OP-ED

A Journalistic Breed Apart

David Ignatius
903 words
30 August 1999
The Washington Post
WP
FINAL
A19
English
Copyright 1999, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved

Journalists, like lawyers and members of Congress, have become the sort of people ordinary folks just
love to hate. In movies and TV shows, they're portrayed as obnoxious busybodies who are always
sticking microphones in people's faces. And there are certainly enough real-life examples to support
that negative image.
But if you want an illustration of what the craft of journalism is really about, consider the case of
Robert I. Friedman. He's a freelance reporter who, at great personal risk, did the groundbreaking
reporting on the Russian mob that lies behind this month's headlines about an alleged $10 billion
money-laundering scheme through the Bank of New York.
The looting of Russia during the 1990s -- and the administration's acquiescence in that mess -- has
become a big story. It's now what we call a "feeding frenzy," with news organizations scrambling to
add new morsels of information. But for years, Friedman was out there nearly alone -- risking his life to
tell a story no one seemed to want to hear.
More than a year ago, Friedman painted a detailed portrait of Semyon Mogilevich, the alleged mobster
some U.S. investigators believe is at the center of the Bank of New York money-laundering affair.
Friedman's May 26, 1998, expose appeared in the Village Voice, under the headline "The Most
Dangerous Mobster in the World." Drawing on FBI and Israeli intelligence reports and his own
interviews, Friedman described Mogilevich's operation in Eastern Europe and the United States.
Things began to get scary for Friedman in June 1998, after the Village Voice piece appeared. An FBI
agent told Friedman the bureau had credible information that a major organized crime figure had taken
out a contract on his life. The bureau didn't provide details, but the New York Times later reported that
Mogilevich had made the assassination threat in a telephone conversation monitored by the CIA and
that the contract was for $100,000.
The FBI advised Friedman last summer that if he had any money, he should get out of town. So he
went into hiding briefly in Vermont and, as he says, "paced the floor for a while and then decided this
was ridiculous." So he returned to New York and went back to work on a book about Mogilevich and
other Russian mobsters, called "Red Mafiya." The Mogilevich death threat wasn't the first Friedman
had received. He had written a piece in the May 1998 issue of Details magazine about the Russian
mob's infiltration of the National Hockey League, through extortion and manipulation of the many East
European hockey players who have come to the West in the 1990s. That piece described the activities
of a Russian mob kingpin named Vyacheslav Ivankov, who was convicted in 1996 on extortion charges
and is serving time in federal prison.
Soon after the Details piece appeared, Friedman received a Valentine's card from Ivankov, covered with
threats and crude obscenities. The FBI concluded it was a death threat. It was signed with Ivankov's
name and cell number. "He had no shame," says Friedman. "He thought he was still in Siberia."
I got to know Friedman more than a decade ago, when I was editor of the Post's Outlook section. At
that time, he was investigating the activities of a right-wing Israeli militant named Meir Kahane. In
1987 Outlook published a Friedman piece about U.S. contributors to Kahane's Jewish Defense League.
Friedman was later assaulted by two JDL members near his apartment in Chelsea.
The Arabs too have threatened to kill Friedman. After interviewing the man who murdered Kahane in
1990, Friedman began investigating a terrorist network that was later linked to the World Trade Center
bombing. The FBI told him that two members of this terror underground planned to kill him.
What makes for such a courageous person, at a time when so many reporters play it safe and avoid
taking risks that could get them sued -- let alone killed? The answer, in part, is that Friedman learned
early to rely on himself. He left home at 15, dropped out of college and spent five years bumming
around the world.
Part of Friedman's secret is that he married a journalist, Christine Dugas, who had risked her own life
as a reporter in El Salvador and Nicaragua and is as passionate a truth-teller as he is. "We decided a
long time ago not to have kids," he says. "We knew it would be a mistake, given the lifestyle we
wanted to pursue."
