Midday Thursday, the 11th of December, 2003, corner of Allenby Street and Yehuda Halevi, downtown Tel Aviv. The lunch crowd is thick. The currency exchange booth on the corner is doing the kind of trade a Thursday before a weekend always brings. Tourists, small businessmen, the usual run of strangers needing dollars or shekels in a hurry.
A man in his late 40s walks out of the booth’s doorway. Slate gray jacket, bodyguard a half step behind him. He gets maybe 15 ft onto the sidewalk before the device above the doorframe detonates. Glass blows across the intersection. The blast wave knocks a pregnant woman sideways into a parked car.
The bodyguard goes down with shrapnel in his back. Somewhere on the pavement a man is missing a leg and does not yet know it. Three men are already dead. Naftali Magad, Rahamim Tsruya, Moshe Mizrahi. 18 others are wounded, some of them in pieces, all of them strangers to one another, all of them now bound together by a midday accident none of them caused.
The man in the slate gray jacket, shirt shredded, hand bleeding, ears ringing, otherwise upright, is Ze’ev Rosenstein. The bomb above the door was not meant for the pregnant woman. It was not meant for Rahamim Tsruya, who came in to change a few hundred dollars. It was meant for him. It killed three strangers instead.
This is the seventh time someone has tried to kill him. The seventh. >> >> Each time he survives. Each time the price is paid by somebody who walked into the wrong shop, at the wrong corner, on the wrong afternoon. And by the time he finally walks into a courtroom that can hold him, it will not be an Israeli courtroom because the country he runs in will spend three decades trying and failing to put him there.
It will take an American one. To understand how one man becomes a target seven times and a prisoner once and why the difference between those two numbers is a foreign passport and a federal indictment in Miami, you have to go back back 30 years to another shop on the same street where a teenager named Zevik was selling electronics and learning for the first time that there was money in Tel Aviv that the state did not see.
Israel in the early 1970s is a young country with a young country’s contradictions. The founding generation, the Ashkenazi kibbutzniks men from Eastern Europe, built the institutions, the army, the courts, the banks, the parties, but the streets of South Tel Aviv belong to somebody else, to the Mizrahi.
Immigration of the previous two decades, to Iraqi Jews, Moroccan Jews, Yemenite Jews, mountain Jews from the Caucasus speaking a Persian dialect their grandchildren no longer understand. The mismatch between who runs the institutions and who lives in the neighborhoods produces, as it always produces, a parallel economy and a parallel power structure.
The artery of that parallel power runs through the Hatikva quarter and down Rehov Etzel. Card rooms, backroom casinos, protection rackets, loan sharking, small kingdoms built around the old central bus station where the dispossessed of three immigration waves come looking for work and find instead an entirely different ladder.
At the top of that ladder through the 1970s and into the ’80s stands a man named Yehezkel Aslan, Iraqi Jewish, built like a docker, iron grip on the South Tel Aviv underworld. The kind of figure who survives because everybody, the police, the rival families, the politicians who occasionally need a favor, finds it more convenient that he survives than that he does not.
In February of 1993, Yehezkel Aslan walks toward the entrance of a Tel Aviv restaurant and is shot dead at the door. The man arrested for dispatching the killing is released within a month for lack of evidence. He is 38 years old. He is, by background, nobody in particular, born 1954 in Jaffa, son of a Romanian Jewish Holocaust survivor and a mountain Jewish mother from the Caucasus.
He went to school in South Tel Aviv. He left without finishing. His first real job was at an electronic store on Allenby Street, the same street where exactly three decades later a bomb meant for him will kill three strangers. He served briefly in the Israeli Defense Forces at Camp Robin in the Kirya left before completing his term.
He has one criminal conviction on his record, an armed robbery from the 1970s. And after that, for the next 30 years, the Israeli state will fail to convict him of anything else. Not because nothing happens, >> >> because nothing sticks. Aslan dies in 1993. Rosenstein walks out of police custody a month later, and inside the closed economy of South Tel Aviv, the throne is now empty. Zevik becomes Zaev.
