Vancouver, Wash.'s eighth homicide of 1997 was also its strangest. On Halloween morning, Oleg Babichenko left home in his Toyota station wagon. Within minutes, his car exploded, and Babichenko, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, was dead, the first death by explosion in Vancouver history. "This is probably one of the most difficult cases I've ever been involved with," says Vancouver Police Det. Scott Creager, who is in charge of the investigation. He suspects Babichenko once may have been in the stolen-car business. If Creager's suspicions are right, Portlanders have something to worry about. For the past few years, Portland police believe, Russian-speaking immigrants have established organized rings responsible for some of the city's high-end auto theft. The problem has become so bad that last week the Portland Police Bureau announced it was forming a six-person unit strictly to battle these Eastern European thieves. "In other cities--places like Brooklyn, Toronto, San Diego and even Bellevue, Wash.--what started out as property crime by Russian-speaking criminals eventually led to violence. Babichenko's death may be a sign that some Portland-area crooks are moving into new--and deadly--territory. Last week on a gravel lot on Sherwood's main thoroughfare, 100 men spent the better part of a day at an auction bidding on approximately 300 cars. Not one was a mint-condition gem. Instead, the lot was sort of a purgatory for totaled vehicles, a place where insurance companies sell cars that have been wrecked or stripped. The inventory included a minivan that looked like a crushed shoebox and a Honda that had been relieved of its wheels, door panels, seats and stereo. Fully one-third of the buyers were speaking Russian. For years, only licensed car dealers, mechanics and wreckers were allowed into the auctions, which are held regularly at six different locations around the state (including three in Portland). Typically, the junked cars were bought for parts or scrap metal. Recently, however, the auctions have opened their doors to anyone who pays an annual fee. Since then, the auctions have been overrun with people who do not operate licensed businesses. Authorities believe many of them are involved in organized car theft. To the neophyte, it would seem that the collection of junkers would be of little value. Nonetheless, many of the cars go for thousands of dollars. And the prices have increased dramatically over the past few years, several wreckers say, thanks to the Russians. According to one wrecker, who's been in business for decades, what used to be a $1,000 collection of barely usable parts now goes for $2,000. Out of a typical 300-car auction, another wrecker claims, only about 75 cars are bought by legitimate businesspeople. The rest, he says, are taken by people he believes are crooks. "We're being squeezed," the first wrecker says. "I have to bid against somebody who's not paying any taxes, any licenses or fees or any parts. We're operating in an unprofitable situation.... It can be totally rolled up in a ball and they pay thousands and thousands for it." Why would something that once seemed fit only for the scrap heap be worth so much money? "All these Russians are able to pay more for the car at the auto salvage because they don't pay for parts," says Sgt. Robert Gross, who helped form the Portland Police Bureau's Auto Theft Task Force two years ago. "They go out and steal them." Here's how it works: A ringleader buys a car at the salvage auction. Then he sends a thief to steal a car that is the exact make, model and year of the salvaged car. They use parts stripped from the stolen car to repair the salvaged vehicle. In another version of the scam, the unscrupulous buyers are really after the VIN, or Vehicle Identification Number. A VIN is stamped in several places on all automobiles and acts as a car's fingerprint. Workers take the VIN from the salvaged car and place it on a stolen car, in essence welding the fingerprint from a legal car onto a hot automobile. With the new VIN, the stolen car is "laundered." In either scenario, they have a working vehicle with a clear title and matching VIN that can be resold for a nice profit. There is some evidence that Oleg Babichenko was involved in this scheme. A couple of years ago, he operated an odd little auto body shop in Washougal, Wash.--a place that didn't advertise, didn't have a sign out front and didn't accept customers off the street. "As far as we could tell, they were buying cars that were totals from auctions and bringing them in and rebuilding them," says Marvin Yates, who owns a nearby auto parts store. "They didn't buy a lot of parts from us even though they were right across the street. I really don't know where they bought parts.... You'd see a small flatbed or a pickup which may or may not have a name on it come by every once in a while with a quarter panel or body pieces.... You didn't know their client base because you never saw them." Last year, 9,300 vehicles vanished from Portland driveways, parking lots and street corners--that's more than one car an hour, a 50 percent increase from 1990. In 1996, the National Insurance Crime Bureau reported that Oregon had the 15th-highest rate of auto theft in the nation. Not surprisingly, auto theft has become a political issue. Two years ago, at the urging of