Senator Feinstein’s Loyalty to China First

Now, this is the woman that concocted the while Dr. Ford v. Brett Kavanaugh chaos event in Washington DC and refused to hand that pesky letter over to Chairman Grassley…

Personally, she should be brought up before the Senate Ethics Committee, it would be a gesture for sure but then we could have a Senate vote of no confidence in Di-Fi…another gesture, but tactics nonetheless.

Meanwhile:

Senator Cruz is not well liked by many Democrats in the Senate because he exposes them, that is if anyone is listening. It was not too long ago that Ben Shapiro published in his DailyWire that Senator Cruz proposed some legislation to rename a road and Feinstein earnestly objected. Hah, it is an interesting story found here.

Related reading: Chinese spy who defected tells all

Now, just before that, a scandal that went away real fast was that lil miss Dianne had an American aide working for the Chinese (read spy) on her payroll for years. BUT, that was not the first time the FBI came knocking on her door for much the same reason. Really you say? Yes….

Only back in 1997 as explained by the LATimes: federal investigators have detected that the Chinese government might attempt to seek favor with Feinstein. Last year, she was one of six members of Congress who received warnings from the FBI that China might try to improperly influence them through illegal campaign contributions.

The article has another interesting paragraph: At the same time, far from the spotlight, Feinstein’s husband, Richard C. Blum, has expanded his private business interests in China–to the point that his firm is now a prominent investor inside the communist nation.

For years, Feinstein and Blum have insisted that they maintained a solid “firewall” between her role as an influential foreign policy player and his career as a private investor overseas.

But such closely coinciding interests are highly unusual for major figures in public life in Washington. And now, as controversy heats up over improper foreign influence in the U.S. political process, the effectiveness of the firewall between those interests could be called into question.

Firewall eh?

SAN FRANCISCO SHANGHAI SISTER CITIES photo

Well there is this other thing in California called the ‘California Asia Business Council’. See Di-Fi’s husband in the photo?

Asia Night 203 back row in the middle

Recipients of Cal-Asia’s prestigious New Silk Road Award include: Ms. Weili Dai, President and Co-founder of Marvell Technology Group; Dr. Chong Moon Lee, Founder, Diamond Multimedia; The Asia Foundation (presented to Dr. David Arnold, President); Alexander D. Calhoun, Senior Counsel, Squire Sanders & Dempsey; Daniel K. H. Chao, Chairman of Bechtel Greater China (retired); John S. Chen, Chairman, CEO, and President of Sybase; Hon. Dianne Feinstein, US Senator; Dr. Ta-Lin Hsu founder and chairman of H&Q Asia Pacific; C. Richard Kramlich, chairman and co-founder of New Enterprise Associates; G. Paul Matthews, Founder, Matthews International Capital Management; Dr. William F. Miller, SRI International, Stanford, and Silicon Valley visionary; Hon. George P. Shultz, Former Secretary of State; Washington SyCip, Founder of SGV & Co. and “Asia’s Wise Business Owl”;   Amb. Linda Tsao Yang, former US Director, Asian Development Bank.

(Senator Feinstein got an award….firewall?)

 

Cal-Asia’s Mission
…is to promote commerce between the U.S. and Asia. We are proud to have received two awards for our efforts from the US Department of Commerce.

Other Cal-Asia News

–Foreign Direct Investment in ASEAN
–APEC Meetings for 2015 started in January in Hanoi and will culminate with the Manila summit. Meeting locations and dates: APEC Events Calendar. General info on APEC outcomes, plans: http://www.apec.org/

EXIM BANKReport to the U.S. Congress on the Export-Import Bank of the United States and global export credit competition, 2014
–OECD list of export credit agencies
Asian ExIm Banks

Ah, but there is more:

SAN FRANCISCO, May 4, 2017 — Richard C. Blum, founder and chairman of Blum Capital Partners, delivers remarks at Asia Society Northern California’s Fourteenth Annual Dinner.

