It’s the spring of 1986 in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood. Inside the Odessa nightclub, a Russian immigrant named Marat Balagula is running one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in American history. His gasoline bootlegging operation is pulling in $150 million every single month. But on June 12th, a man named Vladimir Reznikov walks through the door, presses a 9 mm Beretta against Balagula’s skull, and demands $600,000.
Reznikov wants a cut of everything Balagula has. And he tells him that if he doesn’t pay up, he’ll kill his entire family. What happened next would change the balance of power in Brooklyn’s underworld forever. Because the Lucchese crime family had just claimed Balagula as one of their own.
And nobody, not even the most ruthless Russian gangster in New York, was going to disrespect them on their territory. Within 24 hours, Reznikov was dead. And the message was clear. The Italians weren’t playing around. But here’s what makes this story different from every other mob war you’ve heard about. The Russians weren’t backing down.
In the 2 weeks that followed, six more bodies would hit the streets of Brooklyn. And by the time the dust settled, the Lucchese family had lost something they would never fully recover. Control of their own neighborhood. This is the story of how 12 Russian gangsters took Brooklyn from the Italian mob.
And why the FBI still considers what happened in Brighton Beach to be one of the most significant power shifts in American organized crime history. Before we get into the violence, you need to understand where these Russians came from and why they were different from any criminals the Italian mafia had ever encountered.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union was under pressure from the West to let Jewish citizens emigrate. What the American government didn’t realize was that the KGB saw an opportunity. Mixed in with legitimate refugees, Soviet authorities emptied their prisons and shipped thousands of hardened criminals to the United States.
These weren’t your typical street thugs. Many of them had survived the gulag, the brutal Soviet prison camps where torture and starvation were daily realities. American prisons would feel like hotels compared to what they’d endured. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain. By the late 1970s, Brighton Beach in Brooklyn had transformed into what locals called Little Odessa, named after the Ukrainian port city where many of these immigrants originated.
And right at the center of this new Russian criminal underworld was a man named Evsei Agron. Agron was the original godfather of the Russian-American mafia. Unlike Italian bosses who tried to keep a low profile, Agron seemed to enjoy hurting people. He never left home without his electric cattle prod, a device he used with sadistic pleasure on anyone who crossed him.
Under Agron’s leadership, the Russians began running extortion rackets, credit card fraud, and various scams targeting their own immigrant community. But it was one particular scheme that would eventually bring them into contact with the Italian families. The gasoline tax scam. In the early 1980s, a Soviet immigrant named Marat Balagula figured out how to exploit a loophole in how gasoline taxes were collected.
The system required wholesalers >> >> to collect taxes from gas stations and then pay them to the government. Balagula created shell companies that collected the taxes but never actually paid them. When investigators came looking, they found that the business addresses led to telephone booths and vacant lots. By the time the companies were investigated, they had already closed.
And Balagula had already opened new ones. With Agron’s muscle backing him up, Balagula expanded the operation until they were selling $150 million worth of fuel every month and pocketing an additional 30 to 40 million dollars in unpaid taxes. The IRS had no idea how to stop them. The language barrier alone made infiltrating these organizations nearly impossible.
In 1990, there still wasn’t a single Russian-speaking detective in the entire NYPD. But success attracts attention. And in May of 1985, Evsei Agron was shot and killed outside his Brooklyn apartment. The hit remains unsolved to this day, but many in Brighton Beach believe it was Vladimir Reznikov who pulled the trigger.
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Reznikov was a former resident of Kiev, and he had a reputation for violence that made even other Russian criminals nervous. With Agron dead, Balagula stepped into the leadership vacuum and became the most powerful Russian gangster in Brooklyn. If you’re finding this breakdown of organized crime history interesting, do me a favor and hit that subscribe button.
We cover stories like this every week, and I don’t want you to miss the next one. Now, here’s where things get complicated and where the Italians enter the picture. Word of Balagula’s gasoline fortune spread quickly through New York’s criminal underworld. And it wasn’t long before the Colombo crime family came knocking.
In the spring of 1986, Colombo captain Michael Franzese sent one of his soldiers to extort protection money from Balagula’s associates. The soldier walked into Balagula’s operations with a ball-peen hammer and made it very clear what would happen if they didn’t start paying. Balagula was smart enough to know he couldn’t fight the entire Italian mafia on his own.
So he requested a sit-down at the 19th Hole Social Club in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The man he went to see was Christopher “Christie Tick” Funari, the consigliere of the Lucchese crime family. Also present at that meeting was a rising Lucchese captain named Anthony Casso, who would later become known as “Gas Pipe” for his preferred method of torturing people.
According to Casso’s later testimony, Funari told Balagula something that would change both of their organizations forever. He said there was enough money here for everybody to be happy, that they needed to avoid trouble between the families, and that from now on, Balagula and his people were with the Lucchese family.
If anyone bothered them, they should come to the Luccheses, and Casso would take care of it. The deal was simple. Balagula would pay a family tax of 2 cents for every gallon of bootlegged gasoline he sold. In return, the Lucchese family would provide protection and keep the other Italian families from shaking him down.
2 cents per gallon doesn’t sound like much, but Balagula was moving so much fuel that this arrangement generated over $100 million annually for the five families combined. It became their biggest money maker after drug trafficking. The partnership should have made everyone happy. The Russians got protection.