Mayor Vera Katz, the Portland Police Bureau formed a specialized unit, the 22-person Auto Theft Task Force, to catch these prolific crooks. According to the cops, car thieves fall into three groups. Most are drug addicts who steal the first junker they stumble across and later sell the contents for dope money. Then there are the joyriders, mostly teen-agers who steal cars, trash them and then abandon them. The third type of car thieves are the pros, people who can make a vehicle vanish before the ATTF's morning shift rolls out of bed. These thieves don't mess around with old Datsuns or Chevys--they're strictly class, going after higher-priced late models like Lexuses, Hondas and Acuras. Police are particularly interested in this group. That's because high-end car theft has a ripple effect. "It's those vehicles that get paid off by the insurance company," explains Officer Brent Bates, who works for the ATTF. "You're talking millions of dollars in losses there, and most of it's borne by the insurance industry [which] pass[es] it on to everybody else in their premiums." As ethnically insensitive as it may sound, cops in Portland and southwest Washington are convinced that immigrants from the former Soviet Union are the undisputed kingpins of the professional car thief world. Gross, who has learned about Russian culture since joining the ATTF, says it's no coincidence that car theft rose dramatically around the same time that Russian-speaking immigrants began coming to Portland in large numbers. According to the International Refugee Center of Oregon,25,000 people from the former Soviet Union have settled in Portland, most of them since 1988. Another 10,000 have settled in Vancouver. Anne Valsamakis, who runs a program for Russian-speaking immigrants at IRCO, says most of the newcomers are Evangelical Christians who flocked to the United States to escape religious persecution. Many sought out the Portland area, settling mainly in the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood and East County. Many of the émigrés were outcasts in their homeland and weren't educated; they were welders, miners and construction workers back in the Soviet Union, and have sought similar lines of work here. Gross says a small percentage of the newcomers have put those manual skills to use in the Portland area by stealing cars, chopping them into parts and reselling them. He estimates that Soviet immigrants are responsible for up to one-third of the professional car theft in Portland. "Most of the [Russian-speaking immigrants] are good people," says Portland Police Officer John Laws, who works locally with Soviet émigrés and is one of just two Portland cops who speak Russian. "It's really cultural differences. They think what they're doing is OK." Both Laws and Valsamakis trace that attitude to the black market, which became an accepted and necessary part of daily life in the former Soviet Union. Understandably, Soviet citizens didn't think black-market bartering was wrong, even though it was technically a crime. "Back in the former Soviet Union, you couldn't live without getting involved in some kind of criminal activity," Laws says. "You couldn't keep your car running if you weren't a criminal." In the United States, however, things are different. "We're real black and white here in the U.S. You're either a criminal or you're not," Laws says. "They're on a real gray scale.... It's easier to slide back and forth when it's not black and white." With this philosophy, according to Laws, you might be a crook in the strict, legal sense of the word, but morally, you're guilty of nothing. You might call it the Soviet version of Robin Hood. There's even a Russian phrase for it--"Vory v Zakone," or "thieves in law." The belief that Russian-speaking immigrants play a large role in Portland-area car theft isn't based on a pile of indictments. In fact, the ATTF has arrested only a handful of Russian car thieves. One of them is Aleksandr Filipskiy. A 17-year-old immigrant who lived in Portland, Filipskiy was arrested twice in the Metro area last summer for auto theft. Based on a tip from neighbors, in June 1996, police searched a barn in Boring that they suspected of being a Filipskiy chop shop. The ATTF found about $100,000 worth of stolen cars and parts in the barn, including the frames of two new Lexuses. The ATTF arrested Filipskiy and several other Russian-speaking adults on the scene and charged them with theft and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. Like most car thieves, Filipskiy was quickly released from jail pending trial. A month later, he was at it again. Last summer, police learned that Filipskiy bought a salvaged Honda Del Sol from the auto auction for about $2,000. As Gross explained, "We knew that sooner or later, one would show up on the hot sheet"--that is, the police bureau's daily list of stolen cars. Sure enough, a 1993 Honda Del Sol soon appeared on the list. Based on that and other evidence, in July 1996 the police searched the garage where Filipskiy worked, at Southeast 129th Avenue and Division Street. They found the salvaged Honda and parts from the stolen Honda. He was arrested and charged with unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, theft and trafficking in stolen cars. In both cases, those caught at the scene said that Filipskiy was their ringleader--a puzzling