This article was originally published in The eXile on November 29, 2001.

Now that we stomped the dust monkeys, our only casualty being that helicopter wheel that the Taliban danced around while firing their AKs in the air, I have to say, I’m damn glad I was behind President Bush from the get-go. I toldja so! I knew we’d thrash those pathetic primitives! I told everyone, but nooooo, they wouldn’t listen! (more…)

This article was first published in the March 21, 2002 issue of The eXile.

Hot on the heels of the the Homeland’s latest impluse-buy publishing hit, 1776 Things to Love About America, the eXile decided to put in its own 911 cents. Our agents think this things going to sell and sell and sell… but that’s not why we did it. We did it because this is how we as Americans feel deep inside. Take a gander! (more…)

In celebration of the second printing of The eXile book, we’ve decided to start the painfully dull process of merging the vast and greatly disorganized eXile Canon into a complete and definitive collection, which will now officially be referred to as “The eXile Classics”.

It’s a work in progress. So far, we’ve posted four issues from out historic beginnings during the winter of 1997. Check them out here.

*****

A map of Zhukov’s attack on Japan’s Imperial Army bears a strange resemblance to the inner jaws of those giant sandworms in Dune

How the Japs got served with the 3,000-mile long Stalin Roll combo

Everybody knows about the Fall of Berlin. You Russians will be out in the streets next week doing your Victory Day thing commemorating the capture of the Reichstag, Hitler eating Luger lead, and—on a sadder note—the end of the long, sweet rape-fest Russian soldiers enjoyed on their triumphant march through Prussia.

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Yes, their happy thoughts of home and hearth were tempered, as the preachers say, by the realization that their big Woodstock of free, forced love was about to come to an end.

What most people don’t know is that the Red Army had another huge triumph still to come: a crushing strategic victory on a front 3000 miles long, with 1.6 million Soviets annihilating a force that, on paper at least, totaled more than a million battle-hardened Axis troops. I’m talking about Operation August Storm, the Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria on August 9, 1945—exactly three months after the surrender of the Nazis.

(more…)

This is the cover of The eXile Issue #288, published in May 2008.

Photographic evidence of Tibet’s military, circa 1950

FRESNO, CA — Writing a column on the military history of Tibet seemed like a good idea in the good old days, a week ago, before I started actually trying to research it. I’ve never, ever had a harder time finding decent info on a topic.

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One reason is sheer shame; the Brits, for instance, don’t want anybody to know they invaded Tibet in 1904 and slaughtered a whole bunch of Tibetans for no reason except they were bored.

But some of the stuff on Tibetan military history is just so damn weird it made me feel like that scene in Ghostbusters where Rick Moranis gets possessed by some ancient demon and starts ranting: “During the rectification of the Vuldronaii the Traveller came as a very large and moving Torb. Then of course in the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him, that of a Sloar. Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you.” (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile, April 2008

Last summer, The eXile took a safari journey in search of the legendary Gopniki, Russia’s underworld answer to the OGs of South Central, Long Beach, and the Bronx. Those notorious shaven-headed toughs in their kepki-tabletki and track suits, with their bad-assed “cho blya!” faces and their greasy-haired sluts, were our heroes. In our journey through the podmoskovie ghetto of Lubertsy, we discovered tragedy rather than adventure: the Gopniki, those proletarian toughs and kings of the petty crime margins, had all but gone extinct in the Putin Era. They’d survived Stalin’s Terror and flourished under Brezhnev’s Stagnation, but in the end, they were no match against the soul-sucking effects of capitalism and bourgeois Evroremont. Today, the nearly-extinct Gopniki are little more than irony fodder for urban Russian hipsters in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Word has it that this summer, the “Gop-Stop” look is the Cool New Thing. (more…)

Klein on Columbian TV a few months before his arrest in Moscow

Two weeks ago, while all eyes were focused on the case of international arms dealer Viktor Bout, I spent about five hours at the Moscow City Court watching the appeal case of another accused arms smuggler, Yair Klein. Known as Israel’s most famous arms smuggler, Klein has been fighting extradition to Colombia, where he was tried in absentia in 2001 and sentenced to a 10-year prison term.

Klein was arrested in Moscow last August on an Interpol warrant as he boarded a plane to Tel Aviv. Now he stood just one court decision away from being shipped off in cuffs to Bogota, where he’d rot away in some mosquito-swarmed dungeon.

