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Hollywood scam: New York prosecutor's office accuses Russian-speaking immigrants of stealing $ 30 million

'23.04.2021'

Olga Derkach

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Three Russian-speaking immigrants will be tried in New York. They are accused of conspiracy to launder income and embezzle money and valuables from foreign banks for a total amount exceeding $ 30 million. with the BBC.

Photo: Shutterstock

In case of conviction, 56-year-old Val Cooper (aka Val Konon and Valery Kononenko), as well as residents of Brooklyn, in particular 52-year-old Alexei Levin and 49-year-old Harry Smith (aka Igor Berk and Igor Berkovich), face up to 20 years imprisonment and confiscation of property acquired with the proceeds of crime.

Their crime was so peculiar that, according to some media outlets, it just asks to become the basis for a Hollywood script.

According to the conclusion of the prosecution, from March 2015 to October 2019, the three defendants in the case and their accomplices, whose names were not disclosed, stole cash, gold bars, jewelry and other property from individual bank safes that they rented.

The "bugbears of our days" did not crack them, but opened them with copies of the keys made by their accomplices.

They rented individual bank safes in small branches of foreign banks, where surveillance cameras did not see any part of the premises.

The criminals removed the locks of other people's safes using ultra-modern equipment, in particular borescopes (devices for examining closed cavities), and passed the pictures to their accomplice, who made copies of the keys using pictures.

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Thus, they robbed the banks of Russia, Ukraine, North Macedonia, Moldova, Latvia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. France is also mentioned in one of the court documents.

Brooklyn attorney's office and other US law enforcement agencies in a press release thanked colleagues from the named countries for their assistance.

Two of the accused came to the attention of law enforcement officers long ago.

Cooper-Kononenko has already been convicted: under the USSR in 1986 - for theft. In Russia, in 2001, he was mentioned in connection with another criminal offense, but then he was not brought to justice.

Levin in 1999 was involved in a great securities fraud case involving Soviet immigrants and members of the Italian mafia. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison.

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Among his defenders was Samuel Reiser, a well-known in Soviet immigration native of Ukraine, who in the past worked in the lawyer team of Vyacheslav Ivankov under the nickname Yaponchik. Even earlier, he defended Benjamin Nayfeld, one of the associates of Yevsey Agron, who went down in history as the first head of the Russian mafia in the United States.

The prosecutor's office calls Cooper-Kononenko the head of a criminal organization and claims that he received the stolen property and laundered the proceeds from its sale through his bank accounts.

Levin, according to prosecutors, bought photographic equipment for shooting the mechanism of locks and laundered money.

Smith-Berkovich allegedly robbed a number of bank safes himself and flew for this from the USA abroad, in particular to Riga.

Investigators conducted a series of searches. For example, at Cooper's house, they confiscated copies of keys without numbers, cash, jewelry and luxury handbags. They also searched the individual box, rented by Cooper in Brooklyn, where they found a borescope and a lock from a bank safe.

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