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.
The headlines in Israel are dominated by the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by corruption cases against Israeli politicians. As the details of the investigation into organized crime were announced, Israel’s former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert received an eight-month sentence for accepting envelopes of money from US businessman Morris Talansky. Olmert had previously been sentenced to six years in jail for corruption surrounding a housing development in Israel called the Holy Land complex.
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. The numbers are far smaller than in the US, however.
“In the US crime organizations like the Casa Nostra or Hells Angels have thousands of members,” Shahar Eldar, an expert on organized crime at the Ono Academic College told The Media Line. “Here it is only several dozen people, and the heads of many of the families are involved in the actual violence and killing, which you won’t have in the US.”
Yet Eldar says that the current crackdown might not be as significant as police are portraying it.
“They are merely cracking down on has-been and old timers,” Eldar said. “They are not dealing with today’s problems, but with yesterday’s murders.”
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.