Oh boy what fun. I knew there had to be something further there when I saw the passing mention of taxi medallion biz and Brighton Beach.

Josh does share this interest in these sub-cultures, so thanks for pointing this out, he will probably continue to dig in his spare time. For others interested, I do recommend his links.

One major difference with the Italian mob and even the bigger Russian "mob" is that the Brighton Beach crews have a composition that skews heavily ethnic Jewish but not at all practicing, because the hood is made up of Soviet exile Jews from the 70's and 80's..So the whole sub-culture is real interesting. If you were a Sopranos fan, they presented it pretty well in the few characters though not deeply.

As time went on you also got the development of other SSR exiles making connections with the Brighton Beach mob guys, i.e., there's an Albanian mob. I used a master plumber in 2016 clearly connected to the latter, first name Zev. He had Trump stickers all over his truck,and tried to talk up Trump with me (and a male friend I asked to come over to protect me!) Zev and his assistant could easily have been Sopranos characters as to speech patterns and behavior. When he started on the Trump shit, my friend started to engage but I just said: Zev, we're artsy liberals, just leave us alone on the Trump crap! And he did, he got  that, he just moved on to other aggravating comments about Irish who had probably done the previous plumbing work on my house..