The king of kings was Boris “Biba” Nayfeld, a Russian-Belarusian who arrived in Brighton in 1979 and within a decade had become the top Russian gangster in the US, with his rivals mostly deadlocked (not in hand of, Nayfeld insists). Now aged 75, Nayfeld gave veteran journalist and true crime writer Douglas Century several hours of interviews, resulting in this blood-soaked biography. Nayfeld was born into a Jewish family in Gomel, Belarus. Like Vladimir Putin a few years later, the teenage Boris joined a gang of hooligans (hooligans) – what Putin called the “street university”. His short career in petty theft landed him in a labor camp in Bobruisk (had it been shorter and the thefts less petty, he would have faced the firing squad, like many of his friends). It was a brutally harsh existence, leading to the one incident in his life that he seems to be ashamed of: when he and his fellow prisoners were digging foundations for a factory, they found a mass grave of Holocaust victims and stole their gold teeth. Inevitably, once out of prison, he used what he had learned from his colleagues to turn to crime in earnest. At the time baking matzoh was enough to get you arrested in the USSR, but when he joined the mass exodus of Jewish refugees heading to the US in the 70s, it wasn’t about fleeing state-sponsored anti-Semitism and more with him was a relentless pumpkin whose fancy clothes and car had alerted the authorities to his various rackets and embezzlement schemes.
