This Is The RICHEST Israeli Crime Family That OWNS The Global Diamond Trade

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[00:00:00]Most documentaries about Israeli organized crime open with a body. This one opens with a building, four interconnected towers in Ramat Gan, just east of Tel Aviv, that handle more polished diamonds than any complex on Earth. 3,000 members, 15,000 employees, roughly $9 billion in annual trade at peak. The world's largest diamond bourse.

[00:00:26]And in the apartment blocks and side streets around those towers, for 30 years, lived a family who would build the most successful Israeli criminal organization of the modern era. The Abergil organization did not own the global diamond trade. Nobody owns the global diamond trade. What they built was more lucrative, quieter, and harder to dismantle.

[00:00:51]They built an ecstasy empire that rode on the same Antwerp smuggling routes Israeli diamond dealers had carved through Belgium for half a century. And they laundered the proceeds through a sector the Israeli state had deliberately kept opaque since the day it was founded, Lod, public housing slum.

[00:01:11]250 million shekels stolen from the Israel Trade Bank. 1 million ecstasy pills moved through the streets of Los Angeles. [music] Three innocent Israelis killed on a Tel Aviv sidewalk in a single explosion that was meant for someone else. We pulled the 77 page federal [music] RICO indictment from the Central District of California. We pulled the 824 page verdict from Tel Aviv District Court Judge Gilia Raviv.

[00:01:42]And we read the Bank of Israel's own quiet admission about the $320 million pirate bank that operated inside the diamond exchange complex for 6 years before anyone shut it down.

[00:01:54]By By end of this, you will know why the family that built the apex of Israeli organized crime was headquartered next door to the world's largest diamond bourse.

[00:02:07]You will know how the Antwerp diamond pipeline became the Antwerp ecstasy pipeline.

[00:02:13]And you will know why the Israeli state spent 30 years protecting the conditions that made both of those things possible at the same time.

[00:02:22]The story starts in Lod, not in Ramat Gan, not [music] in Tel Aviv, in a public housing block called Resko in a development town that the state of Israel built in the 1950s to absorb Moroccan Jewish immigrants and then largely forgot about. Father Shalom Abergil was on disability.

[00:02:43]Mother Zuzu cleaned houses.

[00:02:46]There were 10 children, Yaakov, Yitzhak, Meir, and seven others growing up in a flat too small for half their number in a country that had decided their generation would be the manual labor of the new state.

[00:03:02]This is the geography that matters. The Israel Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan is 15 km from the Lod slum where the Abergil brothers grew up and it is 20 social classes away.

[00:03:15]The bourse was founded in October 1937 by a man named Moshe Schnitzer who would go on to serve as its president for nearly 30 years and grow Israeli diamond exports from $200 million to $3.4 billion. Schnitzer was the establishment.

[00:03:35]Ashkenazi connected. The Abergils were the underclass that the establishment did not see, but the diamond exchange the brothers grew up next to was not just an industry, it was an architecture. Ben Gurion's government had decided in the late 1940s that [music] diamonds and Jaffa oranges would carry the new state's foreign currency exports. To make that work, the state built a tax regime around the bourse that looked nothing like the tax regime around any other business in the country. Turnover-based taxation instead of profit-based, [music] no requirement to report individual transactions, an informal exemption from the cap on cash transactions. By the 1970s, the diamond trade was generating roughly a third of all Israeli exports, and the state had every reason to keep the architecture exactly the way it was.

[00:04:32]That architecture is the thing the rest of this story is built on.

[00:04:36]Keep it in mind. We will come back to it.

[00:04:40]Yaakov Abergil started the family business in the 1980s.

[00:04:44]Small-time at first, Lod-based, recruited his brothers as they came of age, allied himself with a Tel Aviv kingpin named Zeev Rosenstein, who was building his own ecstasy and gambling operation out of Hod Hasharon.

[00:05:02]For a while in the 1990s, the two organizations operated in parallel, occasionally cooperating, dividing markets.

[00:05:10]Then, the alliance fractured.

[00:05:12]Territory disputes, money disputes, the kind of disputes that in any other industry end with a lawsuit.

[00:05:22]In June of 2002, [music] Yaakov Abergil was shot to death in front of his five children. Israeli police believe the order came from Rosenstein. Nobody was ever convicted for the killing.