The Italians got paid for doing essentially nothing. Everybody was getting rich. But word of the deal spread quickly through Brighton Beach. And the message many Russians took from it was that Marat Balagula was weak. That he had paid off the Italians because he was too scared to stand up for himself. As one account from the time put it, people started saying Balagula was a punk, that he had no balls.
This was dangerous talk because the Russian criminal underworld operated differently than the Italians. There was no commission, no rules about settling disputes peacefully. If you looked weak, someone would come to take what was yours. That someone was Vladimir Reznikov. By early 1986, Reznikov had already made his intentions clear.
He drove up to Balagula’s offices in Midwood and opened fire on the building with an AK-47 assault rifle. One of Balagula’s close associates was killed. Several secretaries were wounded. This was a direct challenge, not just to Balagula, but to the Lucchese family that had just promised to protect him. Then came June 12th, 1986. Reznikov walked into the Odessa nightclub where Balagula was conducting business.
He pulled out his Beretta, pressed it against Balagula’s skull, and demanded $600,000. He also wanted a percentage of everything Balagula was involved in going forward. And then Reznikov said something that would seal his fate. According to multiple accounts, he told Balagula that if he didn’t pay, he was dead. His whole family was dead.
He would kill his wife while Balagula watched. Shortly after Reznikov left the nightclub, Balagula suffered a massive heart attack from the stress. He insisted on being treated at his home rather than a hospital, believing it would be harder for Reznikov to get to him there. When Anthony Casso arrived and heard what had happened, he was furious.
To his mind, Reznikov had just spat in the face of the entire Cosa Nostra. This wasn’t just about Balagula anymore. This was about respect, about what it meant to be under Lucchese protection. Casso’s response was immediate. He told Balagula to send word to Reznikov that he had the money, that Reznikov should come to the club tomorrow to pick it up, and that they would take care of the rest.
Casso also asked for a photograph of Reznikov and a description of his car. The next day, June 13th, Reznikov showed up at Balagula’s nightclub >> >> expecting to collect his $600,000. What he got instead was a bullet in the back of his head. The shooter was Joseph Testa, a Gambino associate and veteran of the infamous DeMeo crew, one of the most prolific murder machines in American mob history.
Testa came up behind Reznikov >> >> and killed him before he even knew what was happening. He then jumped into a car driven by Anthony Senter and disappeared. According to Casso’s later testimony, after that, Marat didn’t have any problems with other Russians. And for a while, that was true.
The message had been sent. The Lucchese family had proven that their protection meant something. Anyone who challenged Balagula was challenging them, and the consequences were fatal. But here’s what the Italians didn’t fully appreciate. They had just solved a Russian problem using Russian methods.
And in doing so, they had inserted themselves into a world they didn’t fully understand. The Reznikov hit was effective in the short term, but it also demonstrated something important to the watching Russian underworld. The Italians could be manipulated. They could be drawn into internal Russian conflicts, and their muscle could be leveraged against Russian rivals.
Over the following months and years, Russian gangsters would learn to play both sides. They formed alliances with whichever Italian family served their immediate interests. They paid protection to one family while secretly working with another. And they watched carefully as RICO prosecutions began decimating the Italian leadership.
By the early 1990s, the Lucchese family was in chaos. Boss Vic Amuso had ordered so many murders that his own soldiers started flipping to the government just to survive. Acting boss Alphonse D’Arco became the first boss of a New York family to testify against the mob. Casso himself >> >> eventually became an informant, though he was so unreliable that prosecutors kicked him out of the witness protection program.
While the Italians were destroying themselves, the Russians were building. Balagula’s partnership with Casso extended beyond gasoline into diamonds, real estate, and international money laundering. They opened a joint business office in Sierra Leone, Africa, running everything from diamond mines to fuel importation schemes.
The 2 cents per gallon that started this arrangement, it had created a pipeline of Russian money flowing into Italian operations. But increasingly, the Russians were the ones running the show. Brighton Beach today is still Little Odessa. Russian remains the dominant language on the street. The restaurants, the nightclubs, the social clubs where business gets done, they’re all still there.
What’s changed is who’s really in charge. Federal prosecutors now estimate that Russian organized crime groups control more territory in Brooklyn than any single Italian family. The Lucchese family still operates there, but they’re a shadow of what they once were. Their Brooklyn faction had to be merged with other crews just to maintain a presence.
The partnership that Christopher Furnari announced at the 19th Hole Social Club, the one that was supposed to enrich the Italians forever, turned out to be the beginning of the end. Not because the Russians betrayed them, but because the Russians outlasted them. They survived federal prosecution better.
They avoided informants more successfully. They adapted to new opportunities faster. And they remembered the most important lesson from the Reznikov hit. In the world of organized crime, the people with the muscle don’t always win. Sometimes, it’s the people who know how to use someone else’s muscle who come out on top. Balagula served his time for gasoline bootlegging and credit card fraud.
>> >> He was eventually released and died of cancer in 2019. By then, a new generation of Russian criminals had taken his place. Many of them connected to networks stretching back to Moscow and Ukraine. The Lucchese family is still one of New York’s five families, but their Brooklyn operation, the one that once generated hundreds of millions of never fully recovered.
Six bodies in 2 weeks. That’s what it took to establish who was really in charge of Brighton Beach. And the answer wasn’t the family that pulled the triggers. If you want to see how another ethnic criminal organization challenged the traditional Italian families, check out the video on screen now about the Albanian mafia’s rise in New York. The parallels are disturbing.
