ntsia. (Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Volume 3, p. 222) The Bolsheviks succeeded in annihilating some 10,000 political prisoners in Western Ukraine before and after the outbreak of hostilities (massacres took place in the prisons in Lviv, Zolochiv, Rivne, Dubno, Lutsk, etc.). (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, p. 886) The Soviets' hurried retreat had tragic consequences for thousands of political prisoners in the jails of Western Ukraine. Unable to evacuate them in time, the NKVD slaughtered their prisoners en masse during the week of 22-29 June 1941, regardless of whether they were incarcerated for major or minor offenses. Major massacres occurred in Lviv, Sambir, and Stanyslaviv in Galicia, where about 10,000 prisoners died, and in Rivne and Lutsk in Volhynia, where another 5000 perished. Coming on the heels of the mass deportations and growing Soviet terror, these executions added greatly to the West Ukrainians' abhorrence of the Soviets. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 461) Right after the entry we were shown 2,400 dead bodies of Ukrainians liquidated with a shot at the scruff of the neck at the city jail of Lemberg [Lviv] by the Soviets prior to their marching off. (Hans Frank, In the Face of the Gallows, p. 406) In Lvov, several thousand prisoners had been held in three jails. When the Germans arrived on 29 June, the city stank, and the prisons were surrounded by terrified relatives. Unimaginable atrocities had occurred inside. The prisons looked like abattoirs. It had taken the NKVD a week to complete their gruesome task before they fled. (Gwyneth Hughes and Simon Welfare, Red Empire: The Forbidden History of the USSR, 1990, p. 133) When the German attack came on 22 June the Soviets had no time to take with them the people they had locked up. So they simply killed them. Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating Soviets. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 35) The first question having been settled - I trust - to the satisfaction of all, we turn now to the second question: Is there any ethnic group that might have been particularly responsible for the killing? Well, if the slaughter was conducted by the NKVD or was directed by the NKVD, then the question reduces to What was the ethnic composition of the NKVD? The evidence that I have come across points to the conclusion that the NKVD was dominated by Jews. Here is one such piece of evidence. The speaker is Yoram Sheftel, John Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, describing his visit to the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990 - what Sheftel seems to be saying is that out of a sample of some 30 members of the wartime NKVD, every last one was a Jew: On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with the names of about thirty KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets call World War II. I was shocked and angry as I read the names: the first was Polonski and the last Levinstein, and all those between were ones like Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan - all Jews. The best of Jewish youth in Russia, the cradle of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to the Red Devil. (The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial, 1994, p. 301) Of course a sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative of the entire NKVD; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is not a rare or dubious hypothesis, but is one, rather, that is upheld from more than one direction: As a Jew, I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there so many Jews among the NKVD-MVD investigators - including many of the most terrible? It's a painful question for me but I cannot evade it. (Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia, Past, Present and Future, 1994, p. 147) Jews abounded [also] at the lower levels of the Party machinery - especially in the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD.... It is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the Cheka. It may be that having suffered at the hand of the former Russian authorities they wanted to seize the reins of real power in the new state for themselves. (Leonard Shapiro, The Role of Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, Slavonic and East European Review, 1961, 40, p. 165) The question that I would be interested in hearing your views on, then, Mr. Wiesenthal, is whether the assertion you made on the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom of October 23, 1994 may have been diametrically opposite to the truth - specifically, that whereas you held out that during the interval prior to the occupation of Lviv by German forces Ukrainians were slaughtering Jews by the thousands, in reality during this same interval it may have been closer to the truth to say that Jews were slaughtering Ukrainians by the thousands. Sincerely yours, Lubomyr Prytulak HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL < Wiesenthal Wiesenthal > 826 hits since 18Jan98 Wiesenthal Letter 21 Sep 14/97 Altered dates of death September 14, 1997 Simon Wiesenthal Jewish Documentation Center Salztorgasse 6 1010 Vienna Austria Dear Mr. Wiesenthal: In connection with the possibility of a massive, pre-German Lviv pogrom, Morley Safer (in his 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom of October 23, 1994) inserted into the pre-German interval two events which gave the viewer the impression that the pre-German pogrom in question was well-documented and incapable of being doubted: (1) the arrest of your mother, and (2) the shooting of your mother-in-law: SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia, the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here. LUBACHIVSKY: It is not true! SAFER: It's horribly true to Simon Wiesenthal - like thousands of Lvov Jews, his mother was led to her death by the Ukrainian police. These are remnants of a film the Germans made of Ukrainian brutality. The German high command described the Ukrainian behavior as 'praiseworthy.' WIESENTHAL: My wife's mother was shot to death because she could not go so fast. SAFER: She couldn't keep up with the rest of the prisoners. WIESENTHAL. Yes. She was shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman because she couldn't walk fast. SAFER: It was the Lvov experience that compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the guilty, to bring justice. The above passage starts by mentioning Lviv prior to arrival of the Germans, and it ends with a reference to "the Lvov experience," which invites the viewer to imagine that the events bracketed in Mr. Safer's discourse by these two references happened during that same pre-German interval. Specifically, Mr. Safer gives the distinct and unmistakable impression that the pre-German anti-Jewish activities on the part of Ukrainians cannot be doubted because among the events that occurred during these activities were the arrest of your mother and the shooting of your mother-in-law. However, examining your biographies for confirmation of these two events - the arrest of your mother and the shooting of your mother-in-law - turns up the following (it will help at this point to recollect that Lviv was occupied by the Germans on June 30, 1941): In August [1942] the SS was loading elderly Jewish women into a goods truck at Lvov station. One of them was Simon Wiesenthal's mother, then sixty-three. ... His wife's mother was shortly afterwards shot dead by a Ukrainian police auxiliary on the steps of her house. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8) "My mother was in August 1942 taken by a Ukrainian policeman," Simon says, lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold. ... Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal [Mr. Wiesenthal's wife] learned that, back in Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 41) We see, therefore, that Morley Safer seems to have advanced the date of arrest of your mother as well as the shooting of your mother-in-law by more than a year in order to lend credibility to the claim of Ukrainian-initiated actions against Jews prior to the German occupation of Lviv. As this error appears to be Mr. Safer's and not your own, I do not ask you to account for it. However, I do ask if you at any time subsequent to the 60 Minutes broadcast became aware of Mr. Safer's error, and if so, if you as a result asked him to issue a correction? Also, if you are only now for the first time learning of Mr. Safer's error, I wonder if you could tell me if you now intend to ask Mr. Safer to issue a correction? Sincerely yours, Lubomyr Prytulak HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL < Wiesenthal Wiesenthal > 886 hits since 18Jan98 Wiesenthal Letter 23 Sep 23/97 The pious executioners September 23, 1997 Simon Wiesenthal Jewish Documentation Center Salztorgasse 6 1010 Vienna Austria Dear Mr. Wiesenthal: I wonder if you are aware that during the German occupation of Lviv, the Greek Catholic church, headed by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was courageous and outspoken in defense of Jews? Here are four quotations which provide some details as to the role played by Sheptytsky, and which demonstrate that this role is widely acknowledged: There is little doubt as to the almost saintly role of Ukrainian (Greek) Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. Sheptytsky, Archbishop of L'viv and head of the church, was widely known as being sympathetic to the Jews. ... The elderly metropolitan wrote directly to SS commander Heinrich Himmler in the winter of 1942 demanding an end to the final solution and, equally important to him, an end to the use of Ukrainian militia and police in anti-Jewish action. His letter elicited a sharp rebuke, but Sheptytsky persisted even though the death penalty was threatened to those who gave comfort to Jews. In November 1942 he issued a pastoral letter to be read in all churches under his authority. It condemned murder. Although Jews were not specifically mentioned, his intent was crystal clear. We can never know how many Ukrainians were moved by Sheptytsky's appeal. Certainly the church set an example. With Sheptytsky's tacit approval, his church hid a number of Jews throughout western Ukraine, 150 Jews alone in and around his L'viv headquarters. Perhaps some of his parishioners were among those brave and precious few "righteous gentiles" who risked an automatic death penalty for themselves and their families by harbouring a Jew under their roof. The towering humanity of Sheptytsky remains an inspiration today. (Harold Troper & Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds, 1988, pp. 17-18) He [Sheptytsky] dispatched a lengthy handwritten letter dated August 29-31, 1942 to the Pope, in which he referred to the government of the German occupants as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. (Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 1992, p. 267) One of those saved by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky was Lviv's Rabbi Kahane whose son is currently the marshal commander of the Israeli Air Force. (Ukrainian Weekly, June 21, 1992, p. 9) Sheptitsky himself hid fifteen Jews, including Rabbi Kahane, in his own residence in Lvov, a building frequently visited by German officials. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 410) However, despite the widespread agreement that the Catholic church headed by Sheptytsky was outspoken and courageous in its defense of Jews, you have consistently portrayed Christianity in general, and the Catholic church in Lviv in 1941 in particular, as being virulently anti-Semitic. I refer, for example, to your fable of the alcoholic priest in Western Ukraine who incites a pogrom (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 24), which fable I have already brought to your attention in my letter to you of December 8, 1994; and I refer as well to your story of the Ukrainians who you say almost executed you: As the shots and shouts of the boisterous Ukrainians drew closer to Wiesenthal, he heard a new sound: church bells. The Ukrainians heard it, too. Good Orthodox Catholics all, they laid down their arms for evening mass. Wiesenthal and his friend had stood five or six bullets away from extinction. (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, Constable, London, 1993, p. 36) Now if it is the case as we have just seen above that the Catholic church unambiguously and unequivocally stood for the defense of Jews, then we would expect devout Catholics to not be among the executioners of Jews. Conversely, given that someone is among the executioners of Jews, we would expect him not to be a devout Catholic. Your portrayal of sadistic executioners as being simultaneously devout Catholics is incongruous and elicits incredulity. But your story goes beyond the incongruous to the grotesque. You portray a team of executioners who have been repeatedly drinking vodka - and may therefore be depicted as drunk. You say that they have also just been shooting prisoners in the back of the neck, and then lifting the bodies from the floor and placing them into makeshift coffins - therefore, the executioners are also covered with blood. Assuming that these executioners did not have a place to shower and had not brought with them a change of clothing, and assuming that the church bells are signaling the imminent commencement of mass so as not to leave time for showering and changing, then I have trouble conjuring up a credible image of these executioners arriving at the church for mass. To accept your image requires us to accept that the appearance of drunk and blood-spattered executioners at a mass would not attract notice and repugnance - a supposition which is erroneous and offensive. And it requires us also to accept that the mind set of executioners engaged in genocide is so similar to Christians engaged in devotion, that they make the transition instantaneously and seamlessly - another supposition which is erroneous and offensive. Mr. Wiesenthal, I entreat you to either explain and defend your bizarre story, or else to withdraw it. Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL < Wiesenthal Wiesenthal > 3285 hits since 18Jan98 Wiesenthal Letter 24 Jan 18/98 Reversing victim and victimizer The caption at the top of the photographs shown below is from LIFE magazine, 11Jun45, p. 50. The caption in German and Latin at the bottom of the Simon Wiesenthal drawing below was, of course, included with the drawing in Simon Wiesenthal's KZ Mauthausen, 1946, p. 64. This caption says: The Gallows The Marquis de Sade would have been in ecstasy if he could have seen the gallows in a KZ [concentration camp]. His faithful successors the SS-hangmen had daily execution fever. It provided some variety, beyond the eternal, monotonous shootings and beatings. Something one could photograph with pleasure. They placed bets for rounds of beer on how long the offender could hold out. He must not die too quickly. When he threatened that, he was bound, and when he had somewhat recovered, it continued ... to the greater glory of the devil! I refer to Simon Wiesenthal's drawing as a "1946" drawing because that was the date of publication of the book in which the drawing appeared. A reader using a recent version of a NetScape browser can click here to be taken to a discussion of the Lviv pogrom referred to in the letter below. A reader using an Internet Explorer browser can go to the top of the page which contains that discussion by clicking here, and once on that page, can click "What happened in Lviv?" to arrive at the same discussion of the Lviv pogrom. January 18, 1998 Simon Wiesenthal Jewish Documentation Center Salztorgasse 6 1010 Vienna Austria Dear Mr. Wiesenthal: In the course of the October 24, 1993 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, you leveled the accusation, echoed by Morley Safer, that immediately prior to the occupation of Lviv by German forces in 1941, Ukrainians killed some 5 to 6 thousand Jews. I have already brought to your attention