Miami, Booby Traps, and the Mob: What Became of the Russian and Colombian Gangsters Who Ran the Most Ambitious Crime Scheme in the City's History From a Dingy Strip Club?

Business affairs generally concluded with a happy ending at Porky’s, but, it turns out, that didn't prove to be true for the plotters who tried to sell a Soviet submarine to the Cali Cartel.

The Facebook page dedicated to “the memory of a historical landmark…where many became family. If you didn’t know about Porky’s, you simply didn’t know about Miami.”

Strip clubs are commonly operated by mobsters and disproportionately frequented by underworld elements that run prostitution, drug, weapons, money laundering and other rackets, so it’s all but inevitable they’re similarly overrepresented on the list of businesses that law enforcement and intelligence agencies monitor most closely. In Miami, strip clubs, or titty bars to use the common local vernacular, have been the setting for a number of particularly extraordinary cases that made national and international headlines. 

None were more bizarre or consequential than what unfolded long ago at Porky’s, an establishment on Okeechobee Road in Hialeah, which sits just outside of city limits in Miami-Dade County. Though the main events transpired in the 1990s and Porky’s has been out of business for 15 years, it remains the most infamous strip club in Miami’s history. 

Founded by a Soviet-born mobster known as “Tarzan” in 1991, the year the USSR collapsed, Porky’s advertising slogan was "Get Lost in the Land of Love." A club bartender referred to it less charitably as “the kind of place where you could get killed” during an interview five years later with FBI agents who were investigating Porky’s emergence as a local headquarters of organized crime. 

The most spectacular finding that came out of the investigation was that Tarzan and a group of his close associates, who had ties to various Eastern European and South American criminal organizations, had been scheming to sell a Soviet submarine to the Cali Cartel, which planned to use it to transport cocaine cocaine from Colombia into the United States. The cast of characters included Tarzan, whose real name was Ludwig Fainberg; “Fat Tony” Galeota, his Italian-born right-hand man who allegedly ran a prostitution ring from the strip club; and two Cuban emigres to Miam, Juan Almeida, who brokered sales of Russian helicopters to international drug traffickers; and Nelson Yester, an associate of Pablo Escobar. 

It’s always worth remembering that in Miami, things are rarely the way they first appear, which was indisputably the case in regards to the plot hatched by Fainberg and his associates at the Hialeah strip club. However, business affairs at Porky’s almost always finished with a happy ending, in a manner of speaking, but that didn’t prove to be entirely true for the four main co-conspirators behind the botched Russia-to-Colombia submarine deal, though the eventual outcome for the individual crew members, which I pieced together from recent news reports and court documents, could have been infinitely worse, as all would surely acknowledge. 

Porky’s owner Ludwig “Tarzan” Fainberg,“ on left, and his right-hand man “Fat Tony” Galeota. The undated photograph is on the Facebook page dedicated to the strip club’s memory.

Outside of Washington, Miami is the country’s No. 2 stomping ground for military, intelligence, and law enforcement operatives. For professionals in those fields, it’s effectively a job requirement to become familiar with strip clubs as their clients include so many persons of interest to criminal and counterintelligence investigators.

The majority of strip club customers aren’t crime lords, of course, and Miami titty bars are woven into the city’s economic and social fabric more than anywhere else in the country. The industry generates a notable chunk of the city’s GDP and club owners make political contributions and forge political connections the same way other business leaders do. Options for couples making weekend plans might well include going to a strip club along with having dinner at a new restaurant, seeing a movie, bowling, and other more conventional choices.

Another feature that’s somewhat unique to Miami is that it’s extremely expensive to live in relative to most major American cities, but wages conversely are incredibly low. Many residents live hand-to- mouth and have to work two or three jobs to pay the bills, so strip clubs can be a potentially fast route to big money for young women. The most popular strippers in Miami are local celebrities and, as with superstar sports free agents, have become the target of bidding wars between competing clubs.

It can be a slippery slope, needless to say. I’ve interviewed dancers at Miami clubs who told me that when they began their first job, they vowed to reject all offers from clients to pay for sexual intercourse – which is technically forbidden at licensed venues, but can often be arranged if the two parties mutually agree upon the price and the customer adds a bribe for the employee who manages traffic at the VIP room – but acknowledged they had broken their own rules on occasion because they made so much more money of they agreed to.

