When I first saw a short, skinny Abramov in the courtroom of the Brooklyn federal judge Sandra Towns in November 2004, he struck me as strikingly similar to Mikhail Khodorkovsky. After some time, Abramov grew a beard in prison and began to remind me rather of the then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Over time, I got hold of his prison photographs, where he was captured with tattoos, and on them Abramov does not look like either one or the other, but looks like a typical bully.
He was involved in the case of a brigade with several names. At first, the FBI called it the “Abramov-Drubetskoy Brigade” in honor of Gidon and his accomplice Artur Drubetskoy, nicknamed Bald. Then it shortened the name of this group to the “Abramov Brigade”, and a little later renamed it to “The Brigade from the Passage” after the name of the Russian restaurant in Brooklyn chosen by the gang.
According to the FBI, at that time it was the largest “Russian” brigade defeated in the United States. Initially, 19 people were involved in her case, and as they split and began to lay accomplices, their number continued to grow until it reached about 25 defendants.
The brigade also set the record for the number of splitters.
Abramov joined their ranks almost on the day of his arrest, or, as the famous Brooklyn thug Monya Elson puts it, “still in the elevator.” Abramov was arrested on November 4, 2004, immediately attached to a digital recording device and sent to record a conversation with Drubetsky.
It seemed that Abramov should have earned himself serious leniency, but after a while the federal prosecutor’s office suddenly refused his services. The fact is that he concealed from the investigation part of the criminal profits and weapons. When this was discovered, the love boat crashed against everyday life and Abramov was demoted from the informant.
This does not always happen. For example, former Kiev resident Pyotr Sarkisov, who was involved in the same case, collaborating with the FBI, concealed two old murders from investigators. Then they opened up. Sarkisov was one of the main prosecution witnesses at the trial of Marat Krivoy and Vitaly Ivanitsky, about whom I recently wrote in connection with the appearance of Nathan Gozman to the people. Sarkisov continued to provide the prosecutor’s office with such valuable services that she forgave him this minor oversight, and then fervently argued to the judge that he should be given relief. The strict black judge Townes, however, sentenced Sarkisov to 15 years in prison.
But usually the prosecutor’s office ruthlessly rejects the infamous informers. Abramov was rejected, but the prison soon learned about his attempt to cooperate with the trash. He complained to the judge that other prisoners were tyrannizing him, and blamed the author of these lines for the fact that his cooperation became public, although his accomplices learned about him not from my articles, but from their lawyers.
In November 2004, when Gidon was imprisoned in Brooklyn federal prison, his younger brother Dima Abramov, without consulting him, took from his bank safe $ 470,400, received by Gidon through criminal activities, and buried them in the courtyard of his house. Gidon called him from prison and told Dima to hide four guns. The younger brother went to Gidon’s home, took the weapon out of the cache and hid it in another place.
Gidon, who at that time was cooperating with the prosecutor’s office, ordered Dima to give the investigators money and weapons, but not all. Gidon decided to keep himself for a rainy day 46 thousand dollars and one of four barrels. Dima handed the rest of the money and three trunks to FBI investigators Jeffrey Koch and Mario Pisano.
The grateful prosecutor’s office promised not to bring Dima to court.
Four months later, the investigators learned that he had seized some of the money and weapons, and demanded that Dima give everything. As far as I understand, none other than Gidon contributed it. Dima had to give money and a hidden trunk. This time he was already involved in obstruction of justice, from which he concealed material evidence and criminal profits.
Dima pleaded guilty on the day of his arrest and was released before being sentenced on $ 50,000 bail. His lawyer asked the judge for leniency, blaming everything on Gidon, who, in his words, “controlled the accused like Svengali,” that is, the evil hypnotist from the novel Trilby by George du Maurier.
The role model was not very good. Shortly before his arrest in this case, Gidon was released from Greenhaven Prison, where he was serving a long sentence for weapons, including a hand grenade. I have been to this prison, located among the fields and oak groves. Gidon did not enjoy the respect of our emigrants who were sitting there.
The judge sentenced Dima to only 13 months in prison, three years of public supervision and a $ 5,000 fine. At that moment he was 32 years old.
On the very first meetings with the investigators, his older brother told the investigators about such a number of crimes that it is pointless to list them all, and I will mention only the most significant ones.
He first got into the newspaper in 1991, when the New York Post announced the arrest of a group of Soviet émigrés, including Abramov, then 25 years old. The arrest was the fruit of a month-long investigation that culminated in a search of an apartment on East 25th Street in Flatbush, where firearms and cartridges, a homemade bomb and a hand grenade were seized.
Abramov served in Greenhaven for about ten years and soon after his release took up his old work as part of the brigade that was later honored with his name. Her most notorious crime was the broad day robbery of Michael Ashton Fine Jewelry, located on fashionable Madison Avenue between 74th and 75th streets.
It was also an extremely rare “Russian” crime, since people from the CIS, as a rule, rob their own, not native stores.
