Of all the big stories that have been clogging the news over the past week, I'm most interested in the arrest of Israeli organized crime figure Ze'ev Rosenstein. I actually first heard about him when I lived in Tokyo, if you can believe it.
Quite a few young Israelis spend a few months in Japan selling fake designer purses, wallets and watches from outdoor stands. This is regarded as an opportunity to save some money and use it to finance a trip to India or Australia, both popular stops on the "world tour" that is for many a sort of gap year between army service and beginning one's university studies. I got to know some of them in Tokyo, and that's where I learned about the long arm of Israeli organized crime.
I lived in Shibuya, one of the most fashionable and congested commercial areas of Tokyo. The streets leading from the subway station to my home were dotted with stands, mostly staffed by Israelis, that displayed fake Gucci wallets, fake Rolexes and junk jewellery imported from Thailand.
On my way home from another exhausting marathon day at the investment bank that was my then-employer, I often stopped to chat with the Israelis. It was a relief to unwind, buy a take-away coffee at Starbucks and stand around joking in Hebrew. During one of those chats, one Israeli guy explained that the fake designer goods business in Japan was run by a couple of Israeli mafia "families", in cooperation with the yakuza. They paid the Israeli kids who ran the stands 40% of the profits on what they sold, and split the remaining 60% between themselves.
If the kids working the stands got arrested by the Japanese police, however, they were on their own. Later I met a woman who worked at the Israeli consulate in Tokyo; part of her job description involved informing Israeli parents that their offspring had been arrested for a) working illegally on a tourist visa and b) selling counterfeit designer goods. Usually they were held incommunicado for several days at a jail near the airport, before being deported to Israel at their own expense. If they couldn't afford the fare, the consulate lent it to them.
Anyways, this Israeli guy told me that in the neighbouring area of Roppongi, which was filled with hostess and strip bars staffed mostly by foreign women (among them Israeli women), there was a turf war going on between Israeli and Russian mob figures over the drug trade. Rosenstein's name came up in that conversation. According to the story, one of his local drug dealers had been chased off Russian turf in Roppongi by a knife-wielding Slav, an incident that had the denizens of that seedy area buzzing for a few weeks. Street violence is very rare in Japan - practically unheard of - so it was a big story.
Fast forward about one year, back to Tel Aviv. It was December 2003, and I was working on the 26th floor of a modern office building. My window faced Yehuda haLevi Street, and featured a fabulous panoramic view of Tel Aviv, hugging the beach from Jaffa in the south up to Reading in the north. It was one of those sunny mid-December mornings, when you're fooling yourself into believing that maybe this year the gloomy winter rainy season won't ever start. We were already discussing where we would go for lunch - which is what you spend a lot of time doing when your job is so boring you want to scream - when suddenly we were shocked into silence by the concussive sound of an enormous explosion very nearby.
"Pigua!" (terrorist attack) we all shouted simultaneously, as we ran to look out the window and find the source of the blast.
It wasn't hard. There was a big cloud of dust and debris floating upwards just five minutes' walk away on Yehuda haLevi Street. It was right across the street from the restaurant at which we were planning to have lunch.
One of the guys in my office had a pair of binoculars in his desk, and I'm sorry to say that I succumbed to morbid temptation and saw things I would prefer not to have seen.
The rescue services arrived within 30 seconds. Literally. The dust hadn't even settled before we heard multiple sirens wailing from a distance, becoming louder as they approached the scene.
Radios were turned on, news Web sites were logged on to, and the de rigeur phone calls to family members ("I'm okay; are you okay?") were made.
Then we went out to lunch. At a restaurant on Yehuda haLevy - just a little further away. We sat outdoors because it was a warm and sunny day. We ate quiche and salad, and drank lemonade, watched the ambulances speed by and remarked in world-weary tones how messed up it was that we were eating lunch while just a couple of minutes' walk down the road the rescue service workers were collecting body parts.
By the time we got back to the office we knew that the explosion had been a criminal attack rather than a political one. One of Ze'ev Rosenstein's enemies had set off a bomb at a check cashing place that Rosenstein was known to frequent. The bomb was intended for the mob kingpin, but he got away without a scratch. Three bystanders were killed.
I was absolutely outraged by that incident. Here we were dealing with terrorist attacks several times per week, and all the emotional pressure that living with that fear in the back of your mind entails, and these assholes were scaring us and killing innocent people by trying to bomb each other.
The following day I read in a newspaper that Israeli police were complaining that they didn't have the funding or manpower to deal with organized crime.
And several weeks later I saw Rosenstein at one of those star-studded parties for TV and movie actors and musicians. He was sitting at the bar with a couple of rejects from the Sopranos, flirting with leggy blondes and looking as if he didn't have a care in the world.
And now he's under arrest because American law enforcement agents caught some of his guys in Queens with 700,000 Ecstasy pills. They pushed the Israelis to arrest him for extradition to the USA, and so they did. Why it took so long, why the Israeli cops needed the American cops to lean on them to arrest this scumbag, are open questions. But the important thing is, they got him. Finally.
Oh and by the way, I see that even Al Jazeera is covering this story.