Given the international profile of the case, and the brouhaha involving Bout, there were surprisingly few reporters present at Klein’s appeal hearing. Other than a ponytailed Colombian journalist and two female staffers from the Colombian embassy, I had the pews all to myself as Klein was brought in to the courtroom, shackled and under guard. The Israeli’s 64 years showed in the splotches on his bald head and hands, but you would never guess his age by his muscle mass index. His solid beefy build was visible even through his baggy sweater and cargo pants. After six months in a Russian jail, he was still built to harm, and he seemed in good spirits, smiling and joking with the young female interpreter brought in at his own expense.

Klein is no Viktor Bout, but he is one of the better-known figures in the shadowy world of international arms dealers. Over the course of his career, Klein has equipped and trained some of the most notorious paramilitary outfits out there—from Nicaraguan death squads to the child armies of Sierra Leone. And he’s never been shy about it. Klein has openly explained his activities in pretty much every media format: articles, radio programs, TV interviews, documentaries, and self-made promotional videos. Klein and his merry band of Israeli mercenaries even appeared in a 1989 PBS documentary boasting of their activities in Central America, including working with the Nicaraguan Contras, a CIA creation that was known primarily for massacre-and-run operations in poor defenseless villages.

I first became aware of Klein’s case in December 2007, when I received a call from Mordechai Tzivin, Klein’s Israeli lawyer, asking me to meet him at the kosher restaurant inside Moscow’s Bolshaya Bronnaya synagogue. He phoned me because I occasionally write for Ma’ariv, Israel’s second-largest circulation daily, so he figured I might be useful in raising his client’s profile. I met Tzivin for dinner in a corner table, where he explained the case to me in between taking calls on his two cell phones, barking the whole time in English, Hebrew, and broken Russian, depending on which phone he was shouting into.

During our conversation, Tzivin boasted of his long and deep connections in Russia dating back to the Yeltsin years, when he managed to get a couple of Israelis off the hook for illicit diamond exports (one of them was pardoned personally by Yeltsin). He cursed the Israeli government for not doing enough to help his client. “They are abandoning a decorated war hero,” Tzivin complained. “Israel never does this! There is something going on behind the scenes.” He was sure that some kind of deal had been cut, something funny was going on. But what?

* * *

Yair Klein was born in British-occupied Palestine in 1943, the son of hardcore Zionist settlers. He is a member of the Ariel Sharon Generation, a tough Jewish warrior mofo. A veteran of the IDF’s special forces, Klein fought in the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and was part of the 1972 team that rescued dozens of hostages held captive in a Libyan plane at Lod airport in Tel Aviv.

Klein entered the mercenary business in the early 80s, when he founded a private security firm called Spearhead. The timing was perfect. Israel soon invaded south Lebanon and Spearhead landed its first major contract training and supplying basic army gear to the Phalangists, the notorious Lebanese Christian militia responsible for shooting up the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The attack left hundreds of Palestinians dead and tarnished Israel’s reputation around the world. According to a 2007 interview Klein gave on Colombian TV, his infant firm made $2 million from that deal alone. He was off and running.

In the mid and late 80s, Klein made a number of trips to Colombia to arm and train local drug cartel militias. These militias formed the basis of the right-wing paramilitary death squads who squared off against the FARC guerillas (who were at the time being armed by Klein’s Russian-Jewish competitor, Viktor Bout) and sometimes the Colombian government. One of Spearhead’s Colombia employees, Lt. Col. Amatzia Shuali, later explained the company’s role in Colombia to American public television: “Yair mentioned the Contras. I think here it’s the same thing: the Americans won’t interfere directly. We are willing to do it.” (Klein maintains that Bogota was aware of his business activities.)

Klein’s training activities had a big and bloody impact on Colombia. Local human rights activists accuse Klein of singlehandedly turning inept cartel goons into highly efficient death squads. Bogota, which at first turned a blind eye to the right-wing militias, were forced to finally take action when government officials started getting knocked with alarming regularity and professionalism. In 1989, the shit hit the fan when a promotional video showing Klein and other Spearhead employees training drug cartel militias was leaked to the public, causing a PR disaster for Klein—and for Israel. Spearhead was operating under an Israeli government license, putting Israel on the hook. A subsequent investigation by the Colombian government exposed Klein’s ambitious plans to set up a “freedom fighter” training camp on the island of Antigua. Along with a diploma, every graduate would be sent back to Colombia with his very own machine gun.

Klein and several other former Israeli officers fled as they were charged in Colombia. The government of Israel acknowledged Klein’s activities and punished him with fines. While Klein got away with a slap on the wrist, one of his associates was discovered dead not long afterwards, shot and stuffed into the trunk of his car, after he’d complained of being tailed by Mossad agents. It appears as if this associate took the fall for Klein’s operation.