Zaev becomes the wolf. Aslan’s death made him the boss, but it also made him a target because in the world he had just inherited, the only way to know you had really arrived was when somebody tried to kill you. And in Zaev Rosenstein’s case, they would try seven times. From 1993 forward, the chess moves are visible.
The casinos near the old central bus station, the currency exchange booths along Allenby, small, scattered, perfectly legal storefronts that double as the cleaning machine for the rest of the operation. The villa in Hod Hasharon, set back from the road, ringed by cameras, the armored Mercedes. The office near the Tel Aviv exhibition grounds, a few minutes from the old port, whose stated business is arranging overseas trips for gamblers.
A polite description of the international gambling tour operation that became the engine of the early empire. Tour buses to casinos in Eastern Europe, charter flights to junkets in the Caribbean. Israeli money out, >> >> foreign currency in, fees skimmed at every step. The architecture of an Israeli gangster’s wealth in the 1990s is not one big business, it is a layered cake.
At the bottom, gambling. In the middle, currency exchange. And at the top, by the late 90s, something new. Something that scales in a way protection rackets and card rooms never could. Ecstasy. The pills are manufactured in laboratories in Amsterdam and Antwerp. Pressed by Belgian and Dutch chemists working for whoever pays best, the Israeli networks of the late 1990s figured out earlier and faster than the Italians, the Russians, or the South Americans that there is a generation of American kids in New York and Miami who will pay
20 to 40 dollars per pill for a substance that costs less than a dollar to manufacture. The margin is staggering. The product is small and the smuggling routes are bizarre. One shipment, later detailed in the Israeli Supreme Court ruling on his extradition, is hidden inside a load of copper scrap and computer parts, industrial garbage routed through a freight forwarder.
The pills travel sealed inside circuit board casings. In July of 2001, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the New York Police Department raid a Manhattan apartment held by two of Rosenstein’s lieutenants, David Rose and Israel Ashkenazi. They recover 700,000 pills, 182.8 kilograms of MDMA, 187,000 dollars in cash from a single apartment, one node in a much larger network.
By the time the Department of Justice and the Israeli Supreme Court have both reviewed the case, the official figure for the network’s total movement into the United States is over 1 million pills in roughly two years. US Attorney >> >> Alex Acosta will eventually say it on the record in plain English without theatrics.
Quote, “In a two-year period, Rosenstein’s criminal cartel was involved in the shipment of at least 1 million pills of ecstasy to the United States. That’s a lot of pills.” End quote. The lieutenants who run it for him have names. Shimshon Michtavi working the European end out of Sofia, Bulgaria. Mordecai Cohen, known on the wiretaps as Flaco, brokering shipments through Madrid.
A Colombian contact named Carlos Vives supplying the precursor relationships and when needed the killers. The two lieutenants who took the Manhattan apartment fall, Rose and Ashkenazi, will later turn cooperator and provide the testimony that makes the federal indictment against their boss stick. In the corporate world, what Rosenstein has built between 1993 and 2001 is supply chain management.
Manufacturing in one jurisdiction, processing through a second, retail in a third, money laundered home through a fourth, washed through the currency booths on Allenby Street where a thousand small transactions a day make any single suspicious one impossible to isolate. The Israeli press will eventually call him the Al Capone of Israel.
The Americans on their wiretaps will give him a different nickname. They will call him the fat man. Both miss it. He is not running a gang. He is running a multinational and he is doing it well into the year 2003 from a currency exchange booth on Allenby Street that anyone could walk into and change a $100 at the counter.
But while Rosenstein has been building this, other men have been building their own things and the geography of the Israeli underworld has gotten crowded. To the north in Ramat Gan, the Abergil brothers, Ya’akov, Avi, Itzhak, Moroccan, Jewish, second generation, ambitious, with their own roots into Antwerp and their own crews in Los Angeles.