[00:05:37]Leadership of the organization passed to Yaakov's younger brother, Itzhak, with the third brother, Meir, handling the books. But here is what every documentary about Yaakov's killing leaves out. By the time he was murdered, his younger brother Itzhak was already running a parallel ecstasy operation out of Belgium that would, within four years, make the Abergils one of the top five drug cartels on Earth.

[00:06:04]Yaakov's death was not the start of the empire. It was the transition.

[00:06:10]If you have ever walked into a Tel Aviv nightclub between 2000 and 2006 or a warehouse rave in Los Angeles or a bar in Miami Beach and taken a pill from someone you trusted, there is a measurable chance the supply chain that put it in your hand ran through a warehouse in North Brabant operated by Itzhak Abergil.

[00:06:35]This is the part of the story where the diamonds come in, not as product, as infrastructure. Israeli diamond dealers had been moving rough and polished stones through the port of Antwerp since the 1960s.

[00:06:49]The relationship between the Ramat Gan bourse and the Antwerp diamond district was older than the state of Israel itself. Tens of thousands of Israelis lived and worked in Antwerp. Informal courier networks moved stones in suitcases and money in pouches across borders that had largely stopped looking. Family trust arrangements substituted for paperwork.

[00:07:12]Customs officials had been trained for decades not to disrupt the trade the Belgian government had decided was strategic.

[00:07:20]By the late 1990s, Dutch chemists in the southern Netherlands and Belgian chemists in Antwerp's industrial outskirts were producing roughly 80% of the world's MDMA ecstasy.

[00:07:34]The market in the United States was exploding. The product needed to move from Belgian and Dutch labs to American distributors. And the people who knew how to move small high-value objects through Antwerp without attracting attention were the Israelis who had been doing it with diamonds [music] for two generations. The United States Customs Commissioner, Raymond [music] Kelly, said it plainly in 2001.

[00:08:00]He told American reporters, "Quote, we'd seen them in the past be involved in diamond smuggling. The fact that it was drugs was new." End quote. He was talking about Israeli organized crime in general.

[00:08:14]He could have been describing the Abergil organization specifically.

[00:08:19]The pipeline was already there. The Abergils did not invent it. They put new trucks on the same road.

[00:08:27]This is the most important paragraph in this entire story.

[00:08:30]The Abergils never operationally controlled the diamond trade.

[00:08:35]Nobody named in any Israeli or American or Belgian indictment of the family was a registered Ramat Gan diamantaire.

[00:08:44]What the Abergils did was something more sophisticated. They inherited the underground logistics network that the legitimate diamond industry had built for decades, and they used it to move a completely different product. The bourse did not have to be criminal for the criminal organization to use its infrastructure.

[00:09:04]The bourse just had to be opaque, and the Israeli state had spent 50 years making sure it was.

[00:09:11]But smuggling pills was the easy part.

[00:09:14]Laundering a quarter of a billion shekels of stolen Israeli bank money through American businesses without anyone noticing, that required a different infrastructure entirely.

[00:09:26]Between 1997 and 2002, a bookkeeper at the Israel Trade Bank named Etti Alon embezzled in 250 million shekels in stolen funds. She was not stealing for herself. Her brother, Ofer Maximov, was a gambling addict who had been borrowing money from a Jerusalem-based organized crime cell that operated as a feeder organization to the Abergils. Maximov could not pay.

[00:09:57]The Jerusalem gang told him his sister worked at a bank. They suggested she could pay instead. So, she did. Five years of fraudulent loans, falsified accounts, vanished funds. The money flowed from the Trade Bank to Maximov to the Jerusalem gang and into the Abergil organization. When Etti Alon was finally caught in 2002, she received 17 years.

[00:10:23]Her brother got 10.

[00:10:25]The Jerusalem gang figures got various sentences. The bank collapsed and was absorbed by another institution and the Abergils kept the money. But, the genius of the Abergil business model was not in stealing the money. It was in what they did with it next. They did not hide the money. They lent it back out through Israeli front operators in Los Angeles and Miami. The Abergils offered loans to Israeli business people living in the United States, restaurant owners, jewelry wholesalers, real estate developers.

[00:11:02]The terms were predatory. The collateral was the borrower's life.

[00:11:06]Once the loan was made, the Abergils would systematically extort the borrower for additional payments, threats, family pressure, and occasional violence.

[00:11:16]The original capital came back. The interest was extracted by force. And from the perspective of any American bank or regulator, the money flowing through the borrower's legitimate business looked exactly like the proceeds of a legitimate American business.

