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As reported in the Brooklyn Federal Prosecutor's Office for the Eastern District of New York, on April 20, 56-year-old Val Cooper (aka Val Konon and aka Valery Kononenko), 52-year-old Alex Levin and 49-year-old Harry Smith (aka Igor Burk and aka Igor Berkovich) were arrested there. For the smoothness of the narrative, I will call them by their native surnames in the future.
In the case file, there is evidence that Igor Berkovich, once in America, became Igor Burke in May 2015, and Harry Smith in April 2018. Similarly, Valery Kononenko became Val Konon in September 2006 and Val Cooper in November 2016. Only Levin remained Levin, obviously because in America it is a fairly common surname, take at least his current judge.
All three are charged with money laundering, which is understood, and " conspiracy to violate the Travel Act in connection with their roles in the fraudulent intent to steal more than $ 30 million in cash and other valuables from bank deposit boxes abroad, mainly in Eastern Europe." They face up to 20 years in prison for proven money laundering, and the same amount can be obtained for violating the Travel Law.
Let me explain that the International Travel Act, passed in 1961 under President Kennedy, considers it a federal crime "to use federal mail or travel between states and abroad for criminal purposes." What is the laundering of money obtained by criminal means, does not need to be explained. All three defendants are naturalized U.S. citizens born in the former Soviet Union – Kononenko and Berkovich in Ukraine, and Levin in Belarus. On the same day, those arrested were taken to Brooklyn Federal Court, where Magistrate Robert Levy introduced them via video link to the prosecution, which is represented in this case by Russian-speaking Assistant Federal Prosecutor Andrey Spektor, as well as his colleagues Keith Edelman and Joy Lurinsky. I suspected that she also had Russian-speaking roots, but after looking at the photo on the Internet, I realized that such a tan does not happen in the Caucasian, that is, the white race.
Alex Levin is represented in court by Albert Dayan, a Russian-speaking lawyer and native of Tashkent, who is widely known for his effective and aggressive defense of a wide range of Russian-speaking defendants: from Brooklyn mobster Alexey Tsvetkov, nicknamed "Pelmeni", to Bukharian Jewish jewelers from 47th Street in Manhattan, as well as the world-famous Russian Viktor Bout. After hearing arguments from the prosecution and defense, Judge Levy released Levin on a half-million-dollar bail. "Levin's actions in obtaining the items without knowing what they would be used for are not a crime," NBC News correspondent David Lee quoted the lawyer as saying, hastily calling Albert Dayan Nicholas.
43-year-old Tony Mirvis, lawyer of Valery Kononenko, was born in the United States in a family of immigrants from Odessa and graduated from the New York Law School in 2004. He also has enough Russian-speaking clients on his account, including the same "Pelmeni", which he defended against charges that are not related to banditry. Pending further clarification, Magistrate Judge Robert Levy left Kononenko in Brooklyn's MDC federal prison. Igor Berkovich, who became Smith, is being defended by Brooklyn lawyer Jeremy Yandolo, and the judge also remanded his client in custody, but this time in Manhattan's MCC federal prison.
Insisting on a measure of restraint in the form of detention, prosecutors Keith Edelman and Joy Lurinsky noted that Cooper-Kononenko has a mother and family living in Ukraine, and he and his wife own real estate there and in Russia. In addition, according to the data provided by the Ukrainian prosecutor's office, in 1968, 21-year-old Kononenko was tried for theft, and in 2001 he was charged with an unspecified crime, but the case did not go to court. It is known about Levin that in April 2000, in the same Brooklyn federal court, he pleaded guilty to stock fraud on the stock exchange and in February 2002 was sentenced to two years in prison. It was a large case totaling $ 100 million, and the defendants were mostly Italians connected to the Cosa Nostra mafia, and from the "nashi", in addition to Levin, there were Yakov Slavin, Ruslan Dzhikiya, Alexander Muchnik and Denis Yurovsky.
The case that Alex Levin is currently being tried in has generated a lot of media interest from day one. "Three Brooklyn men have been charged with $ 30 million in international bank robbery," Fox News reported, while CNN said it was "straight out of a Hollywood movie." In several news publications on the Web, the names "Modern bank robbers were taken away in Brooklyn" appeared, and all this in English, and in Russian-language publications and social networks you could find headlines with the words "Bear hunters of the XXI century". The same opinion was expressed by the head of the New York office of the FBI, William Sweeney. "The crime that we suggest in this indictment," Sweeney said in a press release from the prosecutor's office, " reads like Hollywood stories. The thieves used sophisticated tools to break into the security systems of foreign banks, and tried to cover their tracks by laundering money through US banks. However, thanks to the outstanding work of the Eurasian Organized Crime Division of our FBI and our international partners, the perpetrators are facing real charges and may face real terms in federal prison."
Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Mark Lesko, went a little further, saying that " the defendants and their accomplices were allegedly part of a sophisticated network of criminals who used high-tech cameras to steal millions in cash and other valuables from victims who tried to protect their property with safes in safe deposit boxes in foreign countries." and then laundered the proceeds of their scam through the United States financial system." Lesko, who worked as an assistant deputy attorney general before being appointed to the Brooklyn Prosecutor's Office, said his office will "hold accountable anyone who uses our financial system for fraud and theft here or abroad," and expressed gratitude to the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), as well as the governments of Azerbaijan and Latvia. Moldova, North Macedonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan for their assistance in the investigation.
What did Kononenko-Cooper, Berkovich-Smith and Levin do to deserve such an honor? The prosecution explains that they robbed the deposit boxes of depositors of the banks of the above-mentioned Eastern European countries using baroscopes. A baroscope, also known as an endoscope, is a popular and relatively inexpensive optical device that is used to monitor work in which the area of inspection is inaccessible by other means. Endoscopes are widely used in medicine, and baroscopes are often used for forensic examinations in law enforcement agencies, construction inspections to check floors, walls of buildings and structures, and the weapons industry to check the inner surface of the barrel of firearms. The defendants in this case have found another area of application for them. Buying a baroscope is no more difficult than a click of your fingers-the Amazon online store will offer you the widest range for an average of one hundred dollars and deliver it to your home for free.
Everything ingenious is simple, and the defendants with accomplices, who are usually called "known and unknown", chose a simpler bank, with a not very well-established security system, usually basement rooms with personal safes. They subscribed to such a safe, gaining access to the room, and went to their cell, during the use of which the bank employee left them in the room alone. Using this method, they used a baroscope to capture the lock cavities of other cells clearly enough to produce keys from the images, and on the next visit they emptied these cells. The prosecutor's office considers Valery Kononenko to be a "locomotive", that is, the leader of a criminal group who carried out general management, received stolen goods and laundered them through bank accounts controlled by him in the United States. Alex Levin allegedly purchased baroscopes and other equipment through his US bank accounts, as well as laundered stolen money. Igor Berkovich directly stole, flying to the designated bank from the United States for this purpose. When they were alone in the room, "the indictment says," they opened other boxes, filled their bags with stolen property... and left the bank through the main entrance." As evidence, photographs of fake keys, lock cavities, as well as members of the criminal group themselves "working" in banks are attached to the case.
Just as bank robbers replaced masks and automatic weapons with a computer, the "bear keepers", as they called the safe crackers, " switched from the fomka to the baroscope. At the dawn of the collective farm movement in the Soviet Union, it was called "equipment came to the fields", and, according to the prosecutor's office, from March 2015 to October 2019, "bear keepers of the XXI century" managed to steal money and valuables totaling more than $ 30 million from the personal safes of banks in five Eastern European and two Central Asian countries. Among the stolen valuables were our dollars, foreign currency, jewelry and gold bars. During a search on the day of Cooper-Kononenko's arrest, keys to bank deposit boxes without numbers, cash dollars, jewelry and expensive women's bags were found in his house. In the storage room that Kononeko rented in Brooklyn, they found a baroscope and a lock for a safe deposit box.
The indictment lists 9 staged episodes of a" hit-and-run "by Kononenko's group, if not a" gang", on the Riga Privatbank on January 15, 2018, when money and valuables totaling approximately $ 2 million were stolen from there. It all started on October 21, 2015, when Alex Levin bought special equipment with money from one of Kononenko's companies. On April 25, 216, he purchased additional equipment that was delivered from Ohio to Levin's home in Brooklyn. On July 11, 2017, Kononenko sent Levin a photo of the lock of a safe deposit box that is on sale. On December 31, 2017, Sostavnik-1 (CC1) used its credit card to buy Berkovich-Smith a ticket for a flight on January 1, 2018 from New York to Riga, and the next day, using the same credit card, paid for Igor Berkovich's accommodation in a Riga hotel. On January 4, 2018, Berkovich appeared at Privatbank (in the case – Latvian Bank) and opened and examined several deposit boxes with forged keys. On January 6, CC1 used his credit card to buy Cooper-Kononenko a flight ticket for January 12 from New York to Riga, and on January 15, 2018, Kononenko, who arrived there with other members of the criminal group, emptied the designated cells. On January 15, Berkovich met with other members of the group in a Riga hotel, where they shared the stolen goods, and on the same day he flew from Riga to Warsaw, from where he returned to the United States.
