In 1980, Bishop Valerian Trifa agreed to voluntary deportation rather than face trial for concealing his collaboration with the Nazis as the Romanian Iron Guard leader who instigated the 1941 pogrom against the Jews of Bucharest. He said that continued court proceedings placed a great financial strain on his Romanian Orthodox Church. Portugal agreed to accept him in 1982, then changed its mind two years later when it learned of his fascist sympathies. Before Portugal could expel him, Bishop Trifa died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-two.
In 1981, the Justice Department cut a deal with an ailing Otto von Bolschwing. If he voluntarily gave up his U.S. citizenship rather than face a long denaturalization process for collaborating with the Iron Guard in Romania, the government would allow him to remain in the United States. The deal was apparently a reward for his years of government service as an OSS-CIA operative. Baron von Bolschwing died in Sacramento, California, from a rare brain disease in 1982 at the age of seventy-two.
Also in 1981, the Justice Department filed charges of immigration fraud against Tscherim Soobzokov, who was then embroiled in a lawsuit with Anthony DeVito, Howard Blum (who had written a book about DeVito called
In 1983, a district court in New York stripped Boleslavs Maikovskis of his U.S. citizenship. The court ruled that he had concealed his collaboration with the Nazis in the murder of the entire population of the Latvian town of Audrini, among other war crimes. Fearing he would be executed if extradited to Latvia, Maikovskis fled in 1987 to Germany, where he was tried for war crimes. Before his trial was over, the court ruled he was too frail to continue. He died in 1992 at the age of ninety-two.
In 1986, after a protracted legal battle, a district court in California finally stripped Andrija Artukovic of his citizenship. He was found guilty of concealing his membership in the Croatian Ustasha and for ordering the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Christian Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. He was extradited to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, where a court sentenced him to death for war crimes. He was never executed because the court later ruled he was too ill with dementia. Artukovic died in a prison hospital at the age of eighty-eight.
In 1985, vigilantes assassinated Tscherim Soobzokov in Paterson, New Jersey. His murder in Paterson— home to 2,500 American Circassians—was described in over one thousand pages of reports released to me by the FBI under an FOIA request. These FBI reports shed light on a little-known chapter in America’s relationship with former Nazis.
Soobzokov’s next-door neighbor was startled from her sleep at 4:20 A.M. on August 15, 1985, by the incessant barking of her dog and someone banging on her front door. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window to see who was there. Soobzokov’s new Buick Riviera, parked at the curb, was on fire.
The woman rushed downstairs and opened the door for the caller, whom she knew. While he was dialing 911, she ran next door to Soobzokov’s house, her black and white terrier barking at her heels. The house was dark. She rang the bell and banged on the window. A light flipped on and the sixty-one-year-old Soobzokov appeared in the hallway.
“Your car!” the woman shouted, turning her face away from the house and pointing to the flames.
Soobzokov opened the front door, then the screen door. There was a ten-second delay before an explosion blew him back into the hallway and knocked the woman and her dog to the ground. When he opened the screen door, Soobzokov had tripped a wire that detonated an eight-inch-long, booby-trapped, galvanized pipe bomb filled with smokeless rifle powder. A second shorter but wider pipe bomb failed to detonate.
The woman struggled to stand and managed to drag herself home. Her dog followed. When they reached the front door, the dog lay down and died. The passerby called an ambulance for the woman, then went to check on Soobzokov. He was alive and conscious but in a state of shock. His wife, daughter, and grandson were all injured when they ran barefoot over broken window glass to help him.
A truck parked across the street quietly pulled away.
Doctors at St. Joseph’s hospital worked on Soobzokov for eight hours. They amputated his right leg above the knee and removed bomb fragments. During the operation, he suffered cardiac arrest. (He had a serious heart condition.) Doctors resuscitated him. Although he was in critical condition, they believed he would live if his damaged heart could stand the stress to his shattered body. Soobzokov’s Good Samaritan neighbor was only slightly injured.
A phone caller identifying himself as a member of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) took credit for the bombing, uttering the JDL slogan, “Never again.”
The FBI assigned the Soobzokov case to its Domestic Terrorism Unit, a task force that most Americans didn’t even know existed. As the FBI saw it, the attempt on Soobzokov’s life was just one in a string of assassination attempts that began eight years earlier, in 1977. It was just one act of terrorism in a spree that both puzzled and worried the bureau. But unless one were a Jew, an Arab, a neo-Nazi, or an alleged Nazi collaborator, the series of intimidations, assaults, murders, and attempted murders mostly passed under American radar.
It all began with the publication of Howard Blum’s
The lawsuit created even more adverse publicity for Soobzokov, who was also on the Karbach list published in the
Given the public outrage over a Nazi hiding in America, New York prosecutors opened a grand jury investigation in 1978 into Soobzokov’s alleged war crimes as a Waffen SS officer and a policeman who collaborated with the Nazis. That same year, under the prodding of Elizabeth Holtzman, the Justice Department had created OSI, which immediately assigned teams of historians, researchers, and attorneys to investigate more than five hundred cases of alleged Nazi collaborators living in the United States. One of them was Tscherim Soobzokov.
In May 1979, a grand jury failed to hand down an indictment against Soobzokov because: prosecutors had not provided eyewitnesses to his alleged war crimes; Soobzokov kept invoking the Fifth Amendment; and the CIA refused to release his file, which detailed his work for the agency in Jordan and which also contained lie detector reports detailing his wartime activity.
A few days after the federal grand jury folded without an indictment, Soobzokov returned home from work to find a package sitting on his dining room table. It was the size of a cigar box, wrapped in brown paper. Soobzokov noticed what looked like wires at two corners of the package and called the police. Explosives experts detonated the powerful and potentially deadly bomb without injury.
The next day, the Associated Press and other media outlets received the same anonymous phone call. “You better write this down because I’m only going to say this once,” the caller said, speaking rapidly. “Parcel bombs have been sent to Nazi war criminals across the United States…. This is from the International Committee Against Nazism.”
The caller wasn’t lying. Five package bombs had been mailed from a New York post office on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street. Four bombs were sent to offices of the American Nazi party in Lincoln, Nebraska; Chicago; and Alexandria, Virginia. No one was injured because either the recipients handed the packages over to the police unopened or alert postal clerks blocked their delivery.
Five deadly bombs in one day was a new record for the FBI. The bureau’s terrorism unit took the threats seriously and opened an investigation, code name ICANBOM. Agents soon learned that the International Committee Against Nazism (ICAN), an organization the bureau had never heard of, was a nonviolent group dedicated to bringing Nazi war criminals around the world to justice. The FBI concluded that the caller who took credit for the package bombs was using ICAN for cover. The real perpetrator, the FBI believed, was a virulent, armed, and dangerous cell inside the Jewish Defense League.