evidence that your accusation is unfounded, and that the more likely reality is that during approximately that same interval, the NKVD - dominated by Jews - killed approximately that same number of Ukrainians. This evidence was presented to you in five letters, dated September 8, 9, 12, 13, and 14, 1997. That the NKVD was dominated by Jews is not an irrelevancy which I am introducing gratuitously, but, rather, is germane in that it offers a motive for your reversal of the truth. That is, it is possible that your reason for falsely portraying Ukrainians killing Jews is to cover up the reality that Jews were killing Ukrainians, and to make any claim on behalf of the latter seem implausible should it ever be put forward. What I ask you in the present letter is whether you had not begun a comparable reversing of victim and victimizer earlier in your career - almost five decades earlier, as a matter of fact - and on a smaller scale? Specifically, I am enclosing copies of two similar, and yet contrasting, images: Three LIFE magazine photographs, 1945 Enclosed you will find a photocopy of three photographs from LIFE magazine (June 11, 1945, p. 50) which appear at the end of a photo essay titled "FIRING SQUAD: Army executes three German spies who were caught in U.S. uniforms." The story appears on three pages - 47, 48, and 50. There are a total of nine, mutually-consistent photographs in the essay. The first paragraph of the story is: During Nazi breakthrough at Bastogne last December the Germans managed to smuggle some of their intelligence officers behind U.S. lines. Three of these spies were captured, tried and shot. Last week the War Department released pictures on this and the following pages, taken by LIFE Photographer Johnny Florea, which show their speedy execution. (p. 47) One Simon Wiesenthal drawing, 1946 Enclosed you will also find a photocopy of one of your drawings, signed "SWiesenthal," from p. 64 of your 1946 book of drawings KZ Mauthausen showing three individuals in striped uniforms, tied to stakes, and apparently either unconscious or executed. As your book is dedicated to depicting the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis at the Mauthausen concentration camp, and as your caption indicates that the drawing depicts victims of Nazi torture, the reader is encouraged to the conclusion that the drawing represents a scene witnessed by yourself of Jews tortured to the point of unconsciousness or executed by Nazis at Mauthausen. However, the similarity between the three individuals shown in the 1945 LIFE magazine photographs and in your 1946 KZ Mauthausen drawing is striking and unmistakable, and suggests the alternative conclusion that you copied the LIFE magazine photographs, added striped uniforms to the victims, and then misattributed the result. Questions I would appreciate your answering the following three questions: (1) How do you explain the similarity between the LIFE magazine photographs and your drawing? (2) Do you not feel it appropriate at this time to issue a retraction of the misattribution of your KZ Mauthausen drawing? (3) Might it not be even more appropriate to issue a similar retraction of your more extreme, more recent, and more damaging reversal of victim and victimizer in the case of the pre-German Lviv massacre of 1941? Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak 2. Israel-Jewish Diaspora World-Wide criminal activity (Jewish extremists lobbism is behind the cover up of the Israel-related criminal activity world wide and money laundering) Hassidic Jews in New York yeshivas are among the top money launderers in the world. They use the cloak of religion to hide their work and they use Israel's exclusively Jewish immigration policy (the "law of return") to escape U.S. justice by relocating to Israel. One of these Hassidic Jews candidly admitted that as long as it benefitted "their community" it didn't matter whether money was laundered. The article is interesting in that demonstrates another example of the age-old problem of Jewish loyalty being to "Jews first" rather than their country of residence. It also shows how can Jews benefit from and get away with crimes due to Israel's exclusive immigration policy which allows Jewish criminals to escape U.S. prosecution by fleeing to Israel (and in most cases, =with= the money). The U.S. government -- ever beholden to Jewish influence and Jewish interest as always -- dare not extradite them. It is amazing how these Jewish criminals can exploit America and then escape its laws by recourse to an immigration policy which Jews claim is "racist" for every other country but Israel (!) New York's 47th Street : Maariv, September 2, 1994 By Ben Kaspit, the New York correspondent Rabbi Yosef Crozet fell because of his big mouth. "I launder money, a lot of money," he once told an acquaintance. "Every day I take $300,000 from 47th Street in Manhattan, bring it to the synagogue, give a receipt and then take a commission." The man who heard that story from Crozer was, how sad, an undercover Jewish agent of the US agency for fighting drugs, DEA. A month later, in February 1990, Crozer was arrested by agents on his way from 47th Street to Brooklyn. They found on him prayer books, five passports and also $280,000 in cash in the trunk of his car. He traveled that route every day. He would arrive at the gold trading office on 