Major newspapers such as The Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal still do serious
investigative pieces. But few magazines are willing to publish the kinds of stories that a free-lancer like
Friedman wants to write. "Magazines are celebrity driven," he says. "There's hardly any place for me to
publish my work any more."
We want stories like Friedman's to have a happy ending. But Friedman has a rare blood disease he
picked up several years ago while he was in India reporting on corruption there. His doctors have told
him there is no cure. He was supposed to be in the hospital this week, but he stayed at home working --
trying to finish his book on the Russian mob.
http://www.washingtonpost.com
The Best Investigative Reporter You've Never Heard Of.(Robert Friedman, reporter on Russian
organized crime in the US)
Sherry Ricchiardi
4576 words
1 January 2000
American Journalism Review
AJR
44
ISSN: 1067-8654; Volume 22; Issue 1
English
Copyright 2000 Information Access Company. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT 2000 American
Journalism Review

Robert Friedman has been way out front in coverage of the Russian mob in the U.S.
A boisterous TGIF crowd was gathering at the trendy New York City restaurant, but the reporter
seemed oblivious. He was deep into reminiscing about his mob sources, including clandestine meetings
where he clinked glasses with the kind of men who travel in white limousines and have names like
Tarzan and the Tattoo Terror.
Between sips of red wine, he explained how he had built a network of Deep Throats in an organization
where "combat brigade" is a euphemism for assassin squads and torture chambers are as common as
swimming pools in some mob strongholds.
Swilling vodka with drug dealers, extortionists and black marketers became routine as he worked the
Russian mob beat from Brooklyn to Miami. He has grilled the likes of Marat Balagula, whose nicotine-
stained fingers bore Cyrillic letters, a sign of allegiance to a lethal secret clan. And he exposed the rise
of a mobster named Ivankov, who served 10 years in a gulag for extortion and torture.
He has shared meals with men who can have enemies hideously maimed or decapitated. Many among
their ranks sport gaudy tattoos designating status in a shadowy underworld that emanates from the
former Soviet territories. The reporter even calls some within the Russian and Italian crime syndicates
his "friends."
During dinner that Friday night, Robert I. Friedman talked about interviewing mobsters the way some
reporters talk about covering city hall: with a nonchalance that hints of boredom. The freelance
journalist, known as Robbie to friends, has been working the Mafia beat since the mid-1980s.
His stories on the Russian mob have appeared in the Village Voice, Vanity Fair, Details and New York
magazine. In November, he was pushing a deadline on a mob-related piece for The New Yorker.
Over the years, his reporting has caught the eye of agents in the FBI, CIA and Israeli intelligence.
Capitol Hill lawmakers have asked him to testify at hearings on Russian organized crime. Democratic
Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts cited Friedman's work in a book on the threat of transnational
criminal networks.
His penetrating exposes also have drawn the ire of a Russian Mafia crime lord, described by the CIA,
according to ABCNEWS.com, as "the most dangerous mobster in the world." Officials say the man
ordered a hit contract on Friedman, reportedly worth $100,000, after the reporter wrote about his
criminal career in 1998. Friedman wrote that a second Russian gangster, Vyacheslav Ivankov, sent a
threatening message from inside a federal prison that same year. The Committee to Protect Journalists
believes it is the first time an American reporter has been targeted by the Russian mob in this country.
A former FBI agent called Friedman "a true media hero" and remembers times when federal agents
played catch-up as the reporter continued to divulge new information about the dramatic rise of the
Russian crime cartel on American soil.
"He was a pioneer when there was nobody else out there," says Robert Levinson, who specialized in
uncovering organized crime activities for the FBI. "I packed a sidearm for 28 years. Robbie had only
his notebook and pen."
Yet, for all his cutting-edge investigative reports on the global expansion of the Russian crime families,
with tentacles extending to more than 50 countries, the freelance journalist has operated in what one
friend calls "heroic anonymity."