Interestingly, in March 2018 on the Latvian website kompromat.lv the article "The case of theft from safes in Privatbank: a police source reports on the detention of an employee of one of the banks"appeared. It was reported that the Latvian police officers managed to detain a citizen born in 1990, who was placed in the investigative building of the Ilgutsiems prison in Riga, without delay. "Hidden video surveillance was conducted behind the bank cells," the article reported, citing a source in the city's Criminal Investigation Department. - Privatbank provided a record that indicates the possible participation of the girl in the theft. This employee of one of the banks, who has no previous criminal record, is a foreigner, and therefore the court has arrested her." From this arrest, the "promotion" began, for which our FBI separately thanked its Latvian colleagues.
---
Last Wednesday, a federal court jury in Brooklyn, after a week of hearings led by Judge Lashann Dearsie Hall, convicted 55-year-old Alex Levin, who I believe lived on West 5th Street in Brooklyn's Gravesend neighborhood. He was arrested with two accomplices in April 2021, but since then a lot has happened in case No. 21-CR-208, and Levin went to court alone.
59-year-old Val Cooper (aka Val Konon, and aka Valery Kononenko) was released from the Cumberland federal prison in Maryland on March 2, 2022, and where 52-year-old Harry Smith (aka Igor Burke, and aka Igor Berkovich) lives in the Federal Bureau of Prisons are silent. Levin was accused of money laundering and violating the Federal Travel Act. Adopted in 1961, this law gave law enforcement officers an additional opportunity to fight organized crime, as it considered it a crime to move a person or business from one state to another for criminal purposes. This was relevant because the criminals lived in one state, and the cases were conducted in another, using immunity from federal charges. The verdict handed down by the jury threatens Levin with imprisonment for up to 10 years, and a sentencing date has not yet been set. Judge Hall, 53, was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2015.
In a press release, the Federal Prosecutor's Office for the Eastern District of New York noted that Levin's accomplices were "international", although all three are naturalized US citizens born in the former Soviet Union: Kononenko and Berkovich in Ukraine, and Levin in Belarus, and that his actions are connected with "embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars from personal cells."- safe deposit boxes of banks outside the United States, including Ukraine, Russia, North Macedonia, Moldova, Latvia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan." Three years ago, after the arrests of Levin, Cooper, and Smith, I called them the " bear hunters of the twenty-first century. Now Brion Peace, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a press release that, as the jury found, " Levin played an important role in a very sophisticated and well-organized international team of thieves who stole millions of dollars in cash and jewelry from banks in Eastern Europe. Levin's role in laundering money and acquiring tools to break into safe deposit boxes was crucial to the success of the entire team, but today's verdict showed that it was disastrous for the defendant himself." Ivan Arvello, head of the Department of Homeland Security's Investigative division, said that " the conviction of Alex Levin shows the collapse of a man who was at the center of an international criminal group that used technology and illegal methods to exploit the vulnerability of financial institutions around the world." Acting head of the FBI's New York office, Christy Curtis, added that " with the help of cameras that Levin purchased here in Brooklyn, his international accomplices stole from safes belonging to innocent bank customers around the world."
Explaining these high words, the prosecution claims that from May 2015 to October 2019, the trio robbed the deposit boxes of depositors of banks in the above-mentioned Eastern European countries using baroscopes. A baroscope, also known as an endoscope, is a popular and relatively inexpensive optical device that is used to monitor work in which the area of inspection is inaccessible by other means. Endoscopes are widely used in medicine, and borescopes are often used for forensic examinations in law enforcement agencies, in construction inspections to check floors, walls of buildings and structures, in the arms industry to check the internal barrel of firearms. The defendants in this case have found another area of application for them. It is easier to buy a borescope than a steamed turnip. Amazon offers you a wide range of products for an average of one hundred dollars and delivers them to your home for free. Having acquired such a tool that replaced the traditional crowbar, as a tractor replaced a plow, the "bear keepers of the XXI century" chose a simpler bank, with a not very well-established security system usually for basement rooms with personal safes.
