The Last Boss of Brighton: Boris "Biba" Nayfeld and the Rise of the Russian Mob in America

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before he was hanging out with gang members, on his way to his own first experience with Soviet prisons. Now, aged 75, Nayfeld has provided the veteran journalist and true crime author Douglas Century with several hours of interviews, resulting in this blood-soaked biography. In a book so enjoyably mayhem-crammed as to make Howard Marks’s drug-smuggling memoir Mr Nice read like Barbara Pym. In the four years I’ve known Boris—interviewing him at his home, hanging out in noisy Brooklyn restaurants and scorching banyas—his personality remains a conundrum.

The Last Boss of Brighton: Boris Biba Nayfeld and the Rise of The Last Boss of Brighton: Boris Biba Nayfeld and the Rise of

The Last Boss of Brighton really takes me back: Douglas Century masterfully recreates a time and place—New York City in the 1980s—in which I played an intricate role . I’ve got a life-or-death personal connection to this story: in 1999, Biba was given a contract to kill me.

A veteran investigative journalist, Century’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Tablet and the Guardian.

The Last Boss of Brighton by Douglas Century | Waterstones

Well into their golden years, in retirement in Chicago and Miami Beach, I remember them reading Der Morgen Freiheit (“The Morning Freedom”), the far-left Yiddish-language newspaper published daily in New York City. In contrast to more established organized crime groups—as Boris never fails to remind me—their power lay in the fact that they felt they had fuck all to lose. He has always conducted himself with professionalism and integrity and we are all disappointed in this outcome. It was a brutally hard existence, leading to the one incident in his life he seems ashamed of: when he and his fellow prisoners were digging the foundation for a factory, they came across a mass grave of Holocaust victims, and stole their gold teeth.When I met Boris Nayfeld, he was seventy years old and on parole for his final felony conviction—a bizarre murder-for-hire plot turned into an extortion scheme that was splashed all over the tabloids for weeks; at the sentencing hearing in the Southern District of New York in July 2016, the prosecutor described Boris as “an extremely complicated person with a rich criminal history” who’d spent “most of his adult life in Russian organized crime. Their criminal genius lay in exploiting the unseen weaknesses within the economic system right under our noses. Coming into this fixture, Potter's team were the only side left in England's top four divisions without a win at home this season. Lifelong progressive idealists they may have been, and Yiddish was always the mama loshen—the “mother tongue”—yet they all became proud American citizens.