For the most part, Friedman, 49, remains relatively unknown in mainstream media circles. But he
received some high-profile attention last summer.
In an August column, the Washington Post's David Ignatius credited Friedman with groundbreaking
reporting on the Russian mob that led to national headlines last year on an alleged $10 billion money-
laundering scheme through the Bank of New York.
"It's now what we call a `feeding frenzy,' with news organizations scrambling to add new morsels of
information," Ignatius wrote. "For years, Friedman was out there nearly alone--risking his life to tell a
stow that no one seemed to want to hear."
When word of the death threats surfaced early last year, the New York Times covered them on page
one.
Suddenly, Friedman found himself the "go-to guy" for information on the Russian Mafia, a group he
has described as "a melange of gangsters and black marketers, unemployed KGB spies, and
Communist Party hacks."
He has been interviewed on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," CNN's "Moneyline" and
"ABC World News Tonight." Representatives of a BBC news-magazine and NBC's documentary unit
have contacted him for help with stories. Hollywood bought three of his articles to explore movie
possibilities, and Little, Brown and Co. is rushing to get his book "Red Mafiya" on the shelves as soon
as it can.
Micah Sifry, a former associate editor at The Nation who once worked with Friedman, calls him "one
of the most meticulous and fearless investigative reporters" in the country today. His body of work,
says Sifry, is a definitive statement on the phenomenon of the Russian mob's power grabs.
But the occasional notice has hardly made the investigative reporter a household name. Mention
Friedman to a group of journalists--not to mention the public in general--and you're likely to draw
blank stares. No one in a room full of reporters and editors at a Society of Professional Journalists
conference in October recognized his byline or knew of his breakthrough reporting on Russian crime.
The lack of acclaim among his peers doesn't surprise the Post's Ignatius. "There's a terrible danger that
we only take seriously brand-name journalism," the columnist says. "We take it seriously if it runs in
the Washington Post or Time magazine or the New York Times, but not if it runs in the Village Voice.
And that is a mistake. Robert deserves to be much better known."
Friedman began infiltrating the Russian mob soon after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, ending the Cold
War and communism in Europe. He used the connections he had developed in reporting on La Cosa
Nostra to meet newcomers to the United States who were members of Russian crime families. His
schmoozing with gangsters began paying off in magazine cover stories a few years later.
In January 1993, readers of Vanity Fair were introduced to Marat Balagula, "a brilliant, coldly efficient
crime boss who would transform the `Organizatsiya' into a multibillion-dollar-a-year criminal
enterprise that stretches across the tatters of Communist Eastern Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia,"
Friedman wrote.
He quoted a U.S. federal agent saying that Balagula "makes John Gotti look like a choir boy."
The story traced how the mob, fanning out from its base in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach--"a cloistered
seaside community of Russian Jewish emigres"--had pulled off perhaps the largest jewelry heist in
American history.
He told of Russian gangsters smuggling heroin into the United States from Southeast Asia and tapping
poppy fields around Chernobyl, site of the world's worst nuclear accident.
Friedman reported that Russian crime families, thanks to their control of gasoline terminals and
distributorships in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere, evaded as much as $5 billion a year
in state and federal taxes. A portion of that money, he reported, "goes as tribute to the Italian Mafia,
with whom they have an uneasy alliance--the first ever between two ethnic crime groups."
The end of the stow was chillingly prophetic. An expert on the Organizatsiya was quoted as saying,
"The Russia Mob will soon become the largest criminal syndicate in the world."
In a January 1996 cover stow for New York magazine, titled "The Money Plane," Friedman wrote the
following lead: "Five nights a week, at least $100 million in crisp new $100 bills is flown from JFK
nonstop to Moscow, where it is used to finance the Russian mob's vast and growing international crime
syndicate. State and federal officials believe it is part of a multi-billion-dollar money-laundering
operation. The Republic National Bank and the United States Federal Reserve prefer not to think so."
