The Nazis Next Door (19 page)

Under attack, Soobzokov had adopted a pose of righteous indignation. He was no Nazi, he would tell friends, neighbors, reporters, and anyone else who would listen. He was innocent of these vile, hurtful accusations being slung at him by his Communist enemies. “On my side is God and truth,
which is unbeatable,” he said. He wore his pain like a crown of thorns. “Do you know what it does to a man’s family to be put through something like this?” he would ask plaintively. “Torture,” he said. “My family, friends, and kids
have suffered much.”

The stakes for Soobzokov were enormous. He was fighting not only for his good reputation, but for his status as an American citizen. The Jewish Defense League wasn’t his biggest problem; its protests, embarrassing though they were, amounted to little more than public theatrics. No, his real enemies were the nettlesome federal officials who were threatening to take away his citizenship and throw him out of the country—if they could prove he really was a Nazi. Federal investigators were poking around, reporters were digging up records, a grand jury was hearing testimony from witnesses, and there was no telling where all this might lead. Soobzokov was worried.

In the span of just a few years, Soobzokov had gone from a man of stature in Paterson—an immigrant success story—to this: a man of notoriety known simply as “that Nazi.” It was a dramatic fall. For many years now, Soobzokov had been a dealmaker in local ethnic, political, and labor circles, a man of power and connections who could fix problems for his fellow immigrants and deliver ethnic votes to local Democrats. His was an inspiring public story: an immigrant who would tell how he escaped fascism and persecution as a Nazi prisoner and a forced laborer during the war and went on to find freedom in America. From a meager start in New Jersey washing cars, he had become a car salesman, an insurance agent, and, ultimately, a civic leader and county executive who helped make Paterson a magnet for immigrants, particularly those from the Caucasus.

The image of a smiling Soobzokov—always so smartly dressed in suit and tie, with jet-black hair and neatly trimmed mustache, driving through the city in his sky-blue Chevy—became a sign of connections and possibilities in Paterson in the 1960s. Once known as Silk City for its textile manufacturing industry, Paterson had fallen into urban decay, and with times as tough as they were, Soobzokov was an important man to know. Local politicians made him Passaic County’s top purchasing official at $16,000 a year. They put him on an influential planning board, and named him to lead a special panel to resettle new immigrants. He would go out to the port
in New York to greet the newcomers arriving by boat from Europe and take them to New Jersey. The local Teamsters union called him
a “distinguished servant of all mankind” and gave him a gold watch for helping hundreds of immigrants come to America and find jobs. His congressman honored him with a letter read into the
Congressional Record
recognizing all his good work in the face of adversity. His life, the local newspaper reported in a glowing profile in 1958, had been “a story of persecution,” overcome by grit and guile.

But for all the praise heaped on him, Soobzokov had always had enemies in New Jersey. Many of them, not coincidentally, were the immigrants who came from the very same region of the North Caucasus as Soobzokov. They were the ones who knew of him during the war. The man they described, usually in hushed tones to one another, bore no resemblance to the one being feted for his civic work.

Occasionally, the rumblings about Soobzokov’s past spilled into the open. In 1962, a Circassian woman in Paterson named Angela Stas was summoned to court in a domestic dispute with her estranged husband. Her husband was friendly with Soobzokov, but Angela had always detested him. Indeed, when she got to court and saw that the multilingual Soobzokov was there to act as her husband’s interpreter, she grew furious and confronted him right there in the courthouse. “The second Eichmann!” she yelled—so loudly that the startled judge heard her screams. Soobzokov was irate; he threatened to sue Angela Stas on the spot for defamation. The bad blood soon got the attention of the FBI, which felt compelled to send an agent to interview her after learning of the episode. “Angela Stas reported there were many people in the Circassian Colony, including herself, who despised Soobzokov,” the FBI agent reported. “She claimed that there were many rumors concerning Soobzokov’s activities
in the Caucasus with the German forces in 1942–43.”

This was a bombshell accusation that in another time, another place, might have triggered a frenzy of follow-up interviews to see if it was true. Instead, the report sat untouched in an FBI file cabinet for years.

Seven years later came a second report to the FBI, this one from another Russian immigrant in New Jersey named Mischeust Chuako, who lived just a few blocks from Soobzokov in Paterson. He went to the FBI with accusations of his own: During the war, Chuako maintained, Soobzokov was often seen in a Nazi uniform and “was a member of a Nazi execution squad,” according to the FBI report. Soobzokov “personally took an active part in raids of population centers” and “took an active part in arresting people and killing them without any kind of investigation or [trial]—fair or unfair.”

Again, nothing happened. The accusations went nowhere.

But Soobzokov’s accusers would not let it rest. Four years later, in 1973, a third Russian immigrant in New Jersey went to the FBI with reports of his Nazi ties. “I am only trying to expose a former Nazi killer,”
the would-be tipster told the FBI.

And again nothing happened. The past was past. Hoover had made clear that he had no interest in having his agents wasting their time tracking down supposed Nazis in America.