To the east in Givat Shmuel, the Abergils, 12 children raised in a two-bedroom apartment by parents who came from Egypt with nothing, now grown men running protection rackets, gambling parlors, and a bottle recycling scheme that nets them millions of shekels a year. In Netanya and Prague, the Abu family, with Felix Abutbul running the Casino Royale, on the steps of which he will be shot dead by a masked motorcyclist in August of 2002.
By the turn of the century, Israel has four major Jewish crime families operating at full scale in a country smaller than New Jersey, and the war between them is about to begin. In June of 2002, Yaakov Abergil, the eldest of the Abergil brothers, the de facto family patriarch, is shot at the front door of his own home in front of his wife and children.
Itzhak Abergil, the surviving brother, believes that exactly one man ordered that killing. From the moment of Yaakov’s funeral forward, Ze’ev Rosenstein is no longer just a boss. He is a target, and the men who want him dead are willing to do something no Israeli criminal organization had ever previously been willing to do. They are willing to kill civilians to get to him.
What follows over the next 18 months is not a feud, it is a war. Attempt one had come earlier in May of 1996, a drive-by on [ __ ] Ibn Gabirol Street near Rabin Square. Two bullets hit him, he survives. The three men arrested, Aslan family revenge, said the prosecutors, are released for lack of evidence. One of them, a man named Rafi Weitzman, is reportedly killed by Rosenstein’s people not long after.
Nothing is ever proven. Nothing is ever charged. Attempts two, three, four and five run between 1996 and the spring of 2003. The details are mostly in the Hebrew press. One of them is foiled before it happens. The Tel Aviv police pick up seven men in two teams while Rosenstein is having lunch at a restaurant near the central bus station.
A second team is staking out the Tel Aviv Hilton as backup. The arrested men’s names enter the file: Abergil, Ben Simon, Snaker, Shalush, Tayeb, Shakur, Kamil. Ski masks, gloves, darkened scooter plates, a gun. The plot is dismantled. The plotters are released. Nothing sticks. Attempt six, the 30th of June 2003. A remote-controlled bomb is placed on the pavement next to the doorway of his gambling tour office at the old Tel Aviv fairgrounds.
Detonated by line of sight as he steps out. Five people were injured, one bodyguard seriously. Rosenstein himself walks away with cuts and ringing ears. He gives no statement to the press. By that night, he is back at the villa in Hod Hasharon. And then, attempt seven, the 11th of December 2003. Allenby Street in Yehuda Halevi, midday.
The currency exchange booth he co-owns. The device is placed by a man named Ofer Bodana, a soldier in the Ashdod cell of the Abergil organization, on the roof above the doorway. It is detonated as Rosenstein walks out. The order to place it has been given by Itzhak Abergil from his hideout in Belgium with Avi Rohan, his right-hand man, coordinating >> >> and his brother, Meir Abergil, handling the financing.
Three innocent civilians die: Naftali Magad, Rahamim Tzaroya, Moshe Mizrahi. 18 wounded. Rosenstein walks out of Meir Hospital that evening with a bandaged hand. The reaction is national. Within 40 minutes, the police announce that this was not a Palestinian suicide bombing, but an underworld hit.
The police spokesman, Gil Kleiman, gives that statement to the press at the scene. Quote, “40 minutes into the investigation, we are treating it as a criminal act. This is probably not a Palestinian attack, but a criminal underworld killing.” End quote. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calls an emergency cabinet meeting.
The government announces an additional 500 million shekels in funding to combat organized crime. Newspapers run editorials comparing the mob families to terrorist cells. The national police commissioner calls the bombing the Felons Park Hotel a deliberate reference to the suicide attack that had triggered the army’s Operation Defensive Shield a year earlier.
The implication is that this should be treated with the same gravity. The Israeli public, for one night, cannot tell the difference between the war against the Palestinians and the war among Israelis themselves. A survivor of the bombing, quoted later in the New York Review of Books by the journalist Joshua Hammer, asks the question that hangs over the country that week.
