Ludwig "Tarzan" Fainberg (1 March 1958-) was a Ukrainian-Jewish arms smuggler affiliated with the Russian Mafia.
Biography[]
Ludwig Lyosha Fainberg was born in Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union on 1 March 1958 to a family of Ukrainian Jews, and he left for Israel in the early 1970s among a surge of Jewish immigration. He served in the Israeli Navy before moving to the United States, settling in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York City. Fainberg did "torch jobs" for an American Mafia mobster, forcing people to buy his boss' furniture. Fainberg later moved to Miami, Florida and founded the Porky's strip club in 1990, and he was involved with the drug trade, prostitution, entertainment, and other rackets there. Fainberg befriended Colombian drug trafficker Juan Almeida while he was in Miami, and the two men owned yachts and travelled to Cancun, Mexico. In 1993, he helped Almeida buy six Russian military helicopters from the cash-starved Russian Army, and Almeida also sought to buy a submarine from the Russian Navy in order to smuggle drugs. The two men met Fainberg's naval contact at a naval base in Russia to buy the submarine, arranging to buy the submarine for $15,000,000. However, the DEA investigated Fainberg's ties to Almeida, and undercover DEA agent Alexander Yasevich managed to discover this plot. On 21 January 1997, Fainberg was arrested in Miami after dropping his daugther off at daycare, and he was charged with 37 federal offenses ranging from conspiracy to wire fraud. Fainberg decided to cut a deal with the government, providing a testimony against Almeida in exchange for serving just 33 months in jail. Fainberg was deported to Israel after leaving prison, and he was jailed in Panama in October 2012 for pimping.