They subscribed to such a safe, gaining access to the room, and went to their cell, during the use of which the bank employee left them in the room alone. Using a borescope, they took pictures of the lock cavities of other cells clearly enough to make keys from the pictures, and on the next visit they emptied these cells. "When they were alone in the room,"the indictment said," they opened other boxes, filled their bags with stolen property... and left the bank through the main entrance." The prosecutor's office considered Kononenko a "locomotive", that is, a leader of a criminal group who carried out general management, received stolen goods and laundered them through bank accounts controlled by him in the United States. Igor Berkovich directly stole, flying to the designated bank from the United States for this purpose. Alex Levin purchased borescopes and other equipment from his US bank accounts and laundered stolen money. During a series of thefts from Ukrainian banks, the British company Glenport Merchants, which was involved in this, transferred $ 150,000 to Levin in Brooklyn on July 31, 2015, with an account with an account in a Latvian bank, of which he transferred $ 144,727 to one of the participants in the thefts.
The prosecution specified that during the specified period, "bear thieves of the XXI century" managed to steal money and valuables totaling more than $ 30 million from the personal safes of banks in five Eastern European and two Central Asian countries. Among the stolen valuables were our dollars, foreign currency, jewelry and gold bars. During a search on the day of Cooper-Kononenko's arrest, keys to bank deposit boxes without numbers, cash dollars, jewelry and expensive women's bags were found in his house. In the storage room that Kononeko rented in Brooklyn, they found a borescope and a lock for a safe deposit box. As evidence to the case No. 21-CR-208 attached pictures of fake keys, lock cavities and the participants of the attack group for "work" in banks.
The indictment lists 9 episodes of Kononenko's team "hitting" the Riga Privatbank on January 15, 2018, when money and valuables totaling approximately $ 2 million were stolen from there. It all started on October 21, 2015, when Alex Levin bought special equipment with money from one of Kononenko's companies. On April 25, 216, he purchased additional equipment that was delivered from Ohio to Levin's home in Brooklyn. On July 11, 2017, Kononenko sent Levin a photo of the lock of a safe deposit box that is on sale. On December 31, 2017, Sostavnik-1 (CC1) used its credit card to buy Berkovich-Smith a ticket for a flight on January 1, 2018 from New York to Riga, and the next day, using the same credit card, paid for Igor Berkovich's accommodation in a Riga hotel. On January 4, 2018, Berkovich came to Privatbank (in the case of "Latvian Bank") and opened and examined several deposit boxes with forged keys. On January 6, CC1 used his credit card to buy Cooper-Kononenko a flight ticket for January 12 from New York to Riga, and on January 15, 2018, Kononenko and other members of the criminal group who arrived there emptied the designated cells. On January 15, Berkovich met with other members of the group in a Riga hotel, where they shared the stolen goods, and on the same day he flew from Riga to Warsaw, from where he returned to the United States.
It was a backstory story. In March 2018 on the Latvian website kompromat.lv the article "The case of theft from safes in Privatbank: a police source reports on the detention of an employee of one of the banks"appeared. It was reported that the Latvian police officers managed to detain a citizen born in 1990, who was placed in the investigative building of the Ilgutsiems prison in Riga, without delay. "Hidden video surveillance was conducted behind the bank cells," the article reported, citing a source in the city's Criminal Investigation Department. - Privatbank provided a record that indicates the possible participation of the girl in the theft. This previously unsubmitted employee of one of the banks is a foreigner, and therefore the court imposed an arrest on her." From this arrest, the "promotion" began, for which our FBI separately thanked its Latvian colleagues. On the day Levin, Kononenko, and Berkovich were arrested in April 2021, the then head of the FBI's New York office, William Sweeney, said in a press release from the prosecutor's office that "the crime that we assume in this charge reads as if straight out of Hollywood history. The thieves used sophisticated tools to break into the security systems of foreign banks and tried to cover their tracks by laundering money through US banks. However, thanks to the outstanding work of the Eurasian Organized Crime Division of our FBI and our international partners, criminals are facing real charges and may face real terms in federal prison." So it happened, although the "real consequences" were not so terrible.
In court, Alex Levin was represented by Albert Dayan, a Russian-speaking lawyer and native of Tashkent, who is widely known for his effective and aggressive defense of a wide range of Russian-speaking defendants, from Brooklyn mobster Alexey Tsvetkov, nicknamed "Pelmeni", to Bukharian Jewish jewelers from 47th Street in Manhattan and world-famous Russian Viktor Bout, who, after 14 out of 25 years, was killed in the Our basketball player Britney Griner, who served 9 months out of 9 years in Moscow for a sniff of cannabis, was exchanged for imprisonment in Sloboda for aiding terrorism. After hearing the arguments of the prosecution and defense in April 2021, his namesake magistrate Judge Robert Levy released Levin on bail of half a million dollars.
