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This post is brought to you by ABC's new drama Red Widow:
Brooklyn has one of the biggest Russian populations outside of Russia, and most of it is situated in the neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay. The area—known as either Little Odessa (because of the Ukrainian immigrants) or Little Russia—has been considered the center for Russian organized crime in America. Here are some notable places mentioned in various exposes and reports:
Rasputin Supper Club
RASPUTIN: The decadently decorated supper club and cabaret is on Coney Island Avenue. In 1994, then-Governor Mario Cuomo's reelection campaign was planning a huge black-tie fundraiser at Rasputin. New York magazine revealed, "…on the Friday before the Monday event, the Cuomo campaign pulled the plug. Officially, they said, there was a scheduling conflict. Discreetly and unofficially, federal investigators had warned the Cuomo campaign that Rasputin was a bastion of the Organizatsiya, the Russian Mafia."
ODESSA RESTAURANT (R.I.P.): The now-closed Brighton Beach Avenue restaurant once catered to the immigrant community (the website is still up) but it was once the scene of a notorious mob hit. Gangster Vladimir Reznikov had put a gun to the head of Marat Balagula at Balagula's club Odessa, over $600,000 that Reznikov felt he was owed. Balagula, a Russian Jew who worked with the Lucchese crime family, promised to give him the money, but then suffered a heart attack, prompting a Lucchese underboss to arrange to meet Reznikov at Odessa, where he'd give him the money. When Reznikov left Odessa, he was shot six times by a shooter in a car.
NATIONAL: Balagula didn't want director Paul Mazursky to film scenes for Moscow on the Hudson at Odessa, so the film shot at National, a restaurant and club, instead. The book Red Mafiya called it a "rival mob hangout" to Odessa. More recently, it was featured in an episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, where his dining companion calls it "1979 frozen in amber."
RUSSIAN SAMOVAR: The Midtown West restaurant and piano bar is part owned by Mikhail Baryshnikov, which might be why it was featured in an episode of Sex and the City. The upscale destination is popular with Russian nationals and non-Russians alike—it boasts flavored vodkas, borscht, smoked fish and many other staples. But it's also apparently a mob hangout—it was named in a FBI affidavit as the locale of shakedowns.
PORT NEWARK: Perhaps you're engaging in a crazy vodka smuggling scheme. For instance, one gangster confided to CBS News that they were smuggling huge amounts of vodka out of a port in Newark, New Jersey and worked out an ingenious way to avoid paying taxes on it: "They would dye it blue. They would label it windshield washer fluid, ship it to Russia, un-dye it, and then sell it as vodka."