In that same piece, he chronicled the rise of Ivankov, sent to Brighton Beach in 1992 to take over the
Russian Jewish mob's empire in the United States. Friedman reported that Ivankov forged alliances
with other Russian gangs across North America and set up a front company in New York called Slavic
Inc. to launder drug money.
During the entire time, Friedman also was gathering information on the rise of Semion Mogilevich, a
Ukrainian Jew who, according to federal investigators, runs one of the most dreaded mob families in
the world. The FBI and Israeli intelligence have linked him to drugs, prostitution, money laundering
and nuclear arms trafficking.
In May 1998, an exclusive report by Friedman in Details magazine reported that the Russian mob had
muscled its way into the National Hockey League, extorting protection money from some of hockey's
biggest stars. That same month, in a cover stow for the Village Voice, Friedman traced Mogilevich's
criminal career, using information from hundreds of pages of classified FBI and Israeli intelligence
documents and interviews with a key criminal associate and with dozens of law enforcement sources in
the United States and abroad.
The stow reported that the crime lord had become "a grave threat to the stability of Israel and Eastern
Europe" and was being exposed by the media for the first time.
In an interview from Moscow that appeared on the ABC News Web site in September, Mogilevich
charged that the stories were driven by "a personal initiative of a journalist, Friedman, a former FBI
agent and an official of the Attorney General's office. They want to write a book and they are working
on the main hero of it," he told an ABC reporter.
Mogilevich, who has not been indicted, denied involvement in an alleged plot to launder billions of
dollars through the Bank of New York and described himself as a publisher and consultant to a cereal
company. The death threat against Friedman was picked up while the CIA was monitoring Mogilevich's
telephone, the FBI reported. Friedman says the FBI called the reporter with the chilling news in June
1998 and suggested that he go into hiding and remain silent about the threats.
At first, Friedman took the advice, and with his wife, Christine Dugas, a business writer for USA
Today, headed for a bed and breakfast in Vermont. (The couple have no children.) After a week, "I
started feeling like a billy goat on a stake," he recalls. "I couldn't let them intimidate me."
The couple returned to their New York City apartment. "On at least two occasions I spotted muscle
men, thugs that I had seen as bodyguards in Russian gangsters' offices while I was doing interviewing
in New York, in my neighborhood," Friedman recalls. "They wanted to clearly show that, `We know
where you are. We can grab you if we want to.'"
As the months passed, Friedman grew furious over what he perceived as the FBI's lack of action on the
mob bosses' threats against him. "That's when I went to CPJ, and it became a public issue," he says. A
story by Blaine Harden in the New York Times followed. "From my point of view as a reporter, his
story on the death threats checked out in every way," Harden told AJR. "He's a brave guy; he's put his
life on the line to do a higher form of reporting."
CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper felt that placing a spotlight on Friedman's case would provide
some protection. Cooper believes the death threats could have a chilling effect on how other American
journalists report on Russian-related crime. "Anyone inclined to cover it will be given pause about how
deeply to go if your life is going to be threatened," she says. According to CPJ, 16 journalists have been
killed in countries of the former Soviet Union since 1993, in circumstances that suggest the
involvement of Russian organized crime. (See "Killing the Messenger," November 1995.)
Last year other reporters began focusing on the Russian mob's ties to money laundering and other
criminal activities.
On August 19, the New York Times ran a page-one stow headlined "Activity at Bank Raises Suspicions
of Russia Mob Tie." Reporters Raymond Bonner and Timothy O'Brien mentioned Friedman, his
reporting on Mogilevich, and how the CIA picked up the death threat against him while monitoring the
crime leader's telephone.
"Finally," says Sifry, Friedman's former editor at The Nation, "the mainstream press is catching up with
Robbie."
During the Friday night interview, Friedman talked of meeting members of the Red Mafia and
Genovese family just a couple evenings before. Another gathering was scheduled for the following
Thursday. "I can't discuss the circumstances," he says. But he did discuss how he built relationships
with men who break laws for a living.
