Apartment Block Burned by Organised Crime in Underground Poker Room War

"In my club I will splash the pot whenever the fuck I want" - Teddy ‘KGB’, Rounders.

Is there a more exciting word to see capitalized in a US Attorney’s Office press release than ‘Syndicate’? It conjures the same SPECTRE-like images as ‘cabal’. As in the phrase:

"Members of the Syndicate broke into the building and set fire to it. The building quickly went up in flames, leaving two residents trapped in a third-floor apartment." 

This quote comes, not from the annals of Nicholas Pileggi or a Mario Puzo novel, but from the recent statement about the arrest of a number of member of the Thieves In Law, an Eastern European gang – referred to incorrectly as ‘Russian Mafia’ by much of the media coverage – with a base of operations in New York.

The Thieves in Law are likely to be shorter handed soon, since a number of alleged members of the gang are currently defendants facing charges carrying with a 17 year minimum for torching a New York apartment building in. The building was supposedly the site of a rival firm’s illegal poker club. With ruthless efficiency the team of arsonists from the Thieves in Law managed to not only burn out the club, but totally destroy the entire block of 33 flats leaving people stranded in the blaze. The rescue efforts led to the injury of two residents of the flats and five of the firefighters who were sent in to save their souls.

While the charges of arson are the most prominent in this case, the defendants are also looking at multiple counts of extortion and non-specific ‘violence’. If they do take the rap for these charges, there is room in the legislation for the judges to put them away for a 40 year stretch.

Despite the Russian emphasis in the news – which of course carries with it shades of movies like Eastern Promises and John Malkovich’s culturally sensitive performance in Rounders – the main suspects (Viktor Zelinger, Vyacheslav Malkeyev, Leonid Gershman and Aleksey Tsvetkov) are from ex-Soviet states like the Ukraine and Moldova. While a further chargee, Librado Rivera, is an American.

It should come as no shock that the prohibition of one of the most popular games in the US has led to organised crime being pushed into the poker industry by the invisible hand of the black market. So, while these alleged perps face prosecution, it might be worth reflecting on the legal statutes that allowed these crims to see card games as part of their purview, and as something to be protected with a jerry-can and lighter.