Kievvlast investigates into the issue.
Usually information about the mafia gets leaked to the media from the FBI or police reports, but rarely from informants or key players in the organizations themselves. That's why the following story piqued my interest and I began to investigate the alleged activities linking the Russian mafia to the U.S. real estate market.
Jody Kriss, the former CFO of Bayrock Group, a major construction company, and the current owner ofEast River Partners-a seemingly respectable company-all but admitted he was working for the Russian mafia for seven years. While managing Bayrock Group, by his own account, he ran errands for Russian criminals involved in real estate and construction in New York and Florida. In doing so, he was using money from a criminal cash stash. The criminals dubbed Jody-who graduated from the prestigious Wharton Business School-"Vorton" or "Wharton-v-zakone", which is a play on "vor-v-zakone" in Russian. This translates as "thief-in-law", "kingpin", or "made-man". All of this has been confirmed via court papers filed in New York as well as in many credible media outlets such as the New York Post.