claim considering Filipskiy was barely old enough to drive, much less rent the barn, buy the heavy-duty auto body tools and get the cash together to buy the salvaged cars. "When I got to this case I said, 'There's got to be somebody else in charge of this,'" recalled Deputy DA Francisco Ravelo, noting that juveniles like Filipskiy are punished much less severely than adults. "Alex Filipskiy seemed to take the fall." Filipskiy's partners in crime avoided prosecution because of a legal technicality. Filipskiy avoided prosecution, too: As a trial date approached last spring, the teen-ager vanished. "We're looking for him," Ravelo says. "I feel pretty confident he's in another state, I suspect with a changed identity." Alex Filipskiy isn't the only Russian-speaking teen-ager involved in stolen cars. Last January, Portland police responded to a call at Shari's restaurant near the airport and found two groups of young men driving two new Honda Accords. They later learned the cars were stolen. The boys fled as soon as they saw the cops, leading police on a high-speed chase through Oregon and Washington. When they arrested brothers Mikhail and Alexandr Pasko, Daniel Skobelev, Dennis Yevgenich Boltach and Alexandr Moskalenko--all were between 15 and 17 years old--police learned that they had come to Portland from Washington on a mission. According to police reports, as many as 10 boys drove down from the Seattle area early one morning with a plan to steal several cars, mainly late-model Hondas. They had at least four sets of license plates with them, which they quickly put onto the stolen cars in order to evade detection by the police. Although the boys would tell police very little after their capture, it appears from reports that they were on orders to deliver one stolen car to someone in the Portland area. The rest they were to drive back up to the Seattle area. When officers asked the boys for details, however, they wouldn't talk. "They kill me," one boy told police. "From all that I've learned about people dealing in criminal matters who are from the former Soviet Union," Gross explained, "they are more afraid of their inner circle than they are of us. If they get caught informing for the police, they will probably disappear forever." To the police, the elaborate plan is a sign that organized Russian-speaking criminals have targeted the metro area. "They're not doing this on their own," Gross said of the adolescent suspects. "There's somebody giving them marching orders." Three of the boys are awaiting trial in Washington on charges of possession of stolen property and eluding police. Mikhail Pasko was sentenced to 16 days in juvenile detention; Alex Pasko fled. Portland cops say that with their new task force focusing on Russian-speaking car thieves, they hope to make a dent in the auto-theft problem. But the bomb that killed Babichenko is at another level entirely. At this point, it's still not clear whether someone killed Babichenko or whether Babichenko built the bomb to kill someone else. In either case, it may be a sign of escalation in organized crime. Some fear that the metro area could go the way of other cities across the country where organized Soviet criminals have caused serious problems. In January 1996, for example, a western Washington man originally from Ukraine was sentenced to more than five years in prison for his involvement in a car-theft ring responsible for $400,000 in insurance losses. In 1993 authorities learned of a group of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who formed a network to steal cars in northern California, according to the California Department of Justice. There is also abundant evidence that organized criminals from the former Soviet Union do more than just steal cars. In Bellevue, Wash., a Ukrainian immigrant was killed in April 1996 in what authorities believe was an organized-crime hit. Another Bellevue man, who had been wanted for murder in the Soviet Union, was kidnapped by two Russian-speaking men who were later arrested for a string of robberies on the East Coast. The kidnappers themselves had been injured in a mob-related shooting prior to leaving Washington. California prosecutors have convicted Russian organized-crime groups of elaborate fuel-tax fraud schemes, a $1 billion Medicaid fraud and loan sharking. New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York investigators released a report last year linking Russian organized-crime groups to multimillion-dollar tax and insurance scams, extortion, money laundering and 70 murders, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. A few years ago, Northwest authorities began to get serious about this new domestic threat. Since 1994, Washington has had a Russian Immigrant Crime Task Force, and officers can receive instruction in Russian crime as part of in-service training. Several Vancouver police officers are currently taking Russian language lessons. For the past few years, an officer in the Portland Police Bureau's Criminal Intelligence Division has monitored Russian crime trends. A few years ago, the state brought in an instructor from California to teach the Department of Justice about Russian crime in America. As Vancouver Police Det. Wayne Reynolds says, "It's not possible that it's happening in huge amounts in Bellevue and San Diego and not happening here." |