[00:11:33]The money laundered itself through the victim. Antwerp's diamond establishment, when it needed to launder money, did it through legal settlements written by their own lawyers.

[00:11:44]We covered that story when we looked at the Belgian carrot tax and the Omega Diamonds case. The Abergils, who did not have lawyers writing Belgian tax law, did something far more efficient.

[00:11:57]They laundered through the people they were extorting.

[00:12:01]The victim cleaned the money for them.

[00:12:03]Meanwhile, the American operation was scaling. The MDMA pills were arriving in shipping containers through Newark and Long Beach. The Abergils used Hasidic Jewish couriers from Brooklyn, young religious men who could move through American airports without raising suspicion, to transport the product to distributors.

[00:12:28]The Los Angeles Police Department seized 400,000 pills in July of 2002, a street value of approximately $5 million.

[00:12:39]United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized another 100,000 pills in the Midwest.

[00:12:45]The federal indictment that would eventually come down alleged the distribution of approximately 1 million pills across California alone.

[00:12:54]And then, in the summer of 2003, a low-level Abergil operative named Sammy Attias allegedly stole 76 kg of ecstasy from the organization. The street value was somewhere around $8 million.

[00:13:09]Itzhak Abergil flew to Spain [music] to meet with senior associates and approve the response. The order came back.

[00:13:17]Sammy Attias would die.

[00:13:20]On August 31st, 2003, Attias was sitting in the parking lot of a cafe in Sherman Oaks, California in the San Fernando Valley north of [music] Los Angeles. Two men from a Latino street gang called the Vineland Boys based in North Hollywood approached his car.

[00:13:39]They shot him to death in the parking lot. The killing was contracted out, paid in cash, executed clean.

[00:13:47]The Abergil organization had subcontracted a Latino American street gang to murder a Moroccan Israeli ecstasy thief on American soil.

[00:13:56]This is the moment everything changed because the United States now had a body, a body on American territory, and no matter how thick the 1978 Israeli extradition shield was, and it was very thick, a federal murder charge with American victims in American jurisdiction would eventually override it. The Atias killing was the single most consequential murder in the history of Israeli organized crime, and the Abergils did not know it yet, but while American prosecutors were quietly building the file that would eventually break the organization, the Abergils were still focused on their war with Ze'ev Rosenstein.

[00:14:40]On December 11th, 2003, a man named Ofer Bodana walked into a narrow stretch of downtown Tel Aviv where Allenby Street meets Yehuda Halevi Street. He was carrying a device. He had been instructed by Itzhak Abergil, communicating from Belgium, to place the device above the doorway of a currency exchange kiosk owned by an associate of Ze'ev Rosenstein.

[00:15:09]Rosenstein was expected to visit the kiosk that afternoon. The device was set to detonate when he arrived. Rosenstein did not arrive.

[00:15:19]Three other men did. Naftali Magad, Rahamim Tzaroya, Moshe Mizrahi. None of them had anything to do with organized crime. They were Israelis walking through downtown Tel Aviv on a Thursday afternoon. The device detonated. All three were killed. 18 other people were wounded. It is worth saying their names a second time.

[00:15:44]Naftali Magad, Rahamim Tzaroya, Moshe Mizrahi. Three civilians killed by an explosion intended for a man they did not know, ordered by a man in another country over a dispute about ecstasy pills and territory and ego that none of them had ever heard of. The Yehuda Halevi bombing was the moment the Israeli state was finally forced to look at its own organized crime problem directly. For three decades, the Israeli political establishment had treated organized crime as a manageable nuisance, embarrassing, occasionally violent, but ultimately compatible with normal national life.

[00:16:28]Yehuda Halevi made that position untenable. Three civilians dead on a Tel Aviv sidewalk in broad daylight was not a manageable nuisance. It was a state failure.

[00:16:41]In 2008, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter established Lahav 433.

[00:16:49]Five investigative units merged into one, an Israeli FBI.

[00:16:55]Its first major target was the Abergil organization, but Lahav 433 could not solve the deeper problem on its own. The deeper problem was that the Abergils were Israeli citizens, and Israeli citizens could not be extradited to face foreign charges. That had been the law since 1978, when Menachem begins government, drawing on Holocaust-era distrust of foreign courts, amended Israel's extradition statute to forbid the transfer of Israeli nationals to any other country's jurisdiction.

[00:17:31]For 23 years, that shield made Israel a haven for Israeli criminals operating abroad.

