He was a glasnost entrepreneur trying to forge a new future out of the ruins of post-Soviet Russia. Now, the Russian immigrant to the San Fernando Valley is trying to convince a federal jury that his resourceful style of communist-busting capitalism did not turn into a kidnap-for-ransom murder scheme that ended with five bodies in a Sierra lake.
The jury is expected to begin deliberating today whether Iouri Mikhel and co-defendant Jurijus Kadamovas were responsible for the deaths of the five victims, who were strangled with flexible ties or smothered with plastic bags, their heads bound with duct tape, their bodies tossed into a remote Northern California reservoir in the dead of night.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday January 27, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 69 words Type of Material: Correction
Emigres' murder trial: : An article in the Jan. 16 California section about the federal trial of two emigres from the former Soviet Union accused in a kidnapping and murder plot reported that all five victims were Russian emigres. Meyer Muscatel, the first victim, was a U.S. citizen born in the United States. Three other victims -- Rita Pekler, Alexander Umansky and Nick Kharabadze -- were naturalized U.S. citizens.
Mikhel, 42, and Kadamovas, 40, face possible death sentences for their alleged roles in what prosecutors say was a grisly conspiracy carried out partly in a posh Tudor home in a hillside neighborhood of Encino. The alleged plot links international money launderers and local muscle-for-hire, Russian organized crime and Valley real estate barons, a phony front man named "Raul" and a temptress dubbed "Natalya from Moscow."
For ill-gotten gains that included mink coats, a Mercedes-Benz and a pair of purebred Dobermans, prosecutors say, Mikhel and Kadamovas planned an elaborate set of crimes carried out against members of the Valley's close-knit Russian emigre community.
After they were arrested, they allegedly hatched an equally elaborate plot to escape from the federal jail in downtown Los Angeles, going so far as to pull a hydraulic pump up to their cells on a string.
But defense attorneys argue that the federal probe has netted the wrong people. Slender, erudite Mikhel -- a "magician" and "moneyman," according to his attorneys -- would not have dirtied his hands with a clumsy and brutal murder scheme, they argued.
As for Kadamovas, a squatter version of Vladimir Lenin, with a goatee, shiny pate and owlish wire-rim glasses, defense attorneys say the one-time vacuum cleaner salesman was only Mikhel's lackey, handling his errands and paperwork in the hope that the latter would invest in his burgeoning fish tank business.
The two men's defense attorneys, though sometimes at odds, agree on one point: The murders were committed by underlings who got out of hand, then cut deals with prosecutors to escape harsh punishment.
