SCENE THREE (3)

A Tavern on the Lower East Side

шутки плохи

Pronunciation: SHUTki PLOhee

Literal translation: jokes are bad (with someone or something)

Meaning: not joking; not to be messed with

“JOKES ARE BAD”

The dry run was on December 21^st, 2012 and main main event took place two months later on February 19^{th, 2013}. It was actually the world’s most impressive recorded bank heist to that date, but the culprits never even used guns or masks, never threatened anyone or even ever set foot inside a single bank vault. In two massive precision operations that mobilized hundreds of cells in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with near surgical precision, thieves in law stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.’s in a matter of hours. In Newyorkgrad alone, the Dominikany clean out crews responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million. But, $45 million dollars really isn’t that much money, so for something that big to have happened with such widespread international collaboration, well something else must have been going on.

The world and the social media didn’t see it because they were not paying attention to any of the right things. All the money stolen was not even real money, it was all insured. But the unlimited operation job did have an objective much larger than the heist of course.

      In Gregorian calendar year 1999, because of technical glitch in computerized monetary systems sensationally depicted on proletarian media as Y2K, many system analysts were worried then about a system wide failure of the internet. Electronic military defense complex systems more specifically were to experience temporary shut down on New Year’s Eve’ December 31st, 1999 leaving anyone and everyone wide open. In order to protect critical defense and money changing infrastructure, major digitized commerce, and all sorts of civilian surveillance databases; governments and major corporations had begun scrambling to back up data on fixed servers. Secure from the effects of this Y2K glitch which many big brained computer engineers believed would wipe out digital control of commerce via internet and for a brief movement allow any country with nuclear missiles first strike capability on the New Year. Enter the ‘Perchevney Bratva’.

‘The Big Job’ took ten years to orchestrate. Planned in its grandiose entirety in a Bulgarian tavern on Lower East Side of the Isle of Man, the central most affluent borough of Newyorkgrad. A little tucked away place the called the ‘Mehanata Social Club’. The man who planned the greatest theft in history was a Bulgarian dentist named Alexander Dmitrievich Perchevney, called “Sasho” by his closest confederates. In Slavic countries ‘Sasha’ is a nickname for ‘Alex’. Sasho and his wife Tanya were enthusiastic co-equal villains. At time of the plot, their human resources really just consisted of newly immigrated Alexander Perchevney and his scheming, but quiet brother strong man Slavi, a Krepki Mushik and serious tough guy. Along with his wife Tanya Magda and also three shady grinning characters named “James White”, “James Brown”, and “Justin Toomey O’Azzello” who all worked part time at “Bulgarian Cultural Center” on Canal and Broadway established in 1998. At first it was a cultural front for a “cash for marriage agency”, an extralegal dental coverage program, and also planning center for a highly lucrative racket called “no-fault-insurance”. Also a highly premium place to drink underage and dance naked, do cocaine; no questions asked. 

You had to have at least two teeth, a sign said. On the same wall was another sign, “Get naked get a shot, fuck on the bar, get a bottle.”

       Sasho and Slavi, alongside several hundred thousand of the newly admitted “Soviet Ivory” began immigration to Breuklyn immediately after the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and United States of America “defensively” began the total pillage of former Soviet Union in a Post-Cold War victory orgy of expropriation , naked theft and non-stop ultra-violence. They arrived on the coast of ‘Fun City Breuklyn’ with advanced degrees, speaking multiple languages, and instilled with a profound skill in extralegal entrepreneurship; cultivated in a Communist society where graft and bribes were way of life. When informed by Amerikansky immigration officers that these degrees not worth the paper they were printed on, well perhaps this is how it all began. In former Soviet Union, Alexander Perchevney was a dentist, which there was really more like doctor specializing in dentistry. His wife, Tanya was ‘an engineer’. That really could mean almost anything in former Soviet Union where almost everyone was some kind of ‘engineer’. But specifically, Tanya was computer engineer. Designing early algorithms for demographic counting, for deportations and for fuel prices, for self automated missile systems. Slavi, well Slavi was good with various machines and breaking man’s faces also with fists. This was a now non-existent empire where 53% of the population had a bachelors degree of higher education level. Alexander, Tanya, Slavi and infant progeny of Tanya and Alex, their four year old daughter Yelizaveta all moved from Brighton coastal ghetto to the higher ground of Williamsburg shortly after their arrival in the cold dark winter of 1991.

      It did not take Alex and Tanya long to realize that not only would they be treated like fourth class citizens of vanquished enemy nation, but that as immigrants their own people would arrive not just with advanced degrees and “dubious moral code”, but accompanied by violent thieves and Voorhees with links to privatization under way transforming the K.G.B., into a large and ruthless transcontinental  mafia, or in Russian parlance’ a Bratva’.