Going back to 2009 and swell company here at this event:

April 23, 2009 – Blum Center Groundbreaking with Vice President Al Gore. (Peg Skorpinski)The groundbreaking ceremony for the new home of the Blum Center will take place on Thursday, April 23 at 1:30 pm PST – with Center Founder and UC Regents Chair Richard C. Blum joined by Former Vice President Al Gore, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, College of Engineering Dean S. Shankar Sastry, and University of California President Mark Yudof. The ceremony will be followed by a reception where faculty and students will present a wide range of innovations aimed at making lasting change for the nearly three billion people that live on less than two dollars a day.

That Center is for developing countries like China….really? Yup…interesting, there are more friends…

Four years ago, Mr. Blum founded the Global Economy and Development Center at The Brookings Institution and the Brookings Blum Roundtable Conference, to develop policy research and new strategies to alleviate poverty. He is also a trustee and a member of the executive committee of The Carter Center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter, and serves on the boards of William J. Clinton Foundation and The Wilderness Society.

More?

Feinstein and Shanghai Mayor Jiang Zemin reportedly visited each other regularly in the 1980s, with Jiang once spending Thanksgiving in San Francisco with Feinstein and her husband. Jiang supposedly danced with Feinstein during one such visit, which surely must have been a propaganda coup for the CCP a la Ted Kennedy and the Soviets.

The Federalist has an interesting summary, yet this stuck out:

In a June 2010 interview with the Wall Street Journal covering a trip to China in which she met with old pals Jiang and former premier Zhu Rongji, Feinstein seemed to further downplay and even alibi the Tiananmen Square massacre:

I think that was a great setback for China in the view of the world. And I think China has also – as we would – learned lessons from it.

It just so happens I was here after that and talked to Jiang Zemin and learned that at the time China had no local police. It was just the PLA [People’s Liberation Army]. And no local police that had crowd control. So, hence the tanks.

Clearly none of that made good sense. But that’s the past. One learns from the past. You don’t repeat it. I think China has learned a lesson.

That year, Feinstein also challenged the Obama administration’s $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, calling it a “substantial irritant” to U.S.-China relations. Be sure and read all of Ben Weingarten’s piece here.

Massive Social Security Fraud, 40 Million Americans

Last week, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) revealed massive identity fraud by illegal aliens in the United States, potentially affecting nearly 40 million Americans.

In April of this year, IRLI filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Social Security Administration (SSA) seeking records related to the Obama-era decision to halt sending “no-match” letters to employers. According to the Justice Department’s website, a “no-match” letter is a “written notice issued by the SSA to an employer, usually in response to an employee wage report, advising that the name or Social Security number (SSN) reported by the employer for one or more employees does not “match” a name or SSN combination reflected in SSA’s records.” The long-held practice of sending the letters had been used to prevent fraud through the use of stolen SSN data by illegal aliens and other criminals.

Days after former President Obama implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty program, his administration announced the decision to stop sending “no-match” letters to employers. This decision led to a thriving SSN black market where illegal aliens are drawn to obtain an American’s information for employment. The SSN of children have proven to be especially valuable as they can be used undetected for years. However, when these children reach adulthood and begin to apply for college, car loans, credit cards, or other needs, many learn they have criminal records attached to their identities.

Specifically, IRLI’s investigation uncovered that from 2012 to 2016, there were a whopping 39 million instances where names and SSNs on W-2 tax forms did not match the legitimate Social Security records. Additionally, over $409 billion was added to the Earnings Suspense File (ESF), which holds any uncredited wages that cannot be correctly matched in the SSA’s database.

Previously, the SSA has estimated that seventy-five percent of illegal aliens possess a SSN— either one stolen from an American citizen, or legal resident, or one that has been made up entirely. Not only is this practice troublesome from an immigration law standpoint, but can actually be quite problematic for Americans, or legal residents, who have their SSNs stolen. In addition to receiving Internal Revenue Service (IRS) letters and audits accusing them of having income they are not claiming or having their benefits blocked, reconciling a compromised identifier is estimated to cost thousands of dollars and take years of effort.