47th Street in the afternoon, and leave a little later, carrying suitcases and bags loaded with cash. From there he drove to the Hessed Ve'Tzadaka ["Mercy and Charity"] synagogue in Brooklyn which had been turned into a laundry for millions of dollars, the revenue from drug sales in the New York area. That was how Crozer made his living. Assuming that the commission for laundering money ranged in the area of 2% to 6%, Rabbi Crozet can be presumed not to have suffered from hunger. The investigators who questioned him faced a simple task. A respectable and pious jew who never imagined that he would be interrogated, a son of a highly respected rabbi who headed a large yeshiva in city of New Square, Crozer broke down and cooperated. But then his lawyer, Stanley Lupkin, argued that his client, a pious Jew, had no idea that he was laundering drug money. Crozer, according to his lawyer, believed that he was laundering money for a Jewish diamond trader .'who trades in cash" and not for Gentile drug traders and was using the situation to make some extra money, for his synagogue. It seems that this argument had some effect since Crozer was sentenced to one year and one days imprisonment. In exchange for a lenient science, he supplied his interrogators with valuable information which helped them to capture a person whom they had been seeking for a long time: Avraham Sharir, another pious Jew, the owner of a gold trading office on 47th Street, who was really one of the biggest sharks for laundering drug money in New York City. Sharir, an Israeli Jew aged about 45, to whom we will later return, subsequently confessed to having laundered $200 million for the Colombian drug cartel of Kali. The drug trade is considered to be the most profitable branch of crime in the world. The profit margin ranges in the area of 200% for cocaine and 1,200% for heroin. The amounts of money laundered in the trading office are larger than the budgets of many small states. The temptation is great. The main problem of the Colombian drug barons who control a significant part of world drug trade is how to get rid of the money. It is a problem of the rich but a nagging one. Two major Colombian drug cartels operate in the US - the Kali cartel and the Medellin cartel. The killing of the head of the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escovar, by the Colombian authorities in December 1993 greatly weakened this cartel which had controlled the drug trade in the New York area. The Kali people, in contrast, hold a monopoly over the Los Angeles and Miami area markets. At present, the Kali people distribute about 80 per cent of the world's cocaine and a third of the heroin- The Kali drug cartel makes $25 billion each year within the US alone. The money must somehow be shipped out of the US without arousing the attention of the American authorities. Besides, the cash must be given a seal of approval and, one way or another, become legitimized. Around this complex issue a mega-business has sprung up - laundering and smuggling drug money. American customs investigators have found millions of dollars in containers supposed to have contained dried peas, in double-sided gas tanks, in steel boxes attached to freight ships. In 1990 they found $14 million in cash in a shipment of cables, supposed to have been sent from a Long Island warehouse to Colombia. According to records found on the site, that was shipment No. 234 (multiplied by 14 million, calculate it yourselves). The same year, at Kennedy Airport, in a warehouse, 26 large containers were found which were supposed to have contained bull sperm. The latter was not there but there were $6.5 million. In May of this year American investigators raided a bowling ball plant in Long Island. They picked up the balls, cut them in half and found within them $210,000 in used $100 bills. Despite their active imaginations, the drug barons find it hard to keep up. $25 billion is a lot of money and it must fill a lot of space since most of the money gained in drug deals comes in bills of $10 to $20. And that is how the match was made between the drug cartels and 47th Street in Manhattan. This street is the world center for trading diamonds, gold, jewels and precious stones. Hundreds of businesses are crowded in there, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Shops, businesses, display halls. In the back rooms and on the top floors, far from public access, the action takes place. That is where the major traders sit, and that is where the deals are made. Diamonds, gold and jewels pass from hand to hand with a handshake. The frantic activity there offers an ideal cover for illegal transfers of money. "In fact, even legitimate business appears, on 47th Street, to be dark and mysterious," said a customs official. "Merchandise arrives constantly, boxes, suitcases and packages are constantly opened, everything arrives in armored cars, under heavy security and a shield of secrecy. Now, go find the black money." "The match between the drug barons and 47th Street," an American customs investigator told Afaai-ii@, "is ideal. The gold and diamonds industry circulates large amounts of cash. The diamond traders are accustomed to transporting large amounts of money in cash, from one state to another, efficiently and without leaving a trace, Large amounts of money pass from hand to hand on 47th Street, without