In the case file, there is evidence that Igor Berkovich, once in America, became Igor Burke in May 2015, and Harry Smith in April 2018. Similarly, Valery Kononenko became Val Konon in September 2006 and Val Cooper in November 2016. Only Levin remained Levin, obviously because in America it is a fairly common surname, take at least his current judge.
All three are charged with money laundering, which is understood, and " conspiracy to violate the Travel Act in connection with their roles in the fraudulent intent to steal more than $ 30 million in cash and other valuables from bank deposit boxes abroad, mainly in Eastern Europe." They face up to 20 years in prison for proven money laundering, and the same amount can be obtained for violating the Travel Law.
Let me explain that the International Travel Act, passed in 1961 under President Kennedy, considers it a federal crime "to use federal mail or travel between states and abroad for criminal purposes." What is the laundering of money obtained by criminal means, does not need to be explained. All three defendants are naturalized U.S. citizens born in the former Soviet Union – Kononenko and Berkovich in Ukraine, and Levin in Belarus. On the same day, those arrested were taken to Brooklyn Federal Court, where Magistrate Robert Levy introduced them via video link to the prosecution, which is represented in this case by Russian-speaking Assistant Federal Prosecutor Andrey Spektor, as well as his colleagues Keith Edelman and Joy Lurinsky. I suspected that she also had Russian-speaking roots, but after looking at the photo on the Internet, I realized that such a tan does not happen in the Caucasian, that is, the white race.
Alex Levin is represented in court by Albert Dayan, a Russian-speaking lawyer and native of Tashkent, who is widely known for his effective and aggressive defense of a wide range of Russian-speaking defendants: from Brooklyn mobster Alexey Tsvetkov, nicknamed "Pelmeni", to Bukharian Jewish jewelers from 47th Street in Manhattan, as well as the world-famous Russian Viktor Bout. After hearing arguments from the prosecution and defense, Judge Levy released Levin on a half-million-dollar bail. "Levin's actions in obtaining the items without knowing what they would be used for are not a crime," NBC News correspondent David Lee quoted the lawyer as saying, hastily calling Albert Dayan Nicholas.
43-year-old Tony Mirvis, lawyer of Valery Kononenko, was born in the United States in a family of immigrants from Odessa and graduated from the New York Law School in 2004. He also has enough Russian-speaking clients on his account, including the same "Pelmeni", which he defended against charges that are not related to banditry. Pending further clarification, Magistrate Judge Robert Levy left Kononenko in Brooklyn's MDC federal prison. Igor Berkovich, who became Smith, is being defended by Brooklyn lawyer Jeremy Yandolo, and the judge also remanded his client in custody, but this time in Manhattan's MCC federal prison.
Insisting on a measure of restraint in the form of detention, prosecutors Keith Edelman and Joy Lurinsky noted that Cooper-Kononenko has a mother and family living in Ukraine, and he and his wife own real estate there and in Russia. In addition, according to the data provided by the Ukrainian prosecutor's office, in 1968, 21-year-old Kononenko was tried for theft, and in 2001 he was charged with an unspecified crime, but the case did not go to court. It is known about Levin that in April 2000, in the same Brooklyn federal court, he pleaded guilty to stock fraud on the stock exchange and in February 2002 was sentenced to two years in prison. It was a large case totaling $ 100 million, and the defendants were mostly Italians connected to the Cosa Nostra mafia, and from the "nashi", in addition to Levin, there were Yakov Slavin, Ruslan Dzhikiya, Alexander Muchnik and Denis Yurovsky.
The case that Alex Levin is currently being tried in has generated a lot of media interest from day one. "Three Brooklyn men have been charged with $ 30 million in international bank robbery," Fox News reported, while CNN said it was "straight out of a Hollywood movie." In several news publications on the Web, the names "Modern bank robbers were taken away in Brooklyn" appeared, and all this in English, and in Russian-language publications and social networks you could find headlines with the words "Bear hunters of the XXI century". The same opinion was expressed by the head of the New York office of the FBI, William Sweeney. "The crime that we suggest in this indictment," Sweeney said in a press release from the prosecutor's office, " reads like Hollywood stories. The thieves used sophisticated tools to break into the security systems of foreign banks, and tried to cover their tracks by laundering money through US banks. However, thanks to the outstanding work of the Eurasian Organized Crime Division of our FBI and our international partners, the perpetrators are facing real charges and may face real terms in federal prison."
Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Mark Lesko, went a little further, saying that " the defendants and their accomplices were allegedly part of a sophisticated network of criminals who used high-tech cameras to steal millions in cash and other valuables from victims who tried to protect their property with safes in safe deposit boxes in foreign countries." and then laundered the proceeds of their scam through the United States financial system." Lesko, who worked as an assistant deputy attorney general before being appointed to the Brooklyn Prosecutor's Office, said his office will "hold accountable anyone who uses our financial system for fraud and theft here or abroad," and expressed gratitude to the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), as well as the governments of Azerbaijan and Latvia. Moldova, North Macedonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan for their assistance in the investigation.
What did Kononenko-Cooper, Berkovich-Smith and Levin do to deserve such an honor? The prosecution explains that they robbed the deposit boxes of depositors of the banks of the above-mentioned Eastern European countries using baroscopes. A baroscope, also known as an endoscope, is a popular and relatively inexpensive optical device that is used to monitor work in which the area of inspection is inaccessible by other means. Endoscopes are widely used in medicine, and baroscopes are often used for forensic examinations in law enforcement agencies, construction inspections to check floors, walls of buildings and structures, and the weapons industry to check the inner surface of the barrel of firearms. The defendants in this case have found another area of application for them. Buying a baroscope is no more difficult than a click of your fingers-the Amazon online store will offer you the widest range for an average of one hundred dollars and deliver it to your home for free.
Everything ingenious is simple, and the defendants with accomplices, who are usually called "known and unknown", chose a simpler bank, with a not very well-established security system, usually basement rooms with personal safes. They subscribed to such a safe, gaining access to the room, and went to their cell, during the use of which the bank employee left them in the room alone. Using this method, they used a baroscope to capture the lock cavities of other cells clearly enough to produce keys from the images, and on the next visit they emptied these cells. The prosecutor's office considers Valery Kononenko to be a "locomotive", that is, the leader of a criminal group who carried out general management, received stolen goods and laundered them through bank accounts controlled by him in the United States. Alex Levin allegedly purchased baroscopes and other equipment through his US bank accounts, as well as laundered stolen money. Igor Berkovich directly stole, flying to the designated bank from the United States for this purpose. When they were alone in the room, "the indictment says," they opened other boxes, filled their bags with stolen property... and left the bank through the main entrance." As evidence, photographs of fake keys, lock cavities, as well as members of the criminal group themselves "working" in banks are attached to the case.
Just as bank robbers replaced masks and automatic weapons with a computer, the "bear keepers", as they called the safe crackers, " switched from the fomka to the baroscope. At the dawn of the collective farm movement in the Soviet Union, it was called "equipment came to the fields", and, according to the prosecutor's office, from March 2015 to October 2019, "bear keepers of the XXI century" managed to steal money and valuables totaling more than $ 30 million from the personal safes of banks in five Eastern European and two Central Asian countries. Among the stolen valuables were our dollars, foreign currency, jewelry and gold bars. During a search on the day of Cooper-Kononenko's arrest, keys to bank deposit boxes without numbers, cash dollars, jewelry and expensive women's bags were found in his house. In the storage room that Kononeko rented in Brooklyn, they found a baroscope and a lock for a safe deposit box.
The indictment lists 9 staged episodes of a" hit-and-run "by Kononenko's group, if not a" gang", on the Riga Privatbank on January 15, 2018, when money and valuables totaling approximately $ 2 million were stolen from there. It all started on October 21, 2015, when Alex Levin bought special equipment with money from one of Kononenko's companies. On April 25, 216, he purchased additional equipment that was delivered from Ohio to Levin's home in Brooklyn. On July 11, 2017, Kononenko sent Levin a photo of the lock of a safe deposit box that is on sale. On December 31, 2017, Sostavnik-1 (CC1) used its credit card to buy Berkovich-Smith a ticket for a flight on January 1, 2018 from New York to Riga, and the next day, using the same credit card, paid for Igor Berkovich's accommodation in a Riga hotel. On January 4, 2018, Berkovich appeared at Privatbank (in the case – Latvian Bank) and opened and examined several deposit boxes with forged keys. On January 6, CC1 used his credit card to buy Cooper-Kononenko a flight ticket for January 12 from New York to Riga, and on January 15, 2018, Kononenko, who arrived there with other members of the criminal group, emptied the designated cells. On January 15, Berkovich met with other members of the group in a Riga hotel, where they shared the stolen goods, and on the same day he flew from Riga to Warsaw, from where he returned to the United States.