Quote, “Are they completely insane? What have we come to? Jews blowing up Jews? End quote. If you have been here a while, you already know what I want to ask of you in return for these stories. Subscribe, leave a comment, tell me what you’d want me to cover next. I read them. And now, the question that the December bombing forces every honest observer in Israel to ask out loud, how is it that Ze’ev Rosenstein, in 1993, in 1996, in 1998, in 2000, in 2001, in 2003, has been a known organized crime boss with a long surveillance file and exactly zero
convictions since the 1970s? One conviction in 30 years for an armed robbery before disco died. After that, nothing. I covered the Chicago Outfit on this channel a few months ago. Tony Accardo, the man who spent 35 years running the city of Chicago by denying that any boss of Chicago existed.
Different architecture, same outcome. Accardo built his immunity through invisibility. Front bosses absorbed every federal prosecution. No paper for his name. The hierarchy he commanded officially did not exist. Rosenstein did the opposite. He built his immunity through visibility. The bodyguard convoy in plain sight. The armored Mercedes parked outside Allenby Street cafes.
The seven assassination attempts survived in public. Each one a kind of advertisement. See, the state cannot get me. My rivals cannot get me. The bombs go off and I walk away. Two opposite blueprints, same conclusion. A man the state cannot touch on its own soil. And in both cases it took an outside jurisdiction to finally close the file.
For Chicago, it was an underboss named Nick Calabrese flipping in 2002. For Rosenstein, it would be the Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami. The Israeli systemic failure that allowed Rosenstein to stand for 30 years was not invisible. It was investigated on the record by the Zeiler Commission in 2007, a state inquiry into police misconduct in an organized crime case from the late 1990s.
Police Commissioner Mosha Karadi was forced to resign in February of that year. Haaretz, in its editorial the following day, wrote what almost every Israeli journalist covering the underworld had been suggesting for a decade. Quote, the report does not rule out the possibility of corruption. Not necessarily political corruption, but rather the good old-fashioned kind, penetration by organized crime rings into bodies with influence over the law enforcement agencies. End quote.
Penetration, that is the word. Not bribery in envelopes, not deals in restaurants. Penetration, the slow, structural, decades-long process by which the institutions that are supposed to investigate organized crime become populated by people who are friendly with it, dependent on it, or quietly afraid of it.
The 500 million shekels Sharon committed after the December bombing did not change that. The new laws did not change that. >> >> What changed it was that, while Rosenstein was surviving bombs >> >> on Allenby Street, in a federal building in Miami, a Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force officer named Robert Deak had been listening to him on wiretaps for 2 years.
And in those wiretaps, Deak had given him a name. They called him the fat man. On the 8th of November, 2004, Ze’ev Rosenstein walks out of a pub at the corner of Ben Yehuda Street in Ben Gurion Boulevard in Central Tel Aviv. He is arrested by Israeli police on the sidewalk. Not on an Israeli warrant, on an American complaint.
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2-year wiretap investigation has matured into a federal indictment unsealed that same day in the Southern District of Florida. The charges, conspiracy to import and distribute ecstasy under 21 U.S.C. 841 and 846. Maximum exposure, 40 years. The actual sleeping problem for the Israeli state, what to do with a sitting Israeli citizen requested by the Americans for crimes a portion of which were committed inside Israel.
The legal war that follows lasts 16 months. Rosenstein’s Israeli defense team, Mati Cats, Karen Nahari, Benny Nahari, argue every angle they can find. Israel had never extradited an Israeli citizen for crimes committed partly on Israeli soil. They argue criminal justice estoppel. They argue the offense belongs to Israel. They argue dual prosecution.
Cats, in November of 2004, gives the press the line that becomes Rosenstein’s public stance, quote, “I did not carry out drug deals, not in Israel and not in the U.S.” End quote. The Tel Aviv District Court rules he is extraditable. He appeals. On the 30th of November 2005, the Israeli Supreme Court Criminal Appeal 45/96 05, Justice E.