Finally, although the hijackers stole a million dollars worth of jewelry, the robbery was extremely mediocre. The robbers, who broke into the store at about 11:30 am on July 16, 2004, spoke to the saleswomen in English with a Russian accent, and among themselves – clearly in Russian. Therefore, the authorities immediately began looking for the raiders in the Russian community. The task was made easier by the fact that it is teeming with informants.
The investigation was also helped by drops of fresh blood left by one of the hijackers on the floor after he smashed a shop window with his bare hand. They were checked against an all-American database and found that the DNA belonged to Abramov, from whom genetic material was taken from him after previous arrests.
Surveillance spotted him in Brooklyn driving a Honda Accord, which was fined twice near a jewelry store before being robbed.
Finally, the robbers went to work without masks.
One of Abramov’s crimes ended in disgraceful failure, since the owner of the Tatiana restaurant, Tatiana Varzar, flatly refused to give him the valuables, although he beat her on the head and legs with the handle of a pistol, with which she fought off him, leaning back in her open car. “Then my legs were like ink,” she recalled.
On February 26, 2004, he attacked this fragile pretty woman in a garage on the Brighton Beach waterfront next to her restaurant. It was 2 pm on Saturday. This time Abramov did not forget his overalls and went to work in a mask, although Tatyana fleetingly saw his face when her heel pushed the mask to the side.
“He thought he would stun me,” the victim told me. – … But I did not fall unconscious, I continued to flounder, kick back with my feet … ”. According to Tatiana, she thought that the attacker’s pistol was not real.
She never gave Abramov the ring and watch, which he was trying to take away. He smashed her head and left, eating incessantly.
“It’s happiness that such a ruthless person will be imprisoned,” Tatyana told me after Abramov pleaded guilty. – I can only say one thing: well, it’s not worth it! Well, well, he has stolen, he will never use it anyway, it turns out. Spend my whole life in prison … ”.
In fact, not all. According to the calculations of the US Federal Prison Department (VOR.com), the estimated date of Abramov’s release, if he remained in America, is August 15, 2026.
He would have been credited with years in the bullpen. In addition, the term in the United States is reduced by about 15% for the minimum exemplary behavior. On March 6 last year, Abramov thus reduced his term by 810 days.
In May, Israel sent a letter to the US Department of Justice stating that Abramov’s term, under certain conditions, could be reduced there as well. In both cases, he has a good chance to be released alive.
Abramov and three accomplices broke into the house of the owner of the St. Petersburg bookstore, Natalya Orlova, and pointed a gun at her son, who was then 3.5 years old. “Every time I remember his face when he says, ‘What are you, uncle, a ninja?’ – said Orlova.
“A month later he says to me:“ You know, they were not ninjas, they were ordinary bandits! ” She continued. – The nanny probably explained to him. This strange hostage effect worked for him: he started talking to them. He says to him: “If you are a ninja, then why are you here ?! Go kill Babu Yaga! “
The hijackers took a small safe with them. “We didn’t have anything else,” Orlova told me. According to her, she was not the only victim of bandits in her Manhattan Beach area: “In fact, many people came to our homes,” she said.
The biggest loot went to the brigade not in the jewelry store on Madison Avenue, but in the apartment of the antiquarian, former Kiev resident Dmitry Markov in Brooklyn. He lived on the top floor of a six-story building on Emmons Avenue, and the bandits came down to his balcony from the roof. The door to the balcony was open due to the heat, Markov turned off the alarm.
The landlord and his girlfriend had watched the film “How It Was Done in Odessa” before going to bed and peacefully went to rest, when suddenly at 4 am a noise was heard on the balcony. Markov with a wild cry flew out of bed and met the intruders, who hit him with a pistol and cut his lip and forehead.
The media later wrote that Markov was struck by his housemate, numismatist Oleg Grabsky, who brought the bandits at him. Markov told me that it was not Grabsky, whom he would recognize even in a mask, who hit him, but the same Abramov. Grabsky was defended by a young lawyer Albert Dayan, who would later represent the Russian Viktor Bout.
The surname Grabsky amused the judges, since the verb to grab means “to grab, grab, snatch,” and the ending sky often denounces the Russian.
The landlord and his guest were tied up and put on the bed.
“Hands back, it is impossible to move, that is, you feel like a ram to be slaughtered,” Markov later described his feelings to me.
“When they knocked me down, calmed me down, calmed me down and laid me face down on the bed,” the antique dealer recalled a few days later, “he (Abramov. – V.K.) said such a beautiful phrase:“ That’s it, boy, you’ve come … ”.
Trophies – coins, icons, sabers, etc. – carried out for two hours. The container they brought with them was not enough, and the raiders borrowed the master’s one. Markov said that the goods stolen from him weighed 200 kilograms and was officially estimated at about one and a half million dollars, although in fact, according to him, it was worth much more.
All this was not insured, and the damage caused to him was irreparable.
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