arousing suspicion. "A diamond trader might launder $5 million every day without arousing special attention. it is difficult to monitor the deals, to locate the sources of the money and it is very difficult to infiltrate that closed field, which is based on personal acquaintance and trust." Added to it is the fact that in the course of the past five years, the diamond industry on 47th Street has been in a deep slump, which put many traders into bankruptcy. "A trader like that," said an investigator, "faces the choice of bankruptcy or making easy, quick and relatively safe money. Not everyone is strong enough to withstand the temptation." All of that would not have been of interest to us if not for the massive Israeli and Jewish presence on 47th Street. "At least 50% of the diamond traders there are Israelis," so an Israeli diamond merchant, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Maariv. "Not a few Israelis also operate in the field of jewels, precious stones and gold. All of them came to New York to make fast money, conquer the market, get their big break. Not all of them have succeeded, especially not recently." But the Jewish presence on 47th Street is much greater than that. Experts in the field estimate that 75% to 80% of the active traders on the street are Jews. A large number of them are very pious Orthodox Jews, mainly Hassids. There is also a respectable representation of Jews from Iran and Syria, usually also very pious. One can get along fine in Hebrew on 47th Street. There are many more kosher restaurants in the area than in all of Tel Aviv. The place is also the biggest laundry for drug money in the US. The expansion of the phenomenon of laundering drug money in the US in general, and on 47th Street in particular, led to the establishment of a special American task force to combat the phenomenon. The unit is called Eldorado, after the mythical South American city of gold. It is staffed with 200 agents, officials of the US customs and internal revenue agencies. Eldorado, established in April 1990, investigates the money- laundering in general. Fifty of its agents dedicate their time just to 47th Street. "It is work that demands tremendous manpower," said Robert Van Attan, an Eldorado officer, "since the money has to be monitored along the length and breadth of the continent, sometimes also abroad." The target of the Eldorado agents is money, and money alone. They are not interested in drug imports, drug deals or drug dealers. "We want to put our hands on the money. To hit their pockets," say members of the unit. The task is difficult. In America there is no law that prohibits possessing money. On the other hand, when a large amount of cash is found in the possession of a launderer, the agents confiscate the money. If the person can prove that the source of the money was legitimate, he gets it back. That does not happen. The launderers are experienced. When one of them is caught and several million dollars are found in his possession, he willingly hands over the money, but asks for a receipt. "The money is not mine. I want you to confirm that you took it," is the common request. Incidentally, their lives depend on that receipt. It is not a simple matter to trail them. The eyes of a typical launderer are glued to his rear-view mirror. He makes sudden stops, moves from one lane to another, chooses long and twisted routes from one place to another. Eldorado has an answer. The investigators follow their targets with eight, ten, sometimes twelve vehicles. If necessary they use one or two helicopters. There is also sophisticated equipment, the wonders of American technology in the fields of tapping, surveillance and code-breaking. In the first two years of its operations, Eldorado captured $60 million and arrested 120 launderers. Compared to the scope of overall laundering, that is peanuts. "That is not the point," say the Eldorado agents. "Obviously, it is impossible, with the existing legal restrictions, to put an end to the phenomenon. Our warfare is psychological." Incidentally, Eldorado is not the only agency combating money-laundering. The DEA, the American Drug Enforcement Agency, and the FBI, also conduct lively activity in that field. Not always is this activity coordinated. In recent months the Eldorado agents discovered a new center of operations. It is called The Cocaine Triangle. Its sides are Colombian drug barons, Israeli-Jewisli money launderers and Jewish-Russian mafiosi. The Colombians funnel the money, the Israelis launder it, the Russian mafiosi (who have recently overrun New York in droves) provide the security and the muscle. A New York journalist recently told Maariv: "The Israeli Jews are ataining notoriety in the money- laundering market. You need only look at the list of arrests and the indictments of the past 3-4 years, in order to grasp the enormous scope of Israeli involvement in this field." One reason for the growing power of the Jews in the business of laundering drug money is the Law of Return with its easy possibility of escape to Israel. In May 1993, five members of the Jewish international laundering ring which had worked with the Kali cartel were arrested. The ring was exposed following an FBI "sting" operation, as part of which it established a dummy corporation called Prism, which served the gang for laundering money. In the course of less than