Mob bosses arraigned in major organized crime case

JERUSALEM POST

Crime kingpins Yitzhak and Meir Abergil and 18 other associates were arraigned by the Tel Aviv District Court on Wednesday for a range of murders and failed attempts on the life of rival gangster Ze’ev Rosenstein, including one in Tel Aviv in December 2003 that left three bystanders dead and dozens injured.

Other top criminals indicted included Avi Ruhan and Moti Hassin – both mob bosses in their own right and close associates of the Abergils.

The investigation, known as Case 512, covered a global drug trafficking, money laundering and tax evasion network run by the Abergil family when they were on top of the Israeli underworld, mainly from 2002-2006.

The case has seized headlines for months, largely because of the more than a half a dozen mob bosses included among the more than 40 suspects.

At the hearing, each of the defendants and their lawyers, one after the next, identically asked the court for more time to review the over 1,000 recordings and over 1,000 legal binders of documents in the case before formally responding to the charges against them.

A few of the defendants had not decided whether to hire private lawyers, as the Abergils’ had, or to seek representation from the Public Defender’s Office.

Over objections by the defendants that they needed far more time to review the case before making a formal admission or denial, the court granted all of the defendants until September 16.

The court gave defendants who had not selected a lawyer 21 days to make the decision and scheduled he trial to start on January 10, 2016.

The Tel Aviv District Attorney’s Office filed indictments against the defendants on July 13.

The case includes seven state witnesses mentioned in the indictments, among them well-known and feared mafia enforcers, drug traffickers and associates of the Abergil family.

Yitzhak Abergil has been in prison for a range of criminal offenses linked to his time as one of the country’s leading crime bosses. He also served some jail time in the US prior to his extradition in January 2014. His extradition and conviction in the US were the result of one of the most complex joint Israel-US criminal investigations ever carried out, especially in light of his stature in the organized crime world.

The indictment focuses on the criminal syndicate’s operations from 2002-2006 when it imported and exported ecstasy, cocaine, hashish and other drugs around the globe from North America to New Zealand, Japan, Europe and South America. The drug trafficking reached a value of at least NIS 227,949,856 during that time period, the indictment alleges.

Yitzhak Abergil was at the top of the totem-pole and managed all the different arms of the organization – the primary groups being in Israel, Europe and Japan.

The indictment details how in May and June 2003, Yitzhak hatched a (ultimately unsuccessful) conspiracy with Yaniv Ben-Simon, Yitzhak’s right-hand man, and D.D., a former top operative turned state’s witness whose name is under gag order, to murder Rosenstein near one of his offices close to the Plumer square in Tel Aviv.

In November 2003, Yitzhak, Ruhan, Meir and several others began to plan another attempt on Rosenstein’s life at a currency-exchange establishment on Yehuda Halevi Street in Tel Aviv, where he did business, by placing a bomb on the awning of the storefront.

On December 11, 2003, the group activated the bomb when Rosenstein was nearby, killing bystanders Rahamim Tzruya, Moshe Mizrahi and Naftali Magad, and wounding Rosenstein and 50 others, including bodyguards and bystanders.

The case is broken down into 13 separate indictments, some for drug charges and others for murders, with names like “The Big Score,” “The Mule,” “The Million-Dollar Deal” and “12 tons of hashish,” among others.

“The Big Score” gives a window into how the international operations of the Abergil family and their associates worked to make millions in drug trafficking and covered their tracks through legitimate businesses. The case names four defendants, including the Abergil brothers, Ruhan and Canadian-Israeli businessman Sami Biton.

The case was built by state witness G.G., a former top member of Ruhan’s gang.

The case began in 1998, when two Abergil associates purchased 800 kg. of cocaine in Peru and stashed it inside the iron wheels of a large industrial machine. Eventually, sometime between 2001-2002, a plot was worked out to ship the machine to Canada where Biton stashed it in a warehouse belonging to his company, Sanielle Finance.

In exchange for housing the machine and laundering the drug money though his company, Biton took 10 percent of the profits, the indictment says.

The indictments also cover the 2003 murder of an Abergil associate named David “Dieudonne” (gift from God) Biton, who allegedly was killed because he mouthed off about some of the crime family’s associates.