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| - Over the last four years, alone on the witness stand in federal court or huddled in back rooms with federal agents, Mani Chulpayev has turned in what federal officials have called one of the most remarkable mob turncoat performances in memory. He has testified about an arson that leveled an entire block in Queens, about multiple extortions backed by beatings, about kidnappings, rampant Medicaid fraud, jewelry theft and trafficking in prostitutes. Prosecutors have hailed Mr. Chulpayev, 25, as one of the most important cooperating witnesses in the history of the government's battle against Russian organized crime. One called him ''by far and away the most intelligent and sophisticated cooperating witness I have ever dealt with.'' Certainly, he's been productive. Mr. Chulpayev's cooperation has yielded more than a dozen felony convictions, solved scores of violent crimes, and helped bring down not just his own ''brigade,'' as the Russians called it, but members of as many as 10 other brigades, prosecutors said. Yet his performance in betrayal only exemplified a wider phenomenon that few predicted a decade ago, when New York and the rest of America first became aware of the threat of Russian organized crime. Mr. Chulpayev, after all, was but the latest in a parade of informants whose abundant cooperation with the government in recent years has shed remarkable light on the inner workings of Russian crime in America and, prosecutors say, substantially blunted its growth. A decade ago, many feared that Russian crime groups in America would be intimately linked to the burgeoning organized crime groups in the former Soviet Union. Instead, they now appear to have only tenuous and incidental links to criminal groups there, law enforcement officials and independent experts say. Moreover, large-scale, highly structured Russian groups rivaling those of La Cosa Nostra, able to rig public contracts or dominate labor unions, for example, have yet to materialize in this country, officials say. Yet perhaps the most surprising development has been the drumbeat of betrayals, which longtime observers of the Russian mob describe as a product and a cause of pervasive suspicion and treachery that has impeded the development of long-term conspiracies and big-time bosses. ''At the beginning of the 1990's, the belief was, among American law enforcement officials and academics, that Soviets would never turn on each other,'' recalled Joseph D. Serio, a research associate at Sam Houston State University in Texas who has studied Russian crime for the last decade. ''It was also widely believed that the Russians endured so much in the Soviet Union that they would endure any hardship rather than cooperate. But they found out that these people would offer as much as necessary to get out of jail.'' Using laws developed to combat traditional Mafia families, notably the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which permits lengthy prison sentences for participants in a conspiracy, federal authorities have had far more success than they had in the early decades of La Cosa Nostra's growth in convicting criminals. Small free-floating brigades like Mr. Chulpayev's have come to be the norm, specializing in identity theft, credit card fraud, insurance scams and counterfeiting. Sophisticated, well-educated and multiethnic, they have sprouted up in virtually every state, and they can steal millions. But they are also hobbled by a culture of betrayal. The culture of Russian crime -- or rather, Eurasian crime, as officials hasten to clarify, since it involves the full range of ethnic groups and regions in the former Soviet Union -- could be seen in the rapid rise and fall of Mr. Chulpayev's brigade. He described those workings in many hours of interviews with federal agents and prosecutors, and on the witness stand last month in an arson case in federal court in Brooklyn. With short dark hair and broad shoulders, smartly casual in a long-sleeved white T-shirt and black jeans, Mr. Chulpayev testified in a courtroom that was mostly empty, except for several rows of Bukharan Jewish emigres from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, whose community in Rego Park, Queens, produced Mr. Chulpayev and some of his criminal confederates, and not a few of their victims. Mr. Chulpayev came to New York with his family in 1989 and settled in Rego Park. He eventually went to work with his father, who owned several food carts. But pretzels and sausages soon gave way to extortion rackets in Brooklyn, Mr. Chulpayev testified. ''I was driven by greed,'' he said. Mr. Chulpayev and others extorted money -- as much as $500 was the weekly tribute -- from furniture stores, restaurants, bakeries and travel agencies, and he enforced the payments with pistols, knives and stun guns. With two friends, Alexander Kutsenko and Anya Rits, who were later convicted of conspiracy charges, Mr. Chulpayev began pimping prostitutes, two or three at a time, importing them from Moscow and Tashkent on six-month contracts, he testified. Dimitri Gufield, who was also later convicted of conspiracy, joined the crew in 1997, court papers said. Lil Phat was visiting his newborn son at an Atlanta hospital when he was gunned down. Chulpayev’s “business partner” Decensae “Grizz” White has now admitted to prosecutors that he ordered Lil Phat murdered because of a drug deal gone bad. Shockingly, he is also expected to cooperate with investigators, and testify he ordered the murder with the understanding he would only receive a maximum of 8 years in prison, according to the Hip Hop Enquirer. Decensae is also an aspiring rapper from California, and was the leading scorer for San Francisco State University’s basketball team. In a previous hearing this past summer, rapper Eldorado Red (collaborator of such acts as Yo Gotti, Waka Flocka Flame) was also denied bond. Along with the murder, he was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, possession of a firearm during a felony, and participation in criminal street gang activity, according to documents from the case. Chulpayev is amongst the men accused, according to Fulton County prosecutors, since Chulpayev wanted the rapper dead as he believed that Lil Phat was going to testify against him for selling him a car that was stolen. During a recent hearing, Chulpayev’s defense attorney Tanya Miller told the judge that her client didn’t know that when he gave the GPS tracking codes to Decensae, the men were looking to kill Lil Phat.
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