodling, Skelton suddenly exclaimed: "I've got it, goddamnit." He looked up: "Do you guys have a spring fair in Tel Aviv?" "No," Appel said, "but we can create one." Skelton seemed satisfied. "You draw a plan. We'll dismantle the goddamned things, put them in crates, and send them to the Tel Aviv Spring Fair." Not long after, several large crates painted red, white, and blue and addressed to the Tel Aviv Spring Fair left Canada. In Israel the contents of the crates were put back together, equipped with bomb racks, and pressed into service as dive bombers.

In Montreal, Baumholz was usually responsible for arranging warehousing, packing, and shipping of both legal and illegal goods. His favourite work place was Rappaport's Bottle and Supply Company on St. Lawrence Boulevard. There students, usually volunteers from Zionist youth groups, worked hard to crate the supplies and stencil destinations on the boxes. Only the military goods were mislabelled. "Technical equipment", "wire", "ingots", and so on were stencilled on crates containing radios, radar, and other military goods. Flame throwers became "insecticide sprayers".

From the warehouse the goods moved by rail or truck to the port-to Montreal harbour, if the St. Lawrence River was still ice-free; in the winter, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, St. John, New Brunswick, or even Portland, Maine. When the shipment was ready, Baumholz called New York. Elie Shalit, the man on Kollek's staff who coordinated shipping from North America, would then arrange to have a freighter pick up the cargo.

By the summer of 1948 a steady stream of supplies was leaving Baumholz's warehouses in Montreal. There were clothes and blankets and canned pears and canned meat. There were also machine guns, flame throwers, and thousands of Mark 19 radio sets that had been built in Canada for Canadian and Allied use during the war. Some, built for the Soviet Union, were shipped to Palestine with Russian markings and instructions still on them. Canadian Jews may have contributed only a handful of planes and guns to the Jewish war effort, but Canadian radio sets and other radio equipment became the backbone of Israel's military communications network.

Baumholz and Victory Equipment were only one small part of a world-wide Haganah operation.' similar activities were taking place from Brazil to Czechoslovakia, and from Burbank to Johannesburg. Some of the network's machinery had been set up in the closing years of World War II, some after Ben Gurion's visit with the Sonneborn group in 1945. But most of the operation had been hastily established in reaction to an obvious need in the months following the partition vote in the United Nations. In almost all countries where the Haganah sought help, the local Jewish communities responded selflessly. They had to. In Palestine the Haganah and the Yishuv were more hard pressed with each passing day.

Although arms from abroad were urgently needed for the battle to open the roads of Palestine, there were other equally vital requirements. Trained men with prior military experience, officers who had served with conventional armies, technical experts, army medical personnel, and maintenance specialists were also essential. The Haganah's war with the Palestine Arabs was only the beginning. When the British withdrew from Palestine leaving the way clear for an Arab League invasion, larger battles would follow. Thus, at Ben Gurion's urging, the Haganah had also embarked on a campaign to recruit foreign volunteers, mostly from among the hundreds of thousands of Jewish war veterans in the Allied countries, but also from among non-Jews who were willing to risk their lives to help the Jews of Palestine.

http://www.public-i.org/story%5F01%5F080200.htm
The Center for Public Integrity
2Aug00
Investigative Report
Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough
State Department Questioned Deal With Firm Linked to Russian Mob
By Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller

[ . . . ]
The former KGB major, who with the fall of communism in the late 1980s had himself been involved in the plan by the KGB and Communist Party to loot state enterprises, said that Alfa Bank was founded with party and KGB funds, and quickly attracted rogue agents who had served in anti-organized-crime units. "They (the rogue agents on the bank�s payroll) quickly determined that dealing in drugs would bring the highest profits with literally no risk in Russia," according to the former KGB officer.

He claimed that a "large channel of heroin transit was established from Burma through Laos, Vietnam, to the Far East [Siberia]." From there the drugs were camouflaged as flour and sugar shipments and forwarded on to Germany. The drug operation was controlled by a Chechen mob family, he said.

The FSB report, too, claimed that the Alfa Group�s top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, "allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe."

BLOODLINES: The Rise & Fall of the Mafia�s Royal Family (p.34-39, 53-54)
By Lee Lamothe & Antonio Nicaso

[ . . . ]
In the late 1960s or early 1970s, Pasquale Cuntrera met the legendary American underworld financier Meyer Lansky. According to a story Pasquale Cuntrera told a fellow Mafioso, it was a fortuitous meeting that was soon to change the destiny of the Cuntreras and the Caruanas.