The Trump administration did announce this summer that it would begin resuming notice letters to employers and third-part providers informing them of any mismatches. However, it is truly up to Congress to rectify this situation for all parties involved.

In July, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) introduced the bipartisan AG and Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 6417) – legislation that would mandate E-Verify, the effective web-based program that ensures a legal workforce. Furthermore, the legislation would protect against identity theft by requiring the Social Security Commissioner to notify individuals whose SSN demonstrates a pattern of unusual use; as well as assist Americans who believe their identity may have been stolen or used fraudulently.

Congress is required to protect American citizens and their interests above all else. It would be shrewd for them to remember that before the November midterms.

Hat tip.

Meanwhile:

The Trump administration will admit no more than 30,000 refugees to the U.S. in the coming year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, down from the current cap of 45,000.

Pompeo announced the lowered ceiling during a press conference Monday at the Department of State headquarters in Foggy Bottom.

Pompeo said the 30,000 cap “must be considered in the context of the many other forms of protection and assistance offered by the United States” and should not be “sole barometer” to measure the country’s humanitarian efforts.

The hawkish turn demonstrates President Donald Trump’s willingness to push hard-line immigration policies in the run-up to the November midterm elections — even after his controversial “zero tolerance” border enforcement policy led to thousands of family separations and a court order to reunify parents and children.

Equifax had Evidence of Chinese Espionage Before the Hack

Fascinating that there is always more to the story. Remember, this was/is confidential and personal data. Further, Alibaba is a Chinese international holding company that is a counterpart to Amazon and specializes in artificial intelligence based in Hangzhou, China.

The General Accounting Office issued a report on Equifax. The GAO analysis detailed the steps Atlanta-based Equifax has taken since the breach to prevent similar attacks in the future. Last year, hackers had found a vulnerability in Equifax servers that gave them access to customer login credentials.

The report said the hackers hid in Equifax’s system for more than two months and mined data for credit card numbers, drivers licenses and social security numbers. The breach led the agency to make $200 million in security upgrades.

WSJ: Two years before Equifax Inc. stunned the world with the announcement it had been hacked, the credit-reporting company believed it was the victim of another theft, only this time at the hands of Chinese spies, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the previously undisclosed incident, security officials feared that former employees had removed thousands of pages of proprietary information before leaving and heading to jobs in China. Materials included code for planned new products, human-resources files and manuals.

Equifax went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Investigators from the company and the FBI came to view events at Equifax as potentially a huge theft of data—not of consumers’ personal data, as happened with the subsequent 2017 hacking of Equifax’s files, but of confidential business information.

Equifax security officials briefed the then-chief executive, Richard Smith, at a fall 2015 meeting, spreading high stacks of paper across the length of the boardroom table. The voluminous printouts represented what they feared was stolen. Adding to suspicions, the Chinese government had recently asked eight companies to help it build a national credit-reporting system.

At one point, Equifax grew so worried it began building a way to monitor the computer activity of all of its ethnic-Chinese employees, according to people familiar with the investigation. The resource-heavy project, which raised legal concerns internally, was short-lived.

Some investigators believed Equifax’s intense focus on the matter contributed to a delay in the company’s understanding the extent of the 2017 hack of consumers’ information, an event that hammered Equifax’s stock, cost some executives their jobs, including Mr. Smith, and damaged the company’s reputation.

Ultimately, the previously undisclosed investigation undertaken by the FBI stalled. The FBI wanted to pursue a criminal case, believing the theft of trade secrets costs the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars a year, with China the leading offender, said people familiar with the investigation. Equifax began to worry about legal exposure and how onerous the inquiry could become, according to these people, and eventually reduced its cooperation with law enforcement.

That left many of the questions raised by the investigation, both about Equifax and about China, unresolved.

This account of the events at Equifax is based on people familiar with the investigation.

Equifax, in a written statement, said it became aware in 2015 of “efforts by a former employee to obtain company information, and launched an internal investigation into his activities.” The company “brought the investigation to the attention of U.S. law enforcement authorities and cooperated with the federal agencies,” Equifax said.