- Levy writing the opinion affirms the extradition. “The center of gravity test,” Levy writes, “weighs where the offense was intended to cause harm. The pills were intended for American streets. The harm landed in American neighborhoods. The American courtroom has the stronger claim.” On the 31st of January 2006, Supreme Court President Aharon Barak rejects a further hearing.
There is nowhere left to appeal. And here is what the cold open did not tell you. The December 11th bombing was not just a hit on Ze’ev Rosenstein. It was the moment that gave the Israeli political class the moral oxygen to do something they had never done before, to hand one of their own citizens born in Jaffa, raised in Tel Aviv, to a foreign government.
The three civilians dead on Allenby Street were not the cause of the extradition. The Americans had wanted him before the bombing. But the bombing made it politically impossible for Israeli prosecutors and Israeli judges to keep finding reasons to keep him at home. Three coffins changed the calculus.
On the 6th of March 2006, Ze’ev Rosenstein is handed to US Marshals at Ben Gurion International Airport. He boards a direct El Al flight to Miami. He is the first Israeli organized crime boss extradited to the United States under the amended extradition law. His arrival at the Federal Detention Center in Miami is photographed. His American lawyer is Howard Srebnick of Black, Srebnick, Cornspan and Stumpf.
A name that has defended international defendants in South Florida for decades. Srebnick gives reporters a line that is half lawyers defiance and half clients bravado. Quote, “This is what we call a snitch case. He’s maintaining his innocence and we are going to get ready for trial.” End quote. They will not, in the end, get ready for trial.
One week before the trial is scheduled to begin, on the 16th of January 2007, in a courtroom in Fort Lauderdale, before US District Judge William P. Dimitrouleas, Ze’ev Rosenstein pleads guilty. 12 years in federal prison. The plea agreement requires that he serve the sentence in Israel. The Israeli state spent 30 years failing to convict Ze’ev Rosenstein.
The American state did it in 26 months. The difference was not the evidence. The evidence had always existed. The wiretaps existed. The lieutenants who had flipped existed. The pills existed. What did not exist, until March of 2006, was a courtroom located outside the reach of whatever it was inside the Israeli system that had kept Rosenstein walking free for three decades.
The difference was not what he had done. The difference was whose courtroom he was standing in. On the 14th of February, 2021, Ze’ev Rosenstein walks out of Ayalon Prison in Ramla, Israel, after 17 years of cumulative incarceration counting from his November 2004 arrests. He is 67 years old. The parole board, chaired by retired judge Mosha Meckles, granted him release roughly eight months early.
The board writes that the years in prison, the medical condition, and the rehabilitation program have produced a genuine change. His release, the board concludes, does not endanger public safety. The state prosecution, which had opposed the parole, called his expressions of remorse crocodile tears. The press photographs him leaving.
He is gray at the temples. He carries a small bag. He goes home to a wife named Yvonne, who has waited for him. Naftali Magid Rahamim Zruya Moshe Mizrahi, the three men who died at Allenby and Yehuda Halevi on the 11th of December 2003, have by that date been dead for 17 years and two months.
They will go on being dead for as long as they have already been dead and then longer than that. Zeev Rosenstein, on the day of his release, is alive. He survives. They do not. That is the math of the seven attempts. He paid for none of them. Other people paid for all of them. Seven attempts on his life. Three civilians died at Allenby and Yehuda Halevi.
18 wounded at one intersection in one afternoon. 30 years of an Israeli state that could not or would not put him in a cell. And in the end, the only courtroom on Earth that could finish him was located on another continent in a federal building in Fort Lauderdale, where a judge named Dimitrouleas gave him 12 years for a thing he had been doing while seven different sets of men had been trying to kill him in the streets of his own city.
Some empires fall when the rivals finally win. Some fall when the state finally moves. Rosenstein’s empire fell because the world turned out to be bigger than the inside of one country’s courthouse. And the people who paid the bill for it were not the rivals, and not the police, and not the politicians, and not the prosecutors.
They were the men buying foreign currency on a Thursday afternoon at the wrong shop, on the wrong corner, on the wrong street, on the 11th of December, 2003.
