MIAMI — It was a typical night at Porky's, a strip joint known for its Russian dancers in the seedy Miami suburb of Hialeah.
The girls were grinding on the dance floor while, inside the club's inner office, cut off from the driving rhythms, owner Ludwig Fainberg was talking business. Big business, federal prosecutors now say: drug business, Russian mafia business and how the two were coming together in a single deal.
And the U.S. government was listening.
According to documents recently filed in federal court here, on that night in April 1995 Fainberg explained to an undercover U.S. drug enforcement agent a deal he was brokering between Russian organized crime and Colombian drug lords to provide a $35-million Soviet navy submarine to the biggest cocaine cartel in South America.
Fainberg, a Russian immigrant from Israel better known as Tarzan, had been boasting about the submarine deal for weeks, according to FBI affidavits made public earlier this year in Ft. Lauderdale federal court. Just three weeks before, at a nearby restaurant, Fainberg had introduced the undercover agent to Juan Almeida, a Cuban-born broker of "exotic" automobiles, aircraft and vessels, who prosecutors allege had contacts in Colombia's drug underworld.
Together, Fainberg and Almeida had already supplied the Colombians with half a dozen Soviet MI-8 military helicopters that the two men had obtained through military contacts in Russia for $1 million each, according to court records in the case, which is scheduled to go to trial in Florida in September.
But that night at Porky's, Fainberg pulled out a map of the western United States and told the agent how the Russian submarine, capable of carrying 40 tons of cocaine per trip, would bring a new global nexus between the Russians and Colombians to the very heart of Southern California.
In his sworn affidavit, FBI agent Anthony Cuomo said Fainberg explained "how the submarine was going to transport cocaine from Mexico, passing by the U.S. naval station in San Diego . . . and unloading the cocaine off the coast of Santa Barbara."
The conversation was one of 11,000 in several languages recorded through wiretaps and hidden microphones at Porky's and elsewhere in 1995.
Fainberg and Almeida were indicted on federal racketeering charges in January 1997. It was unclear from court records--and prosecutors refused to comment on--why charges were not filed until 1997 and why the submarine deal was never completed.
