Mafia

High Spies of the Mossad: Israeli Mystery Man Inspires New Strain of High-Grade Medical Marijuana

This article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of High Times. It only dawned on me this week that I could upload it here with the PDF: High Spies of the Mossad The voice on the other end of Alex Barak‘s phone on the evening of July 14th 2003 asked about some used furniture Barak had put up for sale, after the bar and cafe he ran in central Tel Aviv went under after a couple of years in operation. Barak went downstairs, and moments later a …

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The bombs at those other schools

  No one knows how long the bombs were stashed at the school, but it could have been weeks, maybe longer, that hundreds of kids passed through the school none the wiser. The weapons were stashed in a closet inside a classroom that hadn’t been used for some time. It was a serious haul: 13 mortar shells, three rifles, incendiary flares, and sacks filled with hundreds of rounds of .9mm ammunition. The arsenal was found in Abu Snan only a few …

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Not a celebrity funeral?

The morning after organized crime figure Charlie Abutbul was found dead from a (self-inflicted?) gunshot wound to the head in his Netanya home, a conspiracy began forming on a WhatsApp group for Israeli crime reporters. The first salvo was sent out by a reporter from an Israeli TV channel, who said the family doesn’t want the press to cover the funeral, and maybe we could all agree not to go. He was answered by a well-known radio reporter who agreed, as …

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Aharonovich’s Patriot Act?

Public Security Minister didn’t hide his grin on Saturday night. Speaking to Rina Matzliah on Ch 2 just before the 8pm news hour, he said police had arrested a top organized crime leader, and that more of the same was soon to follow. He wouldn’t confirm that police had arrested Shalom Domrani, but it was already widely-known and by the time the papers closed Saturday night, the arrest of the southern mob boss was splashed across the front pages of the …

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Facebooking the underworld

Not long before his legs would be blown off in a car bomb in Ashkelon last night, Dror Damari took to Facebook to wish his friends a good week. Over the course of the next day, around a dozen people left condolence notes on the post, most wishing the newly paraplegic young man a healthy recovery, as he lay in the trauma ward of Ashkelon’s Barzilay Hospital. Damari, reportedly an associate of mobster Shalom Domrani, did not have a locked Facebook …

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Our violent shadows

It was mid-day in a quiet Petach Tikva neighborhood on June 27th, when a man hopped off a scooter next to a kindergarten, ran down the street and shot two men dead before racing back to the scooter and disappearing into the city. Underworld figure Eli Orkabi, 35, lay dead on the pavement next to local contractor Eran Fartush, 42, who it appears was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time – in this instance a quiet suburban neighborhood …

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The right to remain silent

After four years heading the police intelligence and investigations branch (“AHAM”), Maj Gen Yoav Segalovitz was the one being questioned Thursday, and it appeared he’d learned something from the countless suspects he’d interrogated over the years. Calmly evasive and quietly dismissive of questions, he was not a hostile witness, just a man showing an impressive ability to speak for 45 minutes without saying almost anything of substance. Towards the end of the press conference, one crime reporter from an Israeli paper …

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