[00:17:38]Money laundered through Antwerp, ecstasy moved through Belgium, fraud committed in the United States. None of it could result in an Israeli being put on a plane to face foreign prosecution. The shield broke twice.

[00:17:53]First, in the Samuel Sheinbein case in 1997, when a Maryland teenager murdered his co-worker, dismembered the body, and fled to Israel using his father's citizenship. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled 2001 that Sheinbein could not be extradited. American congressional fury and Knesset amendment number six and amendment number seven, passed in 1999 and 2001, finally created an extradition pathway.

[00:18:23]Israelis could now be sent abroad to face charges, but with the right to serve any resulting sentence at home in Israel.

[00:18:32]Ze'ev Rosenstein was the first major beneficiary, or victim, of the new regime.

[00:18:39]Extradited to the United States in March of 2006 on charges related to a million ecstasy pills distributed in New York and Miami. [music] 12 years in American federal prison.

[00:18:53]Repatriated to Israel in 2007.

[00:18:57]Released on parole around 2020 after roughly 17 years total in custody.

[00:19:04]He is approximately 71 years old now. He does not give interviews. The Abergils were next.

[00:19:12]If you've made it this far and you're finding this useful, leave a comment and subscribe.

[00:19:19]There are a lot more of these coming and they only work because people watch them all the way through.

[00:19:26]On July 13th, 2008, the United States Attorney for the Central District of California unsealed a 77-page federal indictment in the case of United States versus Abergil and others, docket number 208- CR-01033.

[00:19:48]32 counts, racketeering, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to import MDMA, money laundering, extortion. The named defendants included Itzhak Abergil, Meir Abergil, Moshe Malul, Israel Ozifa, Sasson Barashi, Yoram Alal, and Luis Sandoval of the Vagos Boys. The case was assigned to Judge Christina A. Snyder. The legal fight inside Israel took 2 and 1/2 years. The Israeli Supreme Court rejected the Abergils' final appeal against extradition on December 6th, 2010.

[00:20:27]The next morning, a noose was found hanging near the home of Justice Hanan Melcer, one of the judges who had signed the ruling.

[00:20:36]On January 12th, 2011, Itzhak Abergil, Meir Abergil, Moshe Malul, Israel Ozifa, and Sasson Barashi boarded an American government plane in handcuffs and flew to Los Angeles. Meir Abergil, the bookkeeper brother, pleaded guilty in April of 2011 to a single count of extortion involving threats to collect $1,000,000 350,000.

[00:21:05]He received 36 months.

[00:21:08]He was returned to Israel in August of that year.

[00:21:11]He was released on parole in 2021.

[00:21:16]He has kept a low profile since. Itzhak Abergil pleaded guilty in May of 2012 to RICO conspiracy, conspiracy to commit murder in aid of racketeering, and conspiracy to import MDMA.

[00:21:33]On May 21st, 2012, Judge Snyder sentenced him to 10 years in federal prison. Moshe Malul received 15 years.

[00:21:43]Israel Ozifa received eight. Sasson Barashi received four and a half.

[00:21:50]>> [snorts] >> Itzhak Abergil was repatriated to Israel in January of 2014 to complete his American sentence in an Israeli prison, but the American case was never the real reckoning. The real reckoning came 9 years later in a Tel Aviv courtroom, when an Israeli judge spent 824 pages reconstructing what had actually happened on December 11th, 2003.

[00:22:16]And when she did, she revealed something far more uncomfortable than the existence of one criminal family from Lod.

[00:22:24]She revealed why the Israeli state had let it happen for 30 years.

[00:22:29]On November 16th, 2021, Tel Aviv District Court Judge Gilia Ravid issued her verdict in what Israeli prosecutors called Case 512, the umbrella prosecution that consolidated roughly 40 separate investigations into Itzhak Abergil's role in the Yehuda Halevi bombing, the broader Abergil organization, and a chain of other murders and conspiracies stretching back two decades. The verdict ran 824 pages. It convicted Yitzhak Abergil on nearly every count. On June 28th, 2022, Judge Ravid sentenced him to three life sentences plus 30 years plus 1.5 million shekels in compensation to the families of his victims.

[00:23:20]The Israeli Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in 2024.

[00:23:25]He is now held in the secure wing of Shata prison in northern Israel. A Jerusalem Post reporter who visited him in late 2024 described him as, quote, "left all but penniless, tired, exhausted." End quote.

[00:23:43]The Abergil organization as an operational entity no longer exists.