It was shortly after his first brutal run in with a New Russian Voorhi seeking an overtly grand percentage slice for protection of black market dentistry clinic run out of Alex’s basement in Brighton, that Alex realized that one; his daughter would be raised outside the clutches of the new Russian ghetto, so called Little Odessa of Brighton. Second, to operate anything lucrative in this new soft country he’d need the help of the natives at least a few.

     Alex embraced a latent never practiced Orthodox Ivoryism and made friends with some ambitious Fenian tough guys, he got some cops on his payroll. This was how Alex met first met young Misha Kishbivalli. A young Bulgarian pretend Ivory like himself though much wealthier having gotten to America three years earlier and begun actively trafficking in uncut conflict diamonds traffic out of the failed state called Liberia. Over a round of Astika beers Misha and Alexander envisioned an establishment “where criminality and philanthropy, stealing and borrowing, culture and crime could all intertwine, voluptuously and thus ‘the Mehanata Social Club’ was born. By Winter of 1998 Alex and Slavi had rented out second floor loft space on the corner of Canal and Broadway and registered it as “Bulgarian Cultural Center”. Despite having no liquor license or paying any taxes to internal revenue service Alex hired a large menagerie of former Soviet women to work as “cultural hostesses”, and bartenders and “cultural attaches”. Also to dance the mother fucking go-go. Underground lap dance parties, the girl friend experience, whip its before they all went mainstream. Easy to make coke. Easy to import cigarettes in contain ships from their Albanian suppliers.

In the entire sixteen year run of Mehanata at its Canal Street location much was exchanged, culturally and financially. The enterprise itself was a careful gamble that under guise of “multiculturalism and diversity”, just about anything could follow. Keep everyone dancing in big fucking circle! Keep everyone entertained.

Alexander used the Russian language internet to recruit a wide range of medical professionals of former Soviet extraction to offer black market health care to other new arrivals, and long stayed arrivals without paper work. Next, Misha and Alex worked out a technicality called “no fault” where by accidents could be staged arranged all over Breuklyn and insurance companies could be divested of millions upon millions. They reached out directly to the Jamaican mob to help them. Later and alongside all of that they began importing cigarettes in container ships through the Albanians. They were recruiting a veritable Gypsy underground army all fueled by self interest, the music of Balkans, New York’s sanctuary city status, as well as home brewed Vodka-apple cider and Astika beer. They would forge an awkward ethnic alliance under the initial auspices of drinking, dining and dancing. They would rely on heavily the Post Soviet talent pool, particularly the warlike Albanians. They would set up the necessary conditions to achieve oligarch status in the Americas. The greatest expropriation was yet to come.

The $45 million job take was just the starting ante. A smallish bullshit score really. A sort of right of passage operationally, but Sasho Perecheveney wasn’t after “petty cash”. He was after premium antiquities! He was was after really old scrolls covered in logarithmic math codes and anyone he could hire from that very ancient tribe that survived just about everything world history had thrown at them. The Egypt Job, the First Temple destruction and the Babylonian exile, the Esther Job, the Maccabean Revolt, the Second Temple destruction, and the Roman Wars,  the Crusades 1 through 9, “the Spanish Inquisition” and “the purge in Germany”, the Arab Wars, the recent destruction of the Third Commonwealth. And of course they also then knew exactly where the latest New Jerusalem was really hidden. Deep under the sands of some desert? In a submarine under the sea? Thinly hidden in some mountain fort or on some island protected by natives with spears?

Sasho was in the end, after the key codes. After the activation rites to entire Systema Ziggurat. An ancient method of of human organization and tribute linked to deliberately forgotten Gods and perpetual masters. As far as he was aware only the Ivory had been there when the first one was built way back when in Ur. The very first Earth Man City, where the very first Ziggurat had been built up. Sasho needed to borrow trade craft to get in. To get up into the highest towers of the control room. Pull levers and press the buttons. Read the silver wrapped scrolls in the very first language. Thus, with the right circles, one could interpret the Gamatria codes, grok the protocols and drink the very recipes needed to live for ever and ever. But really, after the second great holocaust, the hidden Shoah of the Cold War Times, not that many of the real Ivory were even left to bribe, barter, interrogate, intermarry with or mobilize with the pussy. So he would have to find them. Find the very last hiding ones. His daughters could be compelled to help. There were not very many real Ivory left anymore, actually. You can’t appeal to their pockets. Their ego is also generally intact. If you can’t appeal to their big Jew puzzle loving brains, you can generally appeal to their circumcised dicks. As with virtually all men. “So don’t send a man to do a woman’s job,” claims Sasho, “an Old Bulgarian saying.”