(This article covering the life and times of Israel’s most notorious gangster was first published in the Tel Aviv Review of Books.)
In a Tel Aviv courtroom last December, the most sophisticated and ruthless underworld boss in Israel’s history set out to tell his life story, meandering between his years as a teenage drug trafficker and murderer to how books inspired a prison “rehabilitation” that never quite happened.
The gangster at the center of the biggest organized crime trial in the history of Israel is talking about Nietzsche. It’s the prosecutor who forced Yitzhak Abergil to talk about the author of The Antichrist; but the country’s most famous criminal, who earned his first life sentence at the age of 17, is ready to play ball.
On the morning of December 18, 2018, Yitzhak Abergil took the stand at Tel Aviv District Court, to testify in “Case 512” (the name was picked at random by a computer)—the biggest organized crime investigation and trial in Israel’s history.
Of the 18 suspects indicted in the case—which begun in early 2017, and most likely won’t be concluded until sometime in 2020—Abergil is listed as Defendant #1.
At the heart of the case are two attempts on the life of rival gangster Ze’ev Rosenstein; a June 2003 bombing, next to the Tel Aviv Port in the north of the city, which seriously injured a security guard and wounded 10 others; and a December 2003 bombing at a currency exchange store on Yehuda HaLevi street in central Tel Aviv. The latter left three bystanders dead and dozens injured, sending shockwaves across a city already reeling from the Second Intifada.
The case against Abergil and associates rests mainly upon the testimony of seven state witnesses—killers, drug traffickers, low-lifes, patsies, and hangers-on—together with hundreds of hours of wiretaps. The attempts on Rosenstein’s life aside, Case 512 also covers two murders in Israel and Germany, two attempted murders in Japan and the Czech Republic, and the manifold crimes associated with running a global drug-trafficking, money-laundering, and tax-evasion network (principally between 2002-2006). As the investigation weaved its way around the globe over the course of 15 years, it took on a life of its own, eventually ensnaring more than a half a dozen Israeli mob bosses from several different—and rival—crime gangs. Indicted with Abergil were, amongst others, his brother Meir; Moti Hassin, his former right-hand man; Avi Ruhan, a major crime boss operating out of Ra’anana; and Netanya mob bosses Asi Abutbul and Rico Shirazi, rivals of each other and—in Abutbul’s case—of Abergil as well.
There’s also the matter of nearly a quarter of a billion shekels of dirty money, from the years when Abergil’s organization trafficked ecstasy, cocaine, hashish and other drugs around the world, from the United States to Belgium to Japan.
On December 16, 2018, more than three years after he and dozens of other suspects were first scooped up by Israeli police, it was time for Abergil to take the stand. In front of a packed courthouse, the 50-year-old Abergil spent several hours telling his life’s story, which began as the youngest of 10 children growing up in a public housing complex in Lod’s Benit neighborhood.
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