Tough Jews

[JakeTheSnake630]

Awesome responses thanks all!

[JeremyTheJew]

Buddy Torres is Jewish?

SMB

Scott what's up
Check dm

[PolackTony]

Russian mafia was nicknamed the jewish mob.

Said to be bc the russians claimed they were Jewish to get a political asylum or something like that

Yes ita true and was portrayed also in Lord of War movie,the Soviet Union guaranteed expatriation to anyone who proved to be Jewish, many criminals managed to bribe officials while the most desperate even went so far as to pay doctors to be circumcised, while others did it directly at home with a knife.
Most was only people that wanted freedom but the Soviets used this for get rid of dangerous criminals like Castro did with Mariel Bay in 1980.

While I'm sure there were individuals who faked Jewish ancestry for asylum purposes, I doubt that they were a very significant portion of either the wider Soviet asylum community or Russian OC in Brooklyn. Guys like Agron, Balagula, Nayfeld were all Jews. It's important to keep in mind that Odessa and other Ukrainian and Russian cities had a strong history of Jewish OC syndicates going back to the 19th century. The establishment of the Russian/Ukrainian Mob in Brooklyn was similar, albeit on a much smaller scale, to that of the Mafia earlier, in that criminal syndicates from the old world were able to take root in immigrant communities that carried over social relations and cultural patterns from the original context. It's not at all incidental to the development of Russian OC in the US that in the 70s and 80s the Soviet migrant community in Brooklyn was largely composed of Jews form places like Odessa.