“Although this individual had improperly obtained proprietary Equifax information,” the statement said, “the information we determined was accessed was general in nature and not material or harmful to Equifax, consumers or our business clients.” Equifax said the company has “no evidence to suggest that consumer data or other personal information was compromised, or that this individual targeted this type of information.”

Equifax didn’t address in its statement whether it thought other employees were involved. A person familiar with the company’s thinking disputed the notion that Equifax reduced its cooperation with law enforcement in a probe it had itself triggered.

Representatives of the FBI and CIA declined to comment. The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment.

One of the former employees Equifax and the FBI investigated in connection with a possible business-information theft was Daniel Zou, who worked in Toronto. The company he joined in China was Ant Financial, a fast-growing financial-technology affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , founded by billionaire Jack Ma.

Both Ant and Mr. Zou denied any involvement in taking proprietary Equifax data. Alibaba referred questions to Ant.

Ant, based in Hangzhou, China, said it “has never used Equifax code, scripts or algorithms in the development of its own products and services.”

Mr. Zou, in a sworn statement provided by his lawyer, said, “I deny that I worked with or consulted with a network of Equifax colleagues to steal Equifax code for Ant Financial or that I provided any such code to Ant Financial.”

Interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in Washington, Mr. Zou, a 35-year-old Chinese-born Canadian citizen who graduated from the University of Toronto, repeated his denial and said that learning from the Journal of Equifax’s suspicions had been “a nightmare.”

Those suspicions arose in 2015, a few months after Mr. Zou left his job as an Equifax product manager to join Ant’s new credit-scoring business, which is known as Sesame Credit in English. Ant was among the companies asked by China’s central bank to develop credit-scoring services. Sesame launched its service in January 2015, several months before Mr. Zou came aboard.

Equifax’s data-loss prevention system, which guards against sensitive information leaving the corporate network, flagged the activities of Mr. Zou, according to people familiar with the investigation. The system alerted that an employee might have taken data off the network, and initially registered it as benign, they said.

Mr. Zou said in his interview with the Journal that, according to his understanding of how the system works, it would warn the person removing the data on the spot. He said he never received such a warning. Equifax declined to say whether that is how the system works or whether Mr. Zou received a warning.

At the same time, Equifax officials also had suspicions about a different employee, in another city. Equifax’s security chief, Susan Mauldin, approached the FBI with a question: What would it look like if we were being targeted by China?

FBI officials told her that in one common technique, a group makes plans to visit a company’s office to pitch a partnership, then at the last minute replaces delegation members with spies.

Around this time, a delegation from a Chinese business visited Equifax and swapped out some members at the last minute, fueling Equifax’s suspicions it was a target.

Company security officials decided to examine Mr. Zou’s computer activity. They discovered he had printed out thousands of pages of company information. The material related to the way credit scores are obtained, what different pieces of data mean and how to apply algorithms to assess troves of data, according to the people familiar with the investigation. They said some was information that could help explain products Equifax was working on.

At around the same time they were examining Mr. Zou’s systems, investigators discovered what they believed to be a major infiltration campaign. They found that other employees had sent code to their personal email accounts and uploaded it to software-development platforms others could access.

According to the people familiar with the probe, the investigators, by talking to Equifax employees and examining email accounts and LinkedIn messages sent to them, saw indications that recruiters purporting to represent Ant affiliate Alibaba had offered to triple salaries for certain ethnically Chinese Equifax employees—and provided instructions on specific Equifax information they should bring along if they jumped ship.

The investigators saw, as well, that Mr. Zou had searched the Equifax human-resources system to look up data analytics teams in the U.S. He had printed out contact information for many ethnic-Chinese employees, according to people familiar with the probe. They said some of those employees told colleagues they were later contacted by recruiters who claimed to be working on behalf of Alibaba.

The investigators found notes on Chinese messaging service WeChat in which another group of Equifax employees in North America, using their company-issued phones, arranged off-hours meetings to discuss work projects and left the company soon after, saying they were going to Ant or Sesame for big raises.