Lansky, who for years had laundered and invested organized crime profits for La Cosa Nostra, was widely regarded as the financial wizard who'd brought American gangsters into the modern age, putting them into legitimate businesses, unions, and politics.

Lansky told Pasquale Cuntrera to abandon any plans of returning to Sicily. Instead, he explained how business could be conducted at arm's length, from elsewhere in Italy. Lansky suggested he move to the Lazio region in central Italy where his old American mafia friend, Frank "Three Fingers Brown" Coppola, was living.

As it happened, in the early 1970s the Agrigento Court of Appeal lifted the decree that had forced the Cuntreras to leave Sicily. In their decision, the judges relied on documents that portrayed Pasquale Cuntrera as "a delightful person." Pasquale Cuntrera moved back to Italy and promptly met with Frank Coppola, bringing him greetings from Lansky.

"We're a great family," Cuntrera told the grand old godfather at his Ostia home. "We can attempt what has never been attempted before: laundering heroin money on a massive scale."

Coppola took little convincing. He was impressed with the reputation of the Caruana-Cuntrera and was aware of their expanding influence in the international underworld. He explained to Pasquale Cuntrera the techniques used by Lansky to clean the American La Cosa Nostra's profits. The most successful was the "loan-back scheme," in which illegal profits could be smuggled offshore and loaned back to the original depositor. Others included the use of money orders, traveler's checks, cashier's checks, and bearer bonds. Bulk currency could, if necessary, be body- carried out of the United States and deposited into Swiss banks, or in an Anstalt, a share company with a single secret shareholder, in Liechtenstein. Loans could be acquired through the offshore entities, and the borrower, who owned the money in the first place, would pay himself interest on the one hand, while declaring the loan a business expense.
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http://www.tni.org/archives/tblick/aruba.htm
Transnational Organized Crime
Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 1997, pp. 50-89
TNI ARCHIVES
THE ROTHSCHILDS OF THE MAFIA ON ARUBA
Tom Blickman
TNI Researcher

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Some, like Alfonso Gagliano, representative in the Canadian Federal Parliament for Montreal's 'Little Italy' Saint Leonard, rose to prominent positions.

The accountant Gagliano is a loyal supporter of Canada's Prime-Minister Jean Chr�tien. Gagliano organized the Liberal Party's fund raising for the 1993 election-campaign. He was a candidate for a position in the new government of Mr Chr�tien. The RCMP is asked to screen every probable future minister, and Mr Gagliano didn't quite pass the test. (65) The Montreal daily La Presse revealed why: Gagliano's accountancy firm kept the books of Agostino Cuntrera, a nephew of Pasquale Cuntrera and implicated in the murder of Paolo Violi, boss of the local Cotroni-family, in 1978. The murder was a sign that the Sicilian clan had taken over control in Montreal. Agostino Cuntrera was never convicted; he struck a deal with the Canadian Justice Department.

Asked about his relationship with Agostino Cuntrera, Gagliano said: 'Mr Cuntrera is an acquaintance. We both come from Siculiana. I met him during a engagement in a church. He came to me in the 1970's when he wanted me as his bookkeeper for his restaurant.' Gagliano et Cie kept Agostino Cuntrera as a client after his complicity in the Violi-murder was revealed. Agostino Cuntrera and Gagliano saw each other occasionally during marriages and activities of the Association de Siculiana, a cultural association founded by Mr Gagliano, who was its first president. Some years after Mr Gagliano's chairmanship, Agostino Cuntrera became president of the association.

Nor was Agostino Cuntrera the only client of Gagliano. Another was Dima Messina, the financial aid of Montreal Mafia-boss Vito Rizzuto. An RCMP investigation showed that Messina laundered 22 million Canadian dollars for Rizzuto in 1986-88. Rizzuto's Ferrari Testarossa (a 250,000 dollar Italian sports car) was registered under Messina's name.

During the controlled delivery of 58 kilos of heroin to Montreal in 1985 - the RCMP and British Customs were aware of the traffic and closely watched the transactions - one of the traffickers, Filippo Vaccarello, and an unidentified person, were observed entering the office of Mr Gagliano before the heroin arrived. After leaving the office Vaccarello proceeded with a tour of notorious bars well-known as selling points for heroin.

Bookkeeping proves to be a sensitive business for a politician. When the matter was discussed in Parliament after La Presse disclosed the facts, Premier Chr�tien declared: 'This Parliament would be much better off if we had more Gagliano's.'(66)
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