Interestingly, in March 2018 on the Latvian website kompromat.lv the article "The case of theft from safes in Privatbank: a police source reports on the detention of an employee of one of the banks"appeared. It was reported that the Latvian police officers managed to detain a citizen born in 1990, who was placed in the investigative building of the Ilgutsiems prison in Riga, without delay. "Hidden video surveillance was conducted behind the bank cells," the article reported, citing a source in the city's Criminal Investigation Department. - Privatbank provided a record that indicates the possible participation of the girl in the theft. This employee of one of the banks, who has no previous criminal record, is a foreigner, and therefore the court has arrested her." From this arrest, the "promotion" began, for which our FBI separately thanked its Latvian colleagues.
---
Last Wednesday, a federal court jury in Brooklyn, after a week of hearings led by Judge Lashann Dearsie Hall, convicted 55-year-old Alex Levin, who I believe lived on West 5th Street in Brooklyn's Gravesend neighborhood. He was arrested with two accomplices in April 2021, but since then a lot has happened in case No. 21-CR-208, and Levin went to court alone.
59-year-old Val Cooper (aka Val Konon, and aka Valery Kononenko) was released from the Cumberland federal prison in Maryland on March 2, 2022, and where 52-year-old Harry Smith (aka Igor Burke, and aka Igor Berkovich) lives in the Federal Bureau of Prisons are silent. Levin was accused of money laundering and violating the Federal Travel Act. Adopted in 1961, this law gave law enforcement officers an additional opportunity to fight organized crime, as it considered it a crime to move a person or business from one state to another for criminal purposes. This was relevant because the criminals lived in one state, and the cases were conducted in another, using immunity from federal charges. The verdict handed down by the jury threatens Levin with imprisonment for up to 10 years, and a sentencing date has not yet been set. Judge Hall, 53, was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2015.
In a press release, the Federal Prosecutor's Office for the Eastern District of New York noted that Levin's accomplices were "international", although all three are naturalized US citizens born in the former Soviet Union: Kononenko and Berkovich in Ukraine, and Levin in Belarus, and that his actions are connected with "embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars from personal cells."- safe deposit boxes of banks outside the United States, including Ukraine, Russia, North Macedonia, Moldova, Latvia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan." Three years ago, after the arrests of Levin, Cooper, and Smith, I called them the " bear hunters of the twenty-first century. Now Brion Peace, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a press release that, as the jury found, " Levin played an important role in a very sophisticated and well-organized international team of thieves who stole millions of dollars in cash and jewelry from banks in Eastern Europe. Levin's role in laundering money and acquiring tools to break into safe deposit boxes was crucial to the success of the entire team, but today's verdict showed that it was disastrous for the defendant himself." Ivan Arvello, head of the Department of Homeland Security's Investigative division, said that " the conviction of Alex Levin shows the collapse of a man who was at the center of an international criminal group that used technology and illegal methods to exploit the vulnerability of financial institutions around the world." Acting head of the FBI's New York office, Christy Curtis, added that " with the help of cameras that Levin purchased here in Brooklyn, his international accomplices stole from safes belonging to innocent bank customers around the world."
Explaining these high words, the prosecution claims that from May 2015 to October 2019, the trio robbed the deposit boxes of depositors of banks in the above-mentioned Eastern European countries using baroscopes. A baroscope, also known as an endoscope, is a popular and relatively inexpensive optical device that is used to monitor work in which the area of inspection is inaccessible by other means. Endoscopes are widely used in medicine, and borescopes are often used for forensic examinations in law enforcement agencies, in construction inspections to check floors, walls of buildings and structures, in the arms industry to check the internal barrel of firearms. The defendants in this case have found another area of application for them. It is easier to buy a borescope than a steamed turnip. Amazon offers you a wide range of products for an average of one hundred dollars and delivers them to your home for free. Having acquired such a tool that replaced the traditional crowbar, as a tractor replaced a plow, the "bear keepers of the XXI century" chose a simpler bank, with a not very well-established security system usually for basement rooms with personal safes.