But even all this bad press didn’t put a damper on Spearhead’s activities. In the mid 90s, Klein was reported to have operated in the lucrative and gory business of blood diamonds: Sierra Leone and Liberia. The details, as always, are murky and hard to verify, but one of Klein’s few known transactions in Africa involved an attempt to trade a military helicopter in exchange for access to a Sierra Leone diamond mine. He was later arrested in Freetown on charges of supplying the rebel Revolutionary United Front with weapons and was served a death sentence. He got out in 16 months, cleared of all charges. (It’s rumored that he was sprung out of prison in a joint Israeli-American black op.)

Klein in some third world jail

His most recent deal, involving armored vehicles, brought him to Moscow in the summer of 2007, and from there, to jail, where he’s been sitting ever since.

* * *

Over his long and extraordinary career, Klein has always been able to count on powerful friends to get him out of trouble. But something had changed by the time of his latest arrest.

From the moment he was dragged to a Moscow prison, the Israeli government has treated Klein as if they’d washed their hands and wanted nothing more to do with him. The Israeli embassy in Moscow refused to provide Klein with even the most basic citizen services: no embassy representatives came to visit him in jail, nor was he provided with an interpreter. At the appeal hearing, Klein claimed unfair treatment, including unlawfully restricted access to the telephone, newspapers and his attorney.

According to his attorney Tzivin, Klein believes the CIA is to blame for his predicament. “It’s possible America is leaning on Israel to give him up to the Colombians so they could have a trophy in the War on Drugs,” explained Tzivin. Israel, which relies heavily on American aid, may have agreed and cut Klein loose as a favor to the CIA and the DEA. Tzivin was adamant that Israel would never otherwise sit back and allow Russia to extradite the Israeli war hero.

CIA or not, the reality is that Israel and Colombia have their own growing trade ties that could justify a decision to leave Klein out to dry. Just a week before Klein’s appeal, Israel’s Prime Minister Shimon Peres hosted Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos at his residence in Jerusalem. Referring to the 1950s, when Colombia shipped weapons to Israel in defiance of an international embargo, Peres said: “In recent years the situation has come full circle, and Israel is able to repay Colombia in kind.”

Repay indeed. In early March, Israel supplied Bogota with drone aircraft, arms, ammunition and electronic equipment for use in combating the country’s drug lords (and guerrillas). Israel also has plans to refurbish Colombia’s aging air force. Neither side wants Klein running around smearing Colombia and gloating about his own invincibility. It’s not hard to see how his extradition is a win-win situation for everyone except him: Israel can develop its newly profitable relationship with Colombia, and Colombia gets a wanted criminal. Even Russia looks good, coming off as a law-abiding country that plays by the rule of law, a responsible member of the international community.

The 64-year-old Klein, meanwhile, will be stuck in some foul shit-hole, getting some very late-in-life Spanish lessons as he struggles to survive until release.

* * *

Whoever was putting the screws to his client, Tzivin’s job was to find a way around it and beat the extradition. To do so, Tzivin planned to dust off some old personal favors owed to him in Russia. He also had what he thought might be a secret weapon.

I didn’t think I could be shocked by much after hearing all the details of Klein’s case, but I was wrong. Midway through our meal at the kosher restaurant, we were joined by a tall orthodox Jew sporting a long raggedy beard and dressed in a top hat and black trench coat who had just flown to Moscow from Tel Aviv. He was introduced to me as Avigdor Eskin—one of the most notorious fringe-characters is Israel, famous for having staged a ceremonial death-curse against the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just a month before he was assassinated. Eskin was jailed for four months after the assassination for incitement to terrorism and blamed by many for the murder.

In the half-hour since I was introduced to the world of Yair Klein, things just kept getting weirder.

* * *

Eskin, the man who put a death curse on Yitzhak Rabin

Born in Moscow in 1960, Avigdor Eskin escaped to Israel as a teenager and drifted toward Arab-bashing extremists like Meir Kahane. After a string of brushes with the law as a young man, Eskin emerged as a prominent far-right wacko in his own right. In 1995, enraged by Yitzkak Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Yassir Arafat, Eskin made a public show of laying a kabalistic curse on the Prime Minister. He led a ceremony in front of the prime minister’s house, and intoned a curse: “Angels of destruction will hit him. He is damned wherever he goes. His soul will instantly leave his body … A disaster he has never experienced will beget him and all curses known in the Torah will apply to him. I deliver to you, the angels of wrath and ire, Yitzhak, the son of Rosa Rabin, that you may smother him. Put to death the cursed Yitzhak. May he be damned, damned, damned!”

