6/2/2023 0 Comments Russian prison mafiaIt amused me that the handful of Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians and prisoners from the former Yugoslavia were all mostly called "Russia" too. The American prisoners could not pronounce any Slavic, Caucasian or Tatar names, and the trend was to have a nickname based on origin anyway, so most of these men were simply called "Russia" by their fellow inmates. He'd shot a police helicopter down over Brooklyn, and by the time I arrived he had already been sitting at that table for 15 years, with five more to go. But he was also an accomplished criminal. The Russians had their own table in the prison, headed by Dmitry, who also happened to be the most intellectual of the bunch. Genis, now a free man, lives in Brooklyn with his wife and writes widely about his time in the U.S. I couldn't give them that - though I could and did sing the Soviet anthem with them when they were in the mood. My father had taught me the language well enough that these guys thought I was Baltic, but I was no criminal "avtoritet." They would have preferred someone with nautical stars tattooed on both shoulders and knees, hands covered in inked rings, a church tattooed on his back and a colorful "zona" (prison) record. Imagine my dismay when they not only let me keep the slippers but also embraced me as a "zemlyak," or homeboy, despite the fact that I was born in Manhattan. I used the formal 'Vy' pronoun when speaking to them and was really bad at cursing. When I first arrived, I couldn't speak their language, the slang known as "fenya." I also couldn't spit my cigarette out from a distance like they did, or crouch for hours on end. They spent their days reading trashy Russian paperbacks about thieves-in-law and had been hoping for a real veteran, not an intellectual Jew who was as out of place in their community as he was in prison. The Russians who sent me the slippers were disappointed when they actually met me. They tattooed each other with the symbols that had meaning in Siberian labor camps and brewed "chifir," the very strong tea that gets you high on caffeine. They replicated the hierarchies and rules developed by Russian convicts two centuries ago and fine tuned during Stalinist times. jails had also been in Russian "zones," notoriously violent correctional labor camps, so they lived according to principles learned there. Straight From the ZoneĪ lot of the Russian prisoners in U.S. They didn't fit in with the whites, the blacks or the Hispanics - they made up their own distinct category. But each of the 12 joints in New York I spent time at had its own little community of spitting, crouching, smoking, tattooed Russian zeks. Although many of the prisoners I knew over the years still write to me, none of them are the Russians I met. ![]() I did my minimum and was released earlier this year. I had committed five robberies, gotten away with them, and then got caught on a fluke a few months later. In less than two years, heroin addiction had taken me from my desk at a literary agency in New York to a shop at closing time with a pocketknife in my hand. ![]() I was serving a sentence for robbery, of which I was indeed very guilty. And so began my uncanny journey into the underworld of Russian zeks (a Soviet abbreviation for prisoner) in New York prisons. The porter simply chuckled and said not to worry about it: The Russians in the facility had found out that a "brother" had arrived. Fearing the worst and remembering the awful things I had heard about the consequences of accepting gifts in prison, I wouldn't touch any of it until he told me where this bounty came from. He gave me an envelope of coffee, a handful of tea bags, a newspaper, a few candy bars and shower slippers. On my first day of 10 years and three months spent in the prisons of New York state, a man came to the bare cell I was locked in.
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