one year $22.5 million were laundered through the company. The head of the ring was an Israeli named Zion Ya'akov Evenheim, known as "Zero". Evenheim, who had a dual Israeli and Colombian citizenship, stayed in Kali, from where he coordinated the activity and supervised the transfers of money. Most of the ring's members were arrested in May 1993. Evenheim was arrested by Interpol in Switzerland and extradited to the US. He is cooperating with the FBI. Additional Israeli detainees: Raymond Shoshana, 38, Daniella Levi, 30, Binyamin Hazon, Meir Ochayon, 33, Alex Ajami, 34. Many other suspects, to whom we will later return, escaped to Israel, and there are difficulties in extraditing them to the US. In the course of the investigation, FBI agents recorded hundreds of hours of conversations in Hebrew among the Israeli suspects. For the purpose of translating the material, they employed, among others, Neil Elefant, a Jewish resident of New Jersey who had lived in Israel for some time and who spoke fluent Hebrew. Elefant translated and translated, until one day in May 1992 he was amazed to discover among the speakers a friend, Jack Zbeida, a Jewish antiques dealer from Brooklyn, Elefant was in a difficult dilemma. He approached his rabbi, Elazar Teitz, who told him that his religious duty was to warn Zbeida. Elefant then secretly met Zbeida and told him that he was targeted by the FBI. Alex Ajami, an Israeli Jew who was one of the heads of the gang, was also present. Zbeida and Ajami hurried to the FBI offering to cooperate, turning in Elefant, who was arrested and charged with interfering with legal procedures. He argued that one of the reasons for his decision to warn Zbeida was the zealousness, almost approaching anti-Semitism, which he found among the FBI agents trying to involve the State of Israel in drug affairs. Judge Kevin Duffy sentenced Elefant to I8 months' imprisonment. In the meantime the FBI was forced to arrest hurriedly all those involved in the affair. In spite of their hurry, many Israeli Jews involved fled to Israel. Some few of the tens of Israeli and American Jews who fled to Israel on this occasion are: Raymond Shosliana, Adi Tal, David Va'anunu, his nephew Yisliai Vanunu, Ya'akov Cohen. Most of them came out of the affair with a lot of money which they also took to Israel. The story of Adi Tal is worthy of elaboration. He is an impressive youth, handsome, with a good record in the army, a son of a fine Israeli family, formerly a security guard at El Al. All that did not hinder Tal from becoming involved in laundering drug money in 1988. In March 1988 the American authorities arrested I I members of the laundering ring, including Tal and his good friend Nir Goldstein, also an Israeli. The investigators at the time said that Tal and his friends had operated cautiously, used aliases and codes and lived in constant fear. They would receive large amounts of money from Colombian couriers, divide the money into sums of $10,000 (any amount over 10,000 dollars that is deposited in an American bank requires a report), deposit the sums in banks and convert them into travelers' checks which they sent, by means of international couriers, to a dummy corporation in Panama. The most popular code which Tal's gang used was taken from the diamond industry. When information was transmitted about the transfer of a diamond of 30.4 carats, it meant the sum of $30,400. Tal worked for Jose Satro, the money launderer of the Kali cartel. The Colombians constantly pressured him to increase the scope of the laundering. Tal was afraid. "He lived in constant fear, his bags were always packed and he was prepared to flee at any minute to Israel," one investigator said. An important member of Tal's laundering ring was Rabbi Shalom Leviatan, a Lubavitch Hassad, head of their branch in Seattle. It is assumed that all the considerable political power of these Hassids and of their rebbe (then alive) was exerted in favor of that laundering ring. "My intentions were good," Leviatan said after he was captured. "A person learns from experience," he added. According to him, he did not know that he was laundering drug money and he was certain that he helped Iranian Jews trying to smuggle their money out of Iran. Leviatan got out cheaply and was sentenced to 30 days' community service. Tal, who confessed to laundering $10 million, was sentenced to 52 months' imprisonment. He served his sentence at Danbury jail in Connecticut but he did not learn his lesson. When he was released, he joined a gang which was captured in the FBI's "sting" operation. This time he managed to flee to Israel where he apparently remains to this day. The gold and diamond industry has recently become the favorite of the drug barons, due to the numerous possibilities for laundering which it contains. One of the popular methods is laundering by means of trading in gold. This is how it works. The drug money is converted into gold, which is smuggled to Colombia, from where it is exported to Milano and used to make jewelry which then legitimately returns to 47th Street. "The funniest thing in this business," say the investigators, "is that the jewelry comes here under favored import conditions because the gold seemingly originates from Colombia and that state possesses favored terms of trade with tile US." There are also other methods. Drug money is deposited in the