Leaders of the Western democracies stood helplessly by as the Mafia tightened its grip over the distribution of profitable export commodities like aluminum and oil from Siberia.

One of them was Marat Balagula a college-educated black market profiteer from Odessa, who earned a fortune by evading state and federal excise taxes on gasoline by running his profits through dummy corporations on the East Coast. Balagula’s gasoline-tax scam, which made him millions of dollars by the mid-1980s, helped build the first successful alliance between the Russians and the Italian Mafia of New York.

Over the next few years, the FBI monitored 12 Russian Mafia gangs in New York City and Brooklyn. Greater numbers of immigrant Russians live in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, where local gangsters belonging to the Odessa Mafia and Malina Organizatsia carried out acts of extortion, arson, murder, burglary, fuel tax fraud and narcotics trafficking primarily aimed at neighborhood residents.