Mobsters trust him, he says, because, "They are friends of mine. I have known them for a number of
years, and they have become `not for attribution' sources. I have never burned them, so they tell me
stuff I know them really well. It's not like one meal over 10 years. It's a lot of contact over a long
period of time."
What do they gain by feeding him information?
"They know I really tell the truth, and sometimes the truth is what they want told--their dramatic rise,
their fall, with the warts and all. I don't take anything on face value. Everything is checked out in a
number of different ways."
Does he meet with them as a journalist or as a friend?
"It's both. First of all, I don't take my notebook out because that would just kill it. But, they know I'm a
reporter. Tons of stuff they have said to me over the years has gotten into print.... That's why law
enforcement marvels at me. They wonder, `How the fuck does he get that stuff?.' They don't have these
sources. These bad guys are not talking to them.
"Of course, they're not going to tell me they robbed a Brinks truck today. But I will get a lot of good
intelligence."
Is the mood of these meetings upbeat?
"Oh yeah. We'll be drinking; we'll be toasting; we'll be cutting up.... These are people who didn't like
me at all to begin with, and I kept going to their haunts and making a pest of myself starting back in
1984-85. I was much younger back then, with a baby face. I looked harmless. It has paid off.
"I never betrayed anybody. There is a strong level of trust ... and that is what I bring to the table that [no
other journalist] does. I have gotten inside to a certain extent."
Has mingling with mobsters been worth the risk?
"I'm not like most investigative reporters. I don't wait for leaks from law enforcement. I have
developed, over the last 15 years, good relationships with organized crime figures--first the Italians in
La Cosa Nostra in New York City and then with the Russians. They know they can talk to me and if
they say, `Don't ever print this,' they know I won't.
"With some, I have become, yes, you could say, friends."
How does he cope with knowing that some criminal confidants are responsible for hideous crimes?
"I don't have to make a moral judgment," Friedman says. "I am a journalist."
Risk-taking became a way of life early for Friedman, who grew up in Denver, the oldest of four
children. He left home at 15. He finished high school in 1968, turning to his studies between shifts on
an assembly line at a Denver defense plant. "I was living at the poverty level," he says. "I developed a
lot of street smarts during that time."
A few years later he dropped out of the University of Colorado to travel the world with only a few
hundred dollars in his pocket. He returned and graduated in 1977 with a major in African and Middle
Eastern studies and went on to get a graduate degree in journalism at the University of Wisconsin. It
was there that he met Dugas, who herself had been doing risky reporting in Central and South America.
In the early 1970s, he audited courses at the American University in Beirut and lived in a red light
district with Palestinians, all members of the PLO. He was, Friedman recalls, the only Jew among
them.
In October 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, he volunteered to work on a kibbutz near the Israeli
border with Jordan while the men went off to fight. "I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't
live on the edge," says the reporter who, with his mop of gray curls and thick brown moustache, could
pass for a Middle Eastern entrepreneur.
Friedman credits Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, "The Jungle," which he read in an 11th grade journalism
class, with sparking his love of investigative reporting. Sinclair exposed conditions in the meat
processing industry in the United States, sparking radical reforms. "That book blew me away. I decided
I wanted to write stories that would afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
"I knew I didn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer or go into business. I wanted to be a writer and bring
down the bastions of power that caused common people so much suffering. That's what I thought in
11th grade. I guess I never grew up. I still feel that way."
A common thread runs through Friedman's work, which dates back to the early 1980s. His reporting
shows an uncanny talent for penetrating controversial, volatile political and criminal groups and
obtaining confidential files from within intelligence organizations like the FBI. It also shows a deep
respect for painstaking detail and attribution.
In one of his first successes as a freelancer, he published a piece in the New York Times in 1982 on a
secret alliance between the Israeli Army and the Christian Phalangists, who had battled Palestinian,
Syrian and Muslim leftist commando groups after Lebanon's civil war exploded in 1975. "It was on the
op-ed page, but they let me report," Friedman recalls. "They let me break news."