Ant said Mr. Zou is the only former Equifax employee it has hired since it began collecting employment history information in 2011. Ant said Mr. Zou began at its credit-scoring business in May 2015. It listed a five-figure starting salary for Mr. Zou and said he wasn’t promised any large bonuses.

Ant said it didn’t “directly or indirectly through third-party recruiters” encourage job applicants to steal Equifax information. Ant prohibits employees and recruiters from requesting such activity, the company said, adding that third-party recruiters aren’t authorized to make job offers on its behalf.

Ant said it hadn’t been contacted by Equifax or any government investigators about such matters. After receiving an inquiry from the Journal about Mr. Zou, Ant said, it investigated his information-technology activities and found no evidence he had ever provided Ant with any Equifax code, scripts or algorithms.

Mr. Zou said he worked in marketing and didn’t have access to Equifax code, algorithms and other proprietary information; never took any to Ant; wasn’t asked to; and never encouraged others to.

“I deny that I searched an internal Equifax human resources database to recruit Equifax employees to join Ant Financial,” Mr. Zou said in the sworn declaration provided by a lawyer. “I further deny that I printed contact information for ethnic-Chinese Equifax employees as part of an effort to recruit such employees to join Ant Financial.”

In the Journal interview, Mr. Zou said, “I think [where] this might come from is that during my time at Equifax I had a habit of sending work-related documents to my own email so that I could work at home. If any of those contain [any] of what they call the alleged proprietary information, right after I left Equifax and before I went back to China, I deleted them all. And I did not share that with anybody.”

If investigators were alarmed by his email practices, Mr. Zou said, “I think that’s a huge misunderstanding.”

Mr. Zou also said he printed out employee contact information for projects that required him to work with global colleagues. “Equifax Canada did not want to reinvent the wheel from beginning,” he said, “so my job was to piggyback the success case” from the company’s U.S., U.K. and Latin American regions.

He said he disposed of all the documents before moving to China and joining Ant, and he denied targeting any ethnicity. “If you search a data analytics team, the likelihood is high that you will reach a Chinese employee,” he said.

Mr. Zou said he had never been contacted by Equifax or any government authorities about data theft, and learning he was suspected caused him “emotional turmoil.”

Although Equifax had gone to the FBI—and although the bureau was eager to pursue the matter—Equifax officials by the middle of 2016 had grown wary of providing more information to federal investigators.

Equifax worried that doing so could trigger requirements under securities law for disclosure of material information, said the people familiar with the investigation. They said Equifax also was concerned that handing over access to its entire network, including international operations, as the FBI had requested, could run afoul of obligations in some countries where Equifax operates.

Around the middle of 2016, Equifax told its internal investigators to comply with any potential subpoenas but to stop proactively providing information to law enforcement, said the people familiar with the investigation.

The person familiar with Equifax who disputed the notion the company directed employees to be uncooperative said: “As the investigation progressed, we did ask that requests for information be passed through our legal office to ensure we were adhering to standard legal protocols.”

Equifax continued to monitor certain employees through 2016 and 2017. It eventually confronted several ethnically Chinese employees over activities found in its investigation, who left before the company took further action, according to people familiar with the probe.

FBI officials in Atlanta got the impression from Equifax’s then-CEO, Mr. Smith, and legal staff that the company didn’t believe it generally had information valuable enough to be the target of a major Chinese campaign.

Mr. Smith told colleagues even if thieves had taken code, they didn’t have Equifax’s consumer data, which meant the theft wouldn’t pose a competitive threat. Moreover, Equifax didn’t see a material impact on current operations because the information that appeared to have been stolen related to products in development, not to existing ones.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta ultimately determined it didn’t have evidence the suspected thefts were directed by the Chinese government, a top priority for law enforcement. The prosecutors decided they wouldn’t pursue a case against any individual, since Equifax wasn’t eager to do so, and since what former employees were suspected of taking was corporate information, rather than anything directly affecting U.S. consumers.

The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

Then, in September 2017, came blockbuster news from Equifax: the disclosure that a hacking of its files had exposed highly sensitive personal data on more than 140 million Americans.

