Oy Gevalt!!
Israel is world capital of Organized Crime




Israel pursues crackdown on organized crime
by Linda Gradstein, The Media Line | PUBLISHED May 26, 2015 | Israel

This story originally appeared on The Media Line.

Nissim Alperon was on his way to a vacation in Greece last weekend.
A member of one of Israel’s most prominent crime families, Alperon, 60, was arrested at the airport and is being held in connection with the 2002 killing of a top Israeli gangster in Prague. Alperon is just one of 57 suspects detained in the past two weeks in what the police are describing as one of the largest crackdowns on organized crime in Israel’s history.

“This is a tremendous breakthrough,” Jerusalem police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld told The Media Line. “This is the most significant crackdown we’ve had in this field. We are solving a series of murders and attempted murders of senior crime figures.”

In one case, Rosenfeld said, three innocent bystanders were killed during an attempted murder. In another case, a man was poisoned even while in jail. Rosenfeld said that hundreds of detectives from Lahav 443, the equivalent of Israel’s FBI, have been working together with the Tel Aviv district police for many months. He said that “the investigation is ongoing” and they expect more arrests in the future.

Israeli organized crime is much less entrenched than in the US, and is controlled by about six families, say Israeli experts on organized crime.
While some of Israel’s more than one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union tried to enter the field of money laundering in the 1990’s, today most of the organized crime is by native Israeli Jewish families.
Israel’s organized crime has also spilled over into the US.
In 2006, Zeev Rosenstein, who had been targeted for assassination by other crime families, was extradited to the US on drug charges after 700,000 ecstasy tablets were seized in a Manhattan apartment. He was sentenced to twelve years in jail, but allowed to return to Israel to serve his sentence.

It was the attempted hit on Rosenstein in 2003 that caused the deaths of three innocent bystanders.
Police spokesman Rosenfeld said that some of the organized crime leaders are also involved in the drug trade and that putting these men behind bars will decrease Israel’s crime rate.

But Eldar said that most of the violent crime among Israel’s six major crime families is focused on other crime bosses and not on average citizens although they can get in the way. He also said that there is no vacuum in organized crime, and as kingpins are arrested, others will rise in their place.