In 1987, he received an Alicia Patterson fellowship to report on the rise of the radical Jewish right,
which dreamed of establishing a Greater Israel on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
His stories and subsequent book, "The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane--from FBI Informant to
Knesset Member," explored the role of violence-prone Israeli zealots, the driving force behind the
establishment of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied territories. The Jewish Defense
League, founded by Kahane, responded with lawsuits and public condemnation.
An article in the Sunday Times of London noted that "Friedman paints a portrait of Kahane as thief,
adulterer, terrorist, and bigot. Kahane's supporters will be outraged, his enemies will gleefully learn the
extent of his duplicity." A reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer called the work "extraordinary."
Later, four Pulitzer Prize winners, all with Newsday at the time, authored a book on the conspiracy
behind the World Trade Center bombing. In a chapter titled, "Unreasonable Doubt," they discussed the
November 1990 assassination of Kahane and cited Friedman's earlier reporting on who might have
been responsible.
They also scolded the mainstream press: "Not a single one of the four New York newspapers pursued
the leads exposed by Friedman--nor did CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN or Fox Television. A solitary freelance
writer had raised the alarm. The mainstream press dined on its regular diet of bread crumbs from the
cops and circus performances by the defense lawyers."
In 1992, Friedman wrote a second book, "Zealots of Zion: Inside Israel's West Bank Settlement
Movement." It was during this period that he was attacked by gun-toting thugs while on assignment in
Israel for The New Yorker to write about radical settlers on the West Bank. He recalls that his driver,
who doubled as a bodyguard, stood by. "I was set up. He was a Kahane person," says Friedman, who
sustained bruises but no serious injuries.
Despite stellar reviews, the two books failed to sell very well. "American Jews don't want to read stuff
that makes them feel bad about Israel, and they don't want to see a little journalist from New York
writing these kinds of things," says Friedman, who traces his Jewish ancestry back to Russia. Crossing
the line has been painful, he says, because, "I love Israel."
In 1996, the habit of courting dangerous assignments caught up with Friedman. In April of that year he
roamed the slums of Bombay, India, documenting how sexual slavery and political corruption were
creating an AIDS catastrophe. When he returned home, he developed what appeared to be serious flu
symptoms. Instead, they were the first signs of a rare, incurable blood disease that has left his heart
"ruined." Doctors, unable to diagnose the cause of the ailment, speculate that it likely is related to the
India trip.
One day last September, Friedman answered the telephone in a slow, faint voice that hinted of heavy
medication and described how he collapsed on an assignment for The New Yorker and had to use a
wheelchair to get on and off a Continental Airlines flight. "I almost died last Tuesday," he said matter-
of-factly. "There was a two- to three-week period where my heart almost gave out. Doctors are even
considering doing a transplant."
He recalls that he left for India back in 1996 "completely healthy, without even a cold for 15 years." He
credits his wife with helping him cope with the unpleasantries of hospital stays, swallowing "gobs" of
medication each day, and continually hearing bad news from doctors who are scrambling to save his
heart. "I couldn't do this without her," he says. "She gives me the extra strength, courage and resources
I need to go on."
Yet Friedman remains steadfast in his commitment to his work. He believes that as a reporter he has the
best of both worlds, swapping information with American and foreign intelligence sources and getting
tips from within the most powerful crime families on the globe.
But more than the daring and a passion to stay ahead of the media pack drives Friedman's reporting.
His voice shifts to a conspiratorial tone when he describes what he believes could be a worst-case
scenario in the 21st century if crime families like the Red Mafia are not stopped.
"Their deadly virus could spread around the globe through international financial and political
systems," he says. "It's easy for them to invade the American and political system in this age of
intercommunication, where you can make a wire transfer in a second."
