On a September day last year, at the tail end of Hurricane Floyd, I took a taxi ride to the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami to interview a man known as Tarzan. His real name is Ludwig Fainberg, and until recently he was the ringleader of the Russian mob in South Florida.

"Russian" mob vies for first place: Since the collapse of Communism, the Mafiya, as it is known to outsiders (Russian gangsters affect disdain for the term), has become bigger, more brutal, and better armed; it is widely believed to be richer than any other criminal cartel — richer, even, than its counterpart in Colombia. The Russian mob buys and swaps drugs, money, handguns, assault carbines, submachine guns, anti-aircraft missiles, helicopters, plutonium, enriched uranium, and submarines. In 1996, James Moody, who was then the F.B.I.'s deputy assistant director in charge of organized crime, warned Congress that the Russian mob, which has thirty crime syndicates operating in more than seventeen North American cities, has "a very real chance" of becoming "the No. 1 crime group in the United States." And, until recently, the No. 1 Russian crime figure in Miami was Ludwig Fainberg.
Robert I. Friedman, Land of the stupid: When you need a used Russian submarine, call Tarzan, The New Yorker, 10 Apr 00, pp. 40-49, p. 40.

Ludwig Fainberg once forced a woman to eat gravel:

As we chatted in the prison cubicle, Tarzan spoke expansively about his disreputable past, but he also took pains to mention his eleemosynary activities, and described numerous fund-raisers that he had held for Jewish charities at a restaurant and night club he owned called Babushka. Fainberg, who is Jewish, insists that he never stole from Jewish organizations. "You've got to be kidding?" But, according to statements that he made to undercover agents for the Drug Enforcement Agency, the operating costs for these events tended to run high — eighty-five cents of every dollar. He certainly had the qualities of a mobster: he was greedy (he allegedly stole tip money from the strippers at his club); he was ruthless (he once forced a woman to eat gravel); and he was ambitious (he brokered a complicated negotiation involving the transfer of a Russian military submarine to Columbian narcotraffickers).

The Fainberg family moved from Ukraine to Israel to increase wealth:

Fainberg was born in 1958 in Odessa, a Black Sea port that was once the Marseilles of the Soviet Union. His parents soon divorced, and when he was three he moved with his mother, who had remarried, and his stepfather to Czernowitz, a small city in Ukraine. He sang in a boy's choir and participated in a boxing program set up by the Soviet military. More to the point, his stepfather, who worked for a Soviet factory that made rugs and fur hats, was a prosperous dealer on the burgeoning black market. He'd trade merchandise for choice cuts of meat, theatre tickets, and fresh vegetables. "My mother had nice clothes and jewelry," Fainberg said. "We took a vacation once a year to Odessa, a stunning city with a boardwalk and gorgeous beaches." It was a city, he said, "filled with mobsters and entertainers."

One day in 1972, when Fainberg was fourteen, his mother and stepfather announced that they were moving the family to Israel, where they hoped to increase their already considerable wealth. Ludwig, who had never known the family to identify itself with Judaism in any way, was confused. "Jew" was just something stamped on their passports, he thought, signifying their ethnic group. "I knew only that I was circumcised."

Before leaving, the Fainbergs converted their money into gold and diamonds, stashing some in shoes with hollow heels and hiding the rest in secret compartments in specially built tables and a piano, which they shipped to Israel.

Soviets shipped Jewish criminals to America:

From the middle of the late nineteen-seventies, the Soviet government was under intense diplomatic pressure from the West to let Jews emigrate freely. In response, the authorities searched the Gulag for Jewish criminals — some of them quite recent converts to the faith — and shipped them to America. [...] More than forty thousand Russian Jews settled in Brighton Beach. Most were decent, hardworking citizens, but the criminals among them resumed their careers as thieves and swindlers. By the time Fainberg arrived, in 1984, Brighton Beach had already become the seat of the Organizatsiya, as the Russian Jewish mob was called. "It was the Wild West," Fainberg told me. "I took my gun everywhere."

Ludwig Fainberg is a "Very nice, very kind Jewboy":

Seidle liked Fainberg from the moment they met. "Tarzan was a boisterous, bigmouthed yiddel," he told me in Miami, speaking with obvious affection. "He's a Jewboy, you know. Just a bigmouthed kid, always bragging, boisterous — but very nice, very kind."