Many dancers also turn to booze or drugs to get through their shifts and others get pulled into the porn industry, which owns many Miami clubs. That becomes increasingly common for women who remain in the industry for many years, because as dancers age they become less “viable,” as one put it, and porn and prostitution become the only way to keep making enough money to live on.  

It’s usually easy to keep clear of trouble at Miami strip clubs as long as you’re polite to the dancers and other employees, especially the bouncers. However, while the numbers of criminally-inclined owners and customers in the local industry are small in overall terms, they’re relatively large as a share of the total in comparison to most business sectors. 

When that’s combined with the city’s prevailing ethos of jungle capitalism, where high expenses and low pay make hustling a necessity for most residents, that contributes to the con artistry and corruption that Miami’s famous for, so it’s always best to keep your eyes open. A 2022 gang shoot out at 6 a.m. in the parking lot of a branch of a popular local chain of strip clubs named Booby Trap didn’t result in any casualties, but is typical of the random violence that periodically erupts in the flash of an eye at city strip clubs. 

Out of town visitors often want to check out the strip club scene in Miami, which violates by orders of magnitude local moral standards in most parts of the country. Unless accompanied by a local, tourists are the most common marks because local grifters are far more sophisticated than the national average as well.

In a scam exposed in 2012, and emulated less ambitiously ever since, two-person teams of attractive young women flirted with guests at South Beach hotel bars, ordered rounds of drinks – which they discreetly poured out as their targets got hammered – and lured them to a nearby Caviar Bar. While it looked like an ordinary watering hole, the bar was run by the Russian mob and the entire staff, including the young women, were on payroll. 

After being completely wrecked with additional booze, the marks were escorted back to their hotel rooms. Soon after waking up in an alcoholic blackout, they’d discover their credit cards were maxed out by exorbitant charges for champagne, caviar, naturally, and other items they had no recollection of ordering or consuming.

Of course, some in the law enforcement and intelligence communities are drawn to strip clubs by the same recreational opportunities that bring in regular customers. In 2022, an FBI official in Cincinnati acknowledged agents based in the city spent more than $100,000 during a field visit to Miami, including large expenditures at Tootsie’s, which bills itself “the largest strip club in the world featuring over 300 sexy full nude entertainers daily.”

Photos from the Instagram page of a popular Miami strip club named Booby Trap.

Fainberg, or Tarzan as he was affectionately known by his friends, had been a dentist in the Soviet Union before he emigrated to Israel in the early-1980's, from there to Brooklyn, where he reportedly ran a coin-operated video-game business, and then on to Miami, where he soon joined up with a local branch of the Russian Mob. Later described by the FBI as “a maître d’ for criminals,” Tarzan sold drugs, weapons, and women from Porky’s, which he named after his favorite movie of the same name, which in the words of an online summary, tells the story of a group of Florida high school students who “try to help their buddy lose his virginity, which leads them to seek revenge on a sleazy nightclub owner.”  

In 1993, two years after Tarzan opened the strip club, where he met his future associates Fat Tony, Almeida and Yester, local cops received a tip regarding a wide range of serious criminal activity at Porky’s. That led to the creation of Operation Odessa, a federal and state organized crime task force directed by law enforcement and intelligence officials. 

After one of Tarzan’s Russian contacts called to see if he was interested in acquiring a Soviet submarine, Yester, who had close connections to a variety of South American drug traffickers, negotiated a deal to sell it to Cali Cartel members for $35 million. To convince the traffickers they could deliver it, Yester sent them photographs showing him and Tarzan standing beside the submarine at a Russian naval base with several military officers. Yester’s cartel associates immediately wired him $10 million as the first installment towards the full purchase price.

Unfortunately for the Porky’s gang, Operation Odessa had a wiretap on Tarzan’s phone and heard him discussing the proposed submarine deal. In 1996, a task force undercover agent posing as a cartel trafficker infiltrated the crew and Fainberg and the other key plotters were arrested later that year.