He describes the Russian Mafia as smarter, more ruthless and far wealthier than its Italian counterpart.
"The best description I've heard on the difference between [the two groups] came from a law
enforcement official who said, `The Italian Mafia plays bocce ball, the Russian Mafia plays chess.'"
It is, in fact, the Russian syndicates' financial wizardry, coupled with their legendary viciousness, that
makes them a threat to American security, Friedman says.
By now, it is around 10 p.m. Suddenly, Friedman leans forward across the table in the crowded
restaurant and, in a somber, defiant voice, issues a warning to a man labeled the most dangerous
mobster in the world by the CIA.
"I am still tracking Mogilevich right now, and my book [on the Red Mafia] isn't closed yet," he says.
"We still are doing final edits. The new stuff I am finding definitely will get in. I know exactly what
he's doing, and where he's doing it. He can't run, he can't hide, and I am not going anyplace."
"Brighton Beach Goodfellas"
* Vanity Fair, January 1993 *
At least 15 unsolved homicides have been attributed to Balagula's turf wars with rival Russian
mobsters. Many of the gangland-style slayings were brazen, broad-daylight shootings inside Brighton
Beach restaurants in front of numerous witnesses. In 1986 the Brooklyn office of Platenum Energy, a
company Balagula controlled, was riddled with Uzi submachine-gun fire.
One of Balagula's bodyguards was shot eight times in the chest and twice in the head. According to
law-enforcement sources, the shooters were disgruntled Russians who had been sold invalid state
gasoline-distributorship licenses by Balagula. (Balagula told me the shooting was an attempted
robbery.)
"India's Shame"
* The Nation, April 8, 1996 *
When Mira, a sweet-faced virgin with golden brown skin, refused to have sex, she was dragged into a
torture chamber in a dark alley used for "breaking in" new girls. She was locked in a narrow,
windowless room without food or water. On the fourth day, when she still refused to work, one of the
madam's thugs, called a goonda, wrestled her to the floor and banged her head against the concrete
until she passed out. When she awoke, she was naked; a rattan cane smeared with pureed red chili
peppers had been shoved up her vagina. Later, she was raped by the goonda.
"They torture you until you say yes," Mira recently recounted during an interview here. "Nobody hears
your cries."
"Power Play"
* Details magazine, May 1998 *
Often, jittery NHL scouts are as vulnerable to mobsters as the players are they are trying to sign. "Many
local teams in Russia are associated with the Mob," says a law-enforcement source, noting that they are
often used for money laundering, among other illicit activities. It is not uncommon for gangsters to
demand that scouts pay protection money to be able to operate, say international law enforcement
sources. If they're lucky enough to sign up a promising prospect, they may also be asked to pay a
percentage of the newly signed player's contract.
Friedman's Greatest Hits
Here are some examples of Robert I. Friedman's powerful journalism:
"The World's Most Dangerous Gangster"
* The Village Voice, May 26, 1998 *
"Power Play: An exclusive report reveals how Russian mob muscled its way into the NHL"
Details magazine, May 1998
"The Money Plane"
* New York magazine, January 22, 1996 *
"India's Shame: Sexual slavery and political corruption are creating a catastrophe"
* The Nation, April 8, 1996 *
"An Unholy Rage -- Report from the West Bank"
* The New Yorker, March 7, 1994 *
"Brighton Beach Goodfellas: New York's Mob Gets Tough"
* Vanity Fair, January 1993 *
"The CIA and the Sheikh"
* The Village Voice, March 30, 1993 *
"The Palestinian Refugees"
* The New York Review of Books, March 29, 1990 *
"Inside the West Bank Settlements"
* The New York Review of Books, June 15, 1989 *
"Israel and the Phalange"
* The New York Times, April 27, 1982 *
Contributing writer Sherry Ricchiardi has written for AJR about Africa's embattled journalists, covering
the war in Kosovo and the trauma of reporting on horrific events.