The Last Boss of Brighton, review: a brilliant, blood-soaked biography

If you happened to be in Brighton Beach in south Brooklyn in the Eighties and Nineties, you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting an Eastern European gangster – although this was not an action to be recommended if you didn’t want your kneecaps turned into paperweights. The enclave known as “Little Odessa” was a hotbed of drug smuggling, money laundering and inter-mob brutality.

The king of the kingpins was Boris “Biba” Nayfeld, a Russo-Belarusian who arrived in Brighton in 1979 and within a decade became the leading Russian gangster in the US, his rivals having mostly come to sticky ends (not at his hands, Nayfeld insists). Now, aged 75, Nayfeld has provided the veteran journalist and true crime author Douglas Century with several hours of interviews, resulting in this blood-soaked biography.

Nayfeld was born into a Jewish family in Gomel, Belarus. Like Vladimir Putin a few years later, the teenage Boris became a member of a khuligan (hooligan) street gang – what Putin has called his “street university”.

His brief career in petty theft landed him in a labour camp in Bobruisk (had it been less brief and the thefts less petty, he would have faced the firing squad, like many of his friends). It was a brutally hard existence, leading to the one incident in his life he seems ashamed of: when he and his fellow prisoners were digging the foundation for a factory, they came across a mass grave of Holocaust victims, and stole their gold teeth.

Inevitably, once he was out of prison he used what he had learned from his fellow cons to turn seriously to crime. At that time baking matzoh was enough to get you arrested in the USSR, but when he joined the mass exodus of Jewish refugees heading for the US in the Seventies, it had less to do with fleeing state-sponsored anti-Semitism and more that he was a relentless swanker whose fancy clothes and car had alerted the authorities to his various rackets and embezzlement schemes.

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