According to Kabala tradition, the curse supposedly became active 30 days after the incantation. True to the curse’s power, Rabin was shot exactly 32 days later by Yigal Amir, an extremist settler steeped in the ideology of people like Eskin.

In 2007, Eskin was arrested in Israel for wiretapping the offices of Israel’s most powerful ultranationalist extremist, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister. The reason for wiretapping Lieberman was to get information on his powerful associate, the one-time Russian metals oligarch Michael Chernoy, who had to flee Russia for Israel, where he lost his vast metals holdings to RusAl oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Israeli police found evidence that Deripaksa had hired Eskin to spy on his old associate so that he could smear him with damning kompromat, or “compromising material.”

Eskin was still serving time in Israel for his wiretapping crime when he was recruited to help Klein. It’s not clear how Eskin got out of jail for a crime that serious. If Tzivin is right, Klein still has some powerful people on his side. Eskin was the go-to man, as he’s known for his ties to Russia’s political and business elite. So Tzivin brought Eskin to Russia to help him work their Russian contacts on behalf of Klein.

Turns out, Eskin wasn’t much help. A few weeks after he arrived in Moscow, on December 31, the Russian General Prosecutor’s office announced that Klein would be extradited to Colombia, no matter what trump cards Tzivin thought he had up his sleeve.

* * *

At the hearing on March 12, the judge rejected Klein’s appeal. Klein had wanted his lawyers to argue that his extradition was a CIA conspiracy, but his counsel refused and stuck to arguments more easily proved: 1) that Colombia’s statute of limitation on Klein’s crimes had expired; and 2) that Colombia couldn’t guarantee his safety once he was extradited back. To prove the second point, his lawyers cited a UN report that accused Colombia of serious human rights violations. The Russian prosecutor had a field day with that.

“Well, the UN has criticized Israel for human rights abuses in the same breath as they criticized Serbia and Chechnya. You cannot take that seriously,” he said with a smirk.

As the judges retired to their chambers to decide the case, Klein jumped up and started ranting about the CIA to his attorneys. I caught only snatches of his outburst: “Rockets … missiles bought to arm Taliban fighters in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets … The CIA … Americans … The judge needs to know.” But his lawyer cut him off.

As the judge read off the court’s decision in Russian, Klein remained in suspense. The young interpreter he hired failed to keep up with the judge’s pace and gave up trying to translate. Klein learned of his fate from his lawyer only some time later, after the court session had been adjourned.

“That was bullshit!” Klein’s Russian lawyer cried. “There was no way the judges could have typed up that statement in an hour. It had already been prepared.”

Klein has one more chance to appeal the decision with Russia’s Supreme Court. His attorneys have already filed the request. But Tzivin may have already tapped all of his connections and played his trump cards. The bottom line is, this strange and incredibly story looks like it’s coming to a bad and quiet end for Yair Klein. As he struggles alone, forgotten and shunned by his home country and the various spy agencies who once used his services, one can only hope that his epitaph isn’t summed up with the cheap ol’ “crime doesn’t pay” homily.

This article was published in Issue #285 of The eXile, March 2008.

The guy on the left in the Santa suit is responsible for up to fifty murdered sex slaves, including his own daughter.

A version of this article first appeared in the February 2008 issue of Penthouse magazine.

NIZHNY TAGIL — Last March, The eXile reported a story so shocking and so gruesome that it made every other item in the Russian crime catalog seem like a parking violation.

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If you read the story, you remember it. A mass grave containing the mutilated remains of more than a dozen teenage sex slaves was unearthed in a forest outside Nizhny Tagil, an industrial city of 400,000 just east of the southern Urals. The young victims were linked to a local prostitution ring that had been kidnapping, enslaving and killing local girls for five years. Even by Russian crime standards, the story jumped out, blacker than pitch and colder than a snow-frosted corpse.

There were remarkably few follow-ups to the discovery, first reported in the Yekaterinburg edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda. While the Bittsevsky Maniac was working on his Chikatilo rerun, earning top billing in the Russian press and beyond when caught, the Sex Slaves of Nizhny Tagil were killed a second time by an uninterested and jaded media. Most Russian papers merely allotted an in-brief blurb to the mass murder. Aside from our short report, the Guardian was the only other English language outlet to mention the crime. Komsomolskaya Pravda was the only Russian daily that delved into the nitty-gritty and asked why it went unsolved for so long. (more…)

(a.k.a. Yakov Borisovich Levandovsky)

I came back from vacation this week and found myself urgently in need of a warm winter shapka. I lost my last one after I gave it to some guy in exchange for a bottle of farewell Putinka vodka. To get a new hat, I headed down to Cherkizovsky Rynok this past weekend for some serious shapka shopping. Known simply as “cherkizon” among more seasoned rynok shoppers, this outdoor bazaar is truly a shopping wonderland. Cherkizon might just contain the single largest selection of shapkas crammed into one place on planet Earth. (more…)

Which chick scares you more from a public health perspective?