[00:23:48]Yitzhak is in Shata. Meir is on parole and out of the trade. Yakov is dead.

[00:23:55]Moshe Malul is in American federal custody. The core leadership is gone.

[00:24:01]Israeli police formally delisted the Abergil organization as a recognized criminal organization in the early 2020s, but the architecture they operated inside is still there. A few months ago, >> [music] >> we did a video on Antwerp's diamond district and how it actually operates.

[00:24:21]We covered how lawyers for the Antwerp World Diamond Center drafted the 2011 Belgian settlement law that allowed Omega Diamonds to walk away from a 4.6 billion euro tax fraud claim for 160 million euros.

[00:24:38]And how Koen Geens became finance minister of Belgium [music] days before that settlement was approved. The Ramat Gan story is the same architecture in a different language. The same strategic export shelter built into national tax law. The same lobby drafted exemptions.

[00:24:57]the same arrangement where the people who would have been prosecuted under any normal regulatory regime are the people writing the rules that govern their own industry.

[00:25:09]In the Israeli case, the architecture had a name.

[00:25:13]From the founding of the Bourse in [music] 1937 through the 1948 Independence War through Moshe Schnitzer's three decades as IDE president, the Israeli state treated the diamond industry as untouchable, not because it was clean, but because it generated foreign currency exports the new state desperately needed. Turnover-based taxation, no transaction-level reporting, the informal exemption from the cap on cash transactions that applied to every other Israeli business, the Israel Diamond Institute as a government-funded trade body that lobbied the same Knesset that was supposed to be regulating it.

[00:25:58]>> [music] >> The documented diamond laundering record from inside the Ramat Gan Bourse is its own catalog. Between 2005 and 2011, an illegal pirate bank operated literally inside the diamond exchange complex processing approximately $320 million in undocumented transactions for diamond dealers using fictitious invoices in a two-week record destruction cycle. The operator, Menachem Magin, received four years. Five diamantaires were indicted.

[00:26:33]Industry business inside the Bourse dropped 70% in the month after the case broke. The Bank of Israel itself, in its own subsequent press releases, cited the underground bank case as the trigger for sector reform.

[00:26:49]In 2016, a broker named Hanan Abramovich was investigated for a $65 million fraud inside the exchange.

[00:27:00]In 2018, L.L.D.

[00:27:03]L.L.D. Diamonds, owned by the Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, was implicated in a smuggling scheme that moved approximately $80 million of stones from Russia to Israel between 2010 and 2018 using couriers who concealed the diamonds in body cavities. The company pleaded guilty in October of 2022.

[00:27:30]Charges against Leviev personally were dropped. The Financial Action Task Force, the international body that grades countries on their anti-money laundering compliance, rated Israel only partially compliant on its diamond sector oversight in its 2018 mutual evaluation.

[00:27:50]The FATF report noted that diamond dealers, lawyers, and accountants had, quote, "only recently been incorporated in the anti-money laundering regime," end quote.

[00:28:04]The recent date the FATF was referring to was 2014, 77 years after the Bourse was founded.

[00:28:12]This is the system the Abergils operated inside, not as diamond dealers, as neighbors.

[00:28:19]The same opacity that let billions of dollars in unreported diamond transactions flow through Ramat Gan let the Abergils launder Trade Bank money, hide American extortion proceeds, and move ecstasy profits across borders without serious scrutiny.

[00:28:36]The state had decided in 1948 that the diamond industry would not be regulated like other industries. The Abergils, growing up 15 km away in Lod, understood that decision better than most. They lived in the shadow of an exception, and they made themselves at home there. The Abergils did not own the global diamond trade. They lived [music] in its shadow. They used its smuggling routes. They exploited the tax regime that had been built to protect it, and they laundered the proceeds of an entirely separate criminal industry through a sector that the Israeli state had deliberately kept opaque for 50 years because that opacity generated foreign currency exports a young country needed to survive. The diamond trade and the criminal family were not separate phenomena.

[00:29:28]They were two outputs of the same architecture, an industry the state had chosen not to look at, and a family that learned how to live underneath that choice. The question is not how the Abergils became one of the richest criminal organizations of the modern era. The question is whether anyone today in any Israeli ministry or any diamond bourse in any city could honestly say that the system that allowed them to operate has actually been dismantled, or whether what was dismantled was only one family while the architecture that produced them remains exactly where it has always been. If this story changed how you see the trade, subscribe to the channel. We are not done with this one.