Free Every Man a Menace by Patrick Hoffman Page A

powerful.
    After the first few years, Semion didn’t even have to stand on the street anymore; he could sit back and manage the men. But one summer—a particularly hot one in his memory—Semion got into a conflict over territory with a Russian gangster named Abram Gorin. Semion’s group had gone through a series of small expansions, adding a few men to their street crew along the way, and spread two blocks west to Sderot Har Tsiyon. This area turned out to be one that Gorin thought of as his own.
    The Gorin gang operated on a different level: they were international. They had a reputation. One night, after Semion had drunk too many beers in a bar on Rosh Pina, a handsome-looking Russian man—bald, with bright blue eyes—stepped in front of him on the street and grabbed him by the shoulders. It was a friendly gesture, like an uncle measuring a nephew. Speaking Russian, the man said that Mr. Abram Gorin wanted Semion to know he was no longer allowed to sell heroin in Neve Sha’anan. He looked Semion in the eyes. “Do you hear me?” he asked. Semion didn’t speak Russian perfectly, but he understood this, and, unable to do anything else, he nodded his head.
    The next morning, when he woke, Semion felt equal measures of guilt and fear. What had happened? It was as if he’d been told he had cancer: one day he was healthy, the next he was not. Still, a depressed kind of disbelief kept him from telling his men to stop dealing. Six days later, his friend Schmuel Teper—a funny, chubby man—was pushed in front of a moving bus. Schmuel survived, but he would never walk again.
    A week after that, the same Russian man approached Semion outside his home. It was early in the day, but the sun had already heated the dusty streets. The man wasn’t rude to him; he simply smiled and scanned the area with his eyes, and then, having satisfied himself that they were alone, beckoned Semion toward him with two fingers. When Semion stepped closer he told him that he had to leave Israel. He made the visit feel like a favor. When Semion managed to nod the man slapped him on the back and walked away.
    The next day, Semion called his group together. He invited them all to his apartment—a rare occurrence—and explained that they had to take some time off. Abram Gorin himself had insisted on it, he said. “We take a break,” he said. “Lay low. See how it shakes out.” He expected the men to resist, to call for war, but nobody did. Nobody argued. Three months later, Semion moved to Miami.
    A few of his friends from the army—Russian Israelis, like himself—had been living there, and they helped him find an apartment in South Beach, in a tower overlooking Biscayne Bay. He didn’t bring much—a bag filled with clothes, a computer, a razor, his toothbrush. He had a good amount of money saved.
    One of his friends in Miami was Isaak Raskin. Isaak, a short man with the kind of strong jaw and dimpled chin normally associated with Hollywood actors, was preparing to open a nightclub called Ground Zero; Semion invested cash in it. The club did well, and over the next four years they opened three more. For a time it seemed like Semion might leave the drug trade behind. But eventually Isaak, who had connections in the shipping business, began talking to him about setting something up.
    They would do things differently he insisted. No selling on corners to Arabs and Africans. No heroin. No rival gangs. They were going to be middlemen, and they would focus their attention on a benign corner of the market: ecstasy.
    “Listen to me,” Semion said to Isaak, arranging his words like a drunken professor. “If we’re going to do this, we have to stay small. You get too big you attract the wrong type ofattention. Trust me. I know this. We stay small; we make good money. But we stay small.”
    Isaak, for his part, simply frowned and nodded, as though he couldn’t have agreed more.
    A man named David Eban, another friend of Semion’s from Israel,