Equifax had learned six months earlier, in March 2017, of a software vulnerability, but waited months to fully check its encrypted traffic to see whether it had been breached. Only in July 2017 did Equifax realize the hack had exposed personal information, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth, of nearly half the U.S. population.

This delay was partially due to Equifax’s failure to resolve a dispute between its technology and information-security staffs at a time when top security people were focused on possible infiltration from China, in the opinion of some of the people familiar with the investigation.

The person familiar with Equifax’s thinking said the hack involved both human error and technological failure, and Equifax has been forthcoming about the causes.

In the weeks following the disclosure of that giant 2017 breach, Mr. Smith resigned, as did Ms. Mauldin and Equifax’s chief information officer, David Webb. All either couldn’t be reached or didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In January 2018, Chinese officials rolled out a state-backed credit-scoring company and gave Ant Financial an 8% stake.

Mr. Zou has returned to Canada. Ant transferred him from Sesame Credit to its Alipay international business unit in Hangzhou in mid-2017. On June 1 of this year, he moved to Alipay Canada in Vancouver.

N Korean, Park Jin hyok Charged with Global Cyber Attacks

U.S. CHARGES NORTH KOREAN HACKER

Federal prosecutors charged a North Korean man, Park Jin-hyok, with crimes in connection with a series of costly cyberattacks around the globe, including the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2018, the heist of Bangladesh’s central bank in 2017, and the hack of Sony Pictures in 2014. It is the first time the Justice Department has explicitly charged a North Korean hacker backed by the government. Park was allegedly working as a programmer for a North Korean front company in China called Chosun Expo, which had ties to North Korea’s military intelligence.

Legal analysts say the complaint is the most detailed public accounting yet of North Korea’s cyberattacks against foreign adversaries. The Justice Department has now brought hacking-related charges against North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia. (WSJ, NYT, Reuters, DOJ)

Park Jin Hyok, named by officials as a member of the so-called Lazarus Group hacking team behind last year’s WannaCry global ransomware attack and the 2014 digital attack on Sony, apparently used not only advanced technology, but elaborate reconnaissance work to digitally steal money and sensitive information.

First, Park would obtain a number of email addresses of people affiliated with target businesses from traders dealing in large amounts of personal information. Then he would use the emails to gain an understanding of company employees’ fields of interest and personal relationships.

That would let him craft emails that could pass as genuine messages from major companies in content and style, a tactic known as spear phishing. After spending some time building trust, he would send the malicious links to websites that would infect a target’s computer.

In one case, Park apparently masqueraded as a human resources official at a U.S. defense-linked company to exchange messages with workers at one of the company’s competitors.

Last week’s charges were said to be the first in years against a North Korean hacker related to high-profile attacks linked to the state. The attack on Sony came as the company was preparing to release a movie called “The Interview,” which depicted the assassination of a character resembling North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The group also allegedly stole $81 million from the central bank of Bangladesh in 2016.

A North Korean suspect is wanted by U.S. authorities on suspicion of hacking. (Courtesy of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation)

“We stand with our partners to name the North Korean government as the force behind this destructive global cyber campaign,” Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said in a statement on Sept. 6.

The U.S. Treasury also imposed sanctions on Park and a Chinese business he was affiliated with. “We will not allow North Korea to undermine global cybersecurity to advance its interests and generate illicit revenues in violation of our sanctions,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in his own statement.

Under Kim, the North has consolidated its cyber forces under its Reconnaissance General Bureau, which handles overseas spying. The state has a team of 6,800, according to the South Korean government, and is counted as one of the five cyber powers along with the U.S., Russia, China and Israel.

The core of cyber operations is a team known as “Bureau 121,” established in 1998 by Kim’s father, then-leader Kim Jong Il. Bureau 121 is known for its willingness to commit crimes for the sake of bringing in cash.

“The technology behind North Korea’s cybercrimes is some of the most advanced in the world,” said a source with the U.S. State Department.

Governments and businesses around the world are hurrying to guard themselves from the North’s attacks even as its methods grow more sophisticated. Further cooperation between countries’ cyberdefense authorities may be key to finding effective solutions.