The following year, Fainberg was sentenced to prison for three years, a term that was reduced in exchange for evidence he provided against Almeida. Fainberg was deported to Israel after his release but soon departed for Panama City, where he opened a strip club called Dollhouse. 

Almeida faced 10 years to life in prison, but skated when Tarzan recanted his testimony from Israel. He was back in court in 2018 and sentenced to six years in prison on drug trafficking charges.

Yester disappeared overseas before he could be apprehended and remained a fugitive for two decades. That was a prudent move because the Cali Cartel put a contract on his head for absconding with millions of dollars from the advance payment it made on the submarine deal. 

"All my enemies are dead and I'm happy”, Yester told a documentary filmmaker who he met at an undisclosed location in Africa in 2017. “I'm gonna see them in fucking hell when I arrive there.”. He was detained that same year by police in Italy and extradited to the US, where he was sentenced to five years in 2020 for taking part in the same drug trafficking conspiracy that put his old friend and associate Almeida behind bars.

Fat Tony refused to cooperate and the feds were never able to bring him to trial on the original criminal counts he was charged with. He managed Porky's until 2009, when he was arrested at the strip club on felony drug and prostitution charges, which were later dropped for unknown reasons. 

Fat Tony’s arrest marked the demise of Porky’s and he joined Tarzan in Panama City and helped him run Dollhouse. In 2011, the two men were imprisoned for allegedly trafficking prostitutes and drugs. Fat Tony staged a successful prison break and currently resides in Florida, at least according to his Twitter account, which he last posted from five years ago. 

In 2013, a judge in Panama dropped the charges against Tarzan. He moved back to Russia and reportedly lives in Moscow presently.

Photo of Porky’s and the flyer for its Pig Out Party in 1995, the club’s heyday but just year before the arrest of Fainberg and his co-conspirators that subsequently led to its demise, offered “Free Girls” and “Free Sex.” The image is on the Facebook page dedicated to the club.

A brief addendum to the Porky’s saga can be found in a pending civil rights lawsuit brought against the town of Hialeah by the Tundidor family, which owns Bellas, a low rent club that operates from its old address. Family members allege that their constitutional rights to free speech and protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” were trampled on when a local SWAT team stormed Bellas during a late night televised raid and “yelled for the music to stop and the lights to be turned on,” according to the lawsuit. 

The SWAT team discovered frightened entertainers "in various stages of undress" and rounded up the club’s staff and customers for interrogation. The raid on Bellas, which claims in its advertising to feature Miami's "hottest strippers from exotic places such as Brazil, Cuba, and France," was conducted without a warrant and recorded for live broadcast by an embedded TV reporter “clad in high heels and a bulletproof vest.” Hialeah's then-Mayor Carlos “Big Boss” Hernandez said he ordered the raid because law enforcement officials had grounds to believe Bellas employed underage girls and victims of sex trafficking to perform at the club. 

In the lawsuit, the family noted that no evidence was found during the operation that supported those allegations and charged Mayor Hernandez called in the SWAT team to retaliate against a relative, Jesus Tundidor, for failing to heed his warning not to run for a seat on the town council. The fate of the lawsuit, which seeks $5 million in damages, probably won’t be known anytime soon, but the SWAT raid on Bellas climaxed with at least one happy ending: four months after it was staged, Jesus Tundidor won his campaign for local office.

The coda to the tale of Porky’s, however, was contained in a single sentence in the Tundidor’s lawsuit, which proudly boasted of Bellas’ status as the unofficial successor to a strip club affectionately labeled “the cabaret of local lore.” For any resident who’s lived in the city for more than a short period of time, that could only be a reference to Porky’s, the one and only strip club in Miami’s rich, checkered history of vice, sin, corruption, and crime that can claim to have been Ground Zero for what is arguably the most enterprising mob scheme ever witnessed in all of South Florida.

Even though it ultimately failed, the plot had “tentacles almost worldwide” and the conspirators nearly “pulled it off,'' in the admiring words of two members of the Operation Odessa task force who were interviewed at the time, and couldn’t help but applaud Tarzan and the entire Porky’s gang  for the scope and creativity of their criminal ambitions.