They subscribed to such a safe, gaining access to the room, and went to their cell, during the use of which the bank employee left them in the room alone. Using a borescope, they took pictures of the lock cavities of other cells clearly enough to make keys from the pictures, and on the next visit they emptied these cells. "When they were alone in the room,"the indictment said," they opened other boxes, filled their bags with stolen property... and left the bank through the main entrance." The prosecutor's office considered Kononenko a "locomotive", that is, a leader of a criminal group who carried out general management, received stolen goods and laundered them through bank accounts controlled by him in the United States. Igor Berkovich directly stole, flying to the designated bank from the United States for this purpose. Alex Levin purchased borescopes and other equipment from his US bank accounts and laundered stolen money. During a series of thefts from Ukrainian banks, the British company Glenport Merchants, which was involved in this, transferred $ 150,000 to Levin in Brooklyn on July 31, 2015, with an account with an account in a Latvian bank, of which he transferred $ 144,727 to one of the participants in the thefts.
The prosecution specified that during the specified period, "bear thieves of the XXI century" managed to steal money and valuables totaling more than $ 30 million from the personal safes of banks in five Eastern European and two Central Asian countries. Among the stolen valuables were our dollars, foreign currency, jewelry and gold bars. During a search on the day of Cooper-Kononenko's arrest, keys to bank deposit boxes without numbers, cash dollars, jewelry and expensive women's bags were found in his house. In the storage room that Kononeko rented in Brooklyn, they found a borescope and a lock for a safe deposit box. As evidence to the case No. 21-CR-208 attached pictures of fake keys, lock cavities and the participants of the attack group for "work" in banks.
The indictment lists 9 episodes of Kononenko's team "hitting" the Riga Privatbank on January 15, 2018, when money and valuables totaling approximately $ 2 million were stolen from there. It all started on October 21, 2015, when Alex Levin bought special equipment with money from one of Kononenko's companies. On April 25, 216, he purchased additional equipment that was delivered from Ohio to Levin's home in Brooklyn. On July 11, 2017, Kononenko sent Levin a photo of the lock of a safe deposit box that is on sale. On December 31, 2017, Sostavnik-1 (CC1) used its credit card to buy Berkovich-Smith a ticket for a flight on January 1, 2018 from New York to Riga, and the next day, using the same credit card, paid for Igor Berkovich's accommodation in a Riga hotel. On January 4, 2018, Berkovich came to Privatbank (in the case of "Latvian Bank") and opened and examined several deposit boxes with forged keys. On January 6, CC1 used his credit card to buy Cooper-Kononenko a flight ticket for January 12 from New York to Riga, and on January 15, 2018, Kononenko and other members of the criminal group who arrived there emptied the designated cells. On January 15, Berkovich met with other members of the group in a Riga hotel, where they shared the stolen goods, and on the same day he flew from Riga to Warsaw, from where he returned to the United States.
It was a backstory story. In March 2018 on the Latvian website kompromat.lv the article "The case of theft from safes in Privatbank: a police source reports on the detention of an employee of one of the banks"appeared. It was reported that the Latvian police officers managed to detain a citizen born in 1990, who was placed in the investigative building of the Ilgutsiems prison in Riga, without delay. "Hidden video surveillance was conducted behind the bank cells," the article reported, citing a source in the city's Criminal Investigation Department. - Privatbank provided a record that indicates the possible participation of the girl in the theft. This previously unsubmitted employee of one of the banks is a foreigner, and therefore the court imposed an arrest on her." From this arrest, the "promotion" began, for which our FBI separately thanked its Latvian colleagues. On the day Levin, Kononenko, and Berkovich were arrested in April 2021, the then head of the FBI's New York office, William Sweeney, said in a press release from the prosecutor's office that "the crime that we assume in this charge reads as if straight out of Hollywood history. The thieves used sophisticated tools to break into the security systems of foreign banks and tried to cover their tracks by laundering money through US banks. However, thanks to the outstanding work of the Eurasian Organized Crime Division of our FBI and our international partners, criminals are facing real charges and may face real terms in federal prison." So it happened, although the "real consequences" were not so terrible.
In court, Alex Levin was represented by Albert Dayan, a Russian-speaking lawyer and native of Tashkent, who is widely known for his effective and aggressive defense of a wide range of Russian-speaking defendants, from Brooklyn mobster Alexey Tsvetkov, nicknamed "Pelmeni", to Bukharian Jewish jewelers from 47th Street in Manhattan and world-famous Russian Viktor Bout, who, after 14 out of 25 years, was killed in the Our basketball player Britney Griner, who served 9 months out of 9 years in Moscow for a sniff of cannabis, was exchanged for imprisonment in Sloboda for aiding terrorism. After hearing the arguments of the prosecution and defense in April 2021, his namesake magistrate Judge Robert Levy released Levin on bail of half a million dollars.
