Blood & Volume by Dave Copeland

Author:Dave Copeland [COPELAND, DAVE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-56980-327-1
Publisher: Barricade Books

DURING THE YEARS that Ron Gonen was making secretive trips from Tel Aviv to New York, Ephraim started making secretive trips of his own. Ephraim was accompanying Ofra to France to visit Attias in prison and may have even had an apartment there, where he fell in with other Israeli underworld figures. Ephraim, who was friendly with Ofra's mother and knew Attias from their short prison stint together in Israel, paid for Ofra's plane tickets and travel expenses so she could visit Attias in the French prison. While visiting Ephraim in France, Ofra met some of the other men who would eventually move their entire criminal enterprise to New York City and become the core of New York's Israeli Mafia.

Ofra met Israel Mizrachi, who had dark, curly hair and a massive build and went by the name of Israel Alice; Albert Soussan, "the Moroccan" or Beber, who promised Attias that he would help him get the Moroccan passport as soon as he was released; and Amren Effasy, Beber's partner who would later help the Israeli Mafia open up heroin trafficking routes from Southeast Asia to the United States. Ofra also met Moussan Alyian for the first time.

By the time Attias was released from prison in 1987, Ran Ephraim had been living and working as a drug dealer in the United States for long stretches during the previous six years. Attias was furious when he traveled to Morocco to get a passport on Beber's insistence, only to have to return to France without the document. He was even angrier when he heard that Beber had been arrested and questioned about his phony passport operation. He was paranoid that Beber may have told authorities about his own attempts to get a forged passport. After killing two men during a drug deal that didn't work out, Attias decided he could no longer wait for Beber to deliver the passport. Attias was confident that Ephraim's claims of America being a land of opportunity were true, and he moved to New York City in the summer of 1987. Ofra followed him there that fall.

"MY FRIEND, THE Crazy? Remember him?" Ran Ephraim said to Ron Gonen one afternoon. They were Gonen's Upper West Side apartment.

"He's here—in New York," Ephraim said excitedly. "He's working in Brooklyn and Queens."

Ephraim had arrived in New York for a second time, and he and his bride-to-be had been staying in Raz Ben-Zvi's crowded Queens apartment. Ephraim had stopped by to ask for Gonen's help finding an apartment and a hotel room "for business." He boasted that he was going to become a successful art dealer. His specific requests for a hotel room—within walking distance of 48th Street, "not a shit hole but not too classy"—baffled Gonen. But it hadn't baffled him nearly as much as the news that Attias had been in New York for more than a year.

"Johnny?" Gonen said. "He's not in New York. He's in Paris."

There had been a dispute over a heroin deal in Paris, Ephraim said. Attias had arranged a sit-down to work it out, but Attias wasn't very good at working things out.

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