Spring is here and so are migrant birds. That means another bout of bird-flu media-frenzy. H5N1 was supposed to be a pandemic, remember? The Bubonic Plague without borders. Millions would die, cooked alive in their own skin. But other than a few lousy peasants dropping dead here and there, nothing has happened. In box office terms, the flu is a flop. Millions spent on the greatest fear marketing campaign and nothing to back it up. Sure, H5N1 could still mutate into a form that allowed it to spread between humans. But I say let’s worry about it when it happens. (more…)

All these years, I’ve been wondering to myself, “What’s wrong with Russians? What’s with their strange Byzantine ways? And what the fuck is the deal with that murse thing?”

“Murse?” you ask. The stubby little word may sound unfamiliar, but you know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen everyone from burly former sportsmen to atomic physicists totting murses. Murse: it’s the ubiquitous male purse.

In the West, there’s the mistaken belief that only chicks should carry purses. What foreigner hasn’t had a laugh at the expense of some guy who looks like he eats his Cheerios with vodka instead of milk, clutching under his arm such a gay little accessory as a male purse?

Then I felt one in my own hands. And I can say honestly that, to quote Fet, “A murse cannot be understood with the mind, but only with the armpit.”

This week I held a murse in my hands for the first time, and immediately things changed. Murses are not only NOT gay, they’re: indescribably fantabulous. It’s hard to explain my spiritual transformation when I felt that cool leather case in my hands the first time, and thought to myself, “This could be mine. I could walk into a pricey restaurant holding this thing, and people would think to themselves, ‘Hey, that guy’s not gay at all. In fact, he’s going places.”

The murse is more than a way to liberate your pockets from the usual jumble of your wallet, passport, keys, shoe shine brush and cell phone. Though it’s that too… But the murse is so much more.

It’s a feeling of security that you get when you’ve laced the wrist-strap around your arm and you know you’re immune to pickpockets. It’s knowing that your passport will stay in the same condition it was the day you got it. It’s having a portable filing cabinet that will not only organize any documents that you might obtain over the course of a day, but preserve their crispness. It’s knowing you’ve got a secret ruble reserve in one of the small zippered pockets. And it’s knowing that the expandable walls mean that I’ll never have to decide which discount and club cards I can carry with me at any one time.

It took a trip to Cherkizovsky Rynok to discover all this and more. Cherkizovsky is Moscow’s most famous rynok, where Russia cut its teeth on capitalism. It’s also Ground Zero of Russia’s Murse Movement.

So join me in my special photo essay as I undergo an Extreme Murse-Over.

Murse Mountain: the pride of Cherkizovsky Rynok’s murse merchants and shoppers alike!	“My friend! I give you best price on murse!” At Cherkizovksy,Sikhs and Pakistanis have the murse market cornered
Me and my murse: Nothing can stop us!	iMurse: built-in battery-powered calculator for the Power Murse Man.
Packin’ Murse Heat: we dare anyone to call this guy “gay.”	Murse in one hand, kvas in the other: It just doesn’t get better than this
Murse Envy: Two murse holders pretend like they’re not sizing up the other’s murse.	Find the national symbol!
Babe Magnet: Studies show that a murse has four times the sex appeal of a Merc.	“With my new murse, the sky’s the limit!”

This article was published in Issue #244 of The eXile, August 2006.

A year ago I wrote a poem, concerning nineties. I will translate it from my excellent Russian to my broken English as best, as I can.

The Nineties

I drunked “Rakia”

I have fucked Maria

I had my happiness accented

And commandant me “browning”

presented

Such were years nineties

Were populated by the serbs,

the mighties

Were truly wonderful those years!

Near Saraevo, amongst mountaineers

I was Iovan Tintor best friend

And Tintor wasn’t guy with happy end

He was a military chef and he got lost

So president have Tintor fired

from his post

That time I have expressed

by the reportages

With the ecstasies, excesses

and with rages

O, nineties those years!

Maria’s red moisty clitoris

And Serbian silent rivers

changing gears… (more…)