British Airways: The airline said a “very sophisticated” hacker stole credit card details of hundreds of thousands of its customers in recent days. Anyone who lost out financially as a result of the breach would be compensated, BA officials said. (Reuters)

JPMorgan Hacker: A Russian man, Andrei Tyurin, has been extradited by Georgia to the United States on charges that he participated in the 2014 hack of JPMorgan Chase and other U.S. companies. (Reuters)

Middleweight Boxing Champion Led a Crime Syndicate

The Shulaya Enterprise was an organized criminal group operating under the direction and protection of Razhden Shulaya, a/k/a “Brother,” a/k/a “Roma,” a “vor v zakone” or “vor,” which are Russian phrases translated roughly as “Thief-in-Law” or “Thief,” and which refer to an order of elite criminals from the former Soviet Union who receive tribute from other criminals, offer protection, and use their recognized status as vor to adjudicate disputes among lower-level criminals.  As a vor, Shulaya had substantial influence in the criminal underworld and offered assistance to and protection of the members and associates of the Shulaya Enterprise.  Those members and associates, and Shulaya himself, engaged in widespread criminal activities, including acts of violence, extortion, the operation of illegal gambling businesses, fraud on various casinos, identity theft, credit card frauds, trafficking in large quantities of stolen goods, money laundering through a fraudulently established vodka import-export company, payment of bribes to local law enforcement officers, and the operation of a Brooklyn-based brothel.

The Shulaya Enterprise operated through groups of individuals, often with overlapping members or associates, dedicated to particular criminal tasks.  While many of these crews were based in New York City, the Shulaya Enterprise had operations in various locations throughout the United States (including in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Nevada) and abroad.  Most members and associates of the Shulaya Enterprise were born in the former Soviet Union and many maintained substantial ties to Georgia, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation, including regular travel to those countries, communication with associates in those countries, and the transfer of criminal proceeds to individuals in those countries.

Avtandil Khurtsidze VS Tommy Langford - ITS OFFICIAL - YouTube Not too sure he was not a spy either frankly.

Georgian former boxing champion Avtandil Khurtsidze has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for working as the “chief enforcer” for an “elite” criminal enterprise.

He was convicted in June in New York of racketeering and wire fraud conspiracy.

Prosecutors said the 38-year-old boxer had “substantial influence” in the criminal underworld as part of a Soviet Union crime gang.

They said Khurtsidze used violence in service of the group’s activities.

He and his associates, known as the Shulaya Enterprise, were blamed for crimes across the US including extortion, wire fraud, illegal gambling and operating a brothel in Brooklyn.

Many of the crew’s activities were based in New York but they also operated in other major cities as well as abroad, a justice department statement said.

Officials say most of its members were born in the former Soviet Union, with strong ties to Georgia, where the boxer was born.

Khurtsidze was caught on film twice carrying out assaults, with prosecutors describing him as a “heavyweight enforcer” for the group’s members and leadership.

He was also accused of participating in a complex fraud scheme to predict casino slot machines algorithms, which involved kidnapping a software engineer in Las Vegas in 2014.

Khurtsidze on shoulders with a belt above head
Getty Image
Image caption Khurtsidze was arrested in 2017, scuppering his chances at the WBO middleweight title

On top of his decade federal jail sentence, the Georgian boxer was given two further years supervision on release.

“Thanks to our dedicated law enforcement partners around the globe, Khurtsidze’s reign of extortion and violence has been halted,” US attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement.

‘Just a waste’

Khurtsidze held the interim WBO middleweight title in 2017.

His last professional fight was against British boxer Tommy Langford in April 2017, which he won.

A later bout against Billy Joe Sanders was cancelled after Khurtsidze was arrested along with more than 30 others in a swoop against the organised crime syndicate.

Following his conviction, his former promoter Lou DiBella criticised the boxer for squandering his career.

“He let many people down who believed in him, but no one more than himself. Just a waste, and it’s all on him for choosing the dark side,” Mr DiBella told ESPN.