Besides, Soobzokov was one of the FBI’s own. The bureau already had a thick file on him—not as a Nazi suspect, but as an informant dishing out information on supposed Communist sympathizers. The CIA had broken ties with Soobzokov years earlier after branding him an “incorrigible fabricator,” but the FBI had no hesitation about using him as an informant beginning in the late 1950s, with Hoover’s personal approval. Soobzokov even had his own personal FBI handler, a street agent in New Jersey. He would pass on McCarthyesque leads to his FBI contact about whatever he was hearing in Paterson about immigrants with supposed Communist leanings. Since he was such a fervent anti-Communist, it didn’t arouse much suspicion when he would go around town asking questions about local politics. What his fellow immigrants didn’t know was that he was doing it as an undercover informant for Hoover’s G-men, spying on the townspeople.

His FBI handler never really trusted
Soobzokov; the man seemed slippery and always appeared to be involved in some financial scheme or other on the side. But Soobzokov did occasionally produce intriguing bits of dirt on the Commies, and dirt was dirt. When it came to Communists, that trumped all else inside Hoover’s FBI.

In one disquieting episode early in his career as an informant, Soobzokov reported to the FBI that a twelve-year-old “half-Negro boy” in town had expressed an interest in visiting Russia. Soobzokov feared the boy could be used as Soviet propaganda, he told the FBI, so he started collecting the names of the boy’s friends and even went to see the boy’s doctor, a Jew from Russia who also struck Soobzokov as suspicious. Determined as ever, Soobzokov chatted up a nurse in the office, who agreed that her boss couldn’t be trusted. “Jewish doctors were not reliable,” she told him. Soobzokov dutifully passed what he’d found to the FBI, and it all went into the boy’s file
under the heading “Communist provocateurs.”

The FBI protected its valued informant for years, sopping up all the Communist leads he fed the bureau while ignoring the damning reports in its own files about his reported Nazi ties. Things might have stayed that way, with the past kept safely hidden away, were it not for a tip to the Social Security Administration about a financial scheme that Soobzokov was rumored to be running in Paterson.

Even as Soobzokov was building up his reputation as a civic leader, there was always the suggestion of a shadier side to his Horatio Alger–like, up-by-the-bootstraps life story, and not just because of the Nazi rumors. Some immigrants whispered that, in exchange for a few hundred dollars or so, Soobzokov could make paperwork problems go away—changing a birthdate on a Social Security eligibility form, for instance, or greasing the skids for a would-be immigrant trying to get into the country. Soobzokov had heard the rumors, of course, and he denounced them as bogus. He had never taken a kickback in his life, he said, and the talk on the street was obviously the work of his rivals in the immigrant community, jealous of his success.

One day in 1972, a tip about one of Soobzokov’s reputed
kickback schemes landed on the desk of a Social Security investigator in Baltimore named Reuben Fier. He had been a police officer in New York City for more than twenty years, and he had loved the street cop’s life. Now retired from the force and chasing Social Security cheats from a desk in Baltimore, Fier was bored and restless. He hated the slow pace and the banality of the work. But something intrigued him about the tip from New Jersey about this man Soobzokov. It was not simply the accusations of Social Security fraud, although a few interviews with Soobzokov’s accusers
had left him convinced there was something to them. No, it was the
other
issue that several of the immigrants who knew Soobzokov had mentioned to the investigator. They brought it up on their own, almost as an aside.
You know that he was a Nazi during the war, right?
No, Fier hadn’t known that, but he certainly wanted to know more. A Nazi in New Jersey? If what these men were telling him about the Russian immigrant was true, it would make Fier’s run-of-the-mill fraud cases look like jaywalking violations.

Fier organized a meeting of Soobzokov’s accusers at the home of a New Jersey doctor named Jawad Idriss, a rival of Soobzokov’s in the local immigrant community. Fier wanted to compare what they had to say not just about Soobzokov’s purported financial scams, but about his war history as well. Ten men showed up, giving remarkably similar accounts of how Soobzokov, in German garb, had served with the Nazis and wielded extraordinary influence over prisoners in German-occupied zones, including his fellow countrymen. “I saw Soobzokov in an SS uniform in Buzov, Romania,” said a war refugee named Isa Hoket. Soobzokov was the Nazis’ point man in control of the many White Russian prisoners and refugees in the occupied area, trying to get them to fight for the Nazis and join a new front, he said. Hoket resisted his entreaties, he said, telling Soobzokov in one angry conversation that he was not his commander. Rebuffed, Soobzokov walked away and quickly returned with two senior Nazi SS officers, Hoket said. “The colonel spoke,” Hoket recounted. “He asked me my name, and then said, ‘Hoket, your
führer
is Soobzokov.’
He used that very word:
Führer
.” Hoket told Fier how, twenty years after the war, a smiling Soobzokov welcomed him to New Jersey and, over lunch at a local diner in a much more serene setting, offered to help him resettle in his new country, just as he had with so many others. If Soobzokov remembered their prior encounter, he did not let on.

As Fier scribbled down the accounts from Hoket and the other New Jersey immigrants, the old passions that had driven him as a New York City cop were starting to rekindle. He saw the makings of a major investigation. His bosses, however, had other ideas. By now, an irate Soobzokov had gotten wind of the questions that Fier was asking around town. He went on the offensive, threatening legal action against anyone who had the audacity to accuse him of being a Nazi. These charges were nothing more than “un-American slanderous remarks
and innuendos,” he charged in a letter to the head of the INS. He even drove down to Fier’s office in Baltimore to complain in person, and he brought along a powerful friend:
Robert Roe, his local congressman from New Jersey. Roe was a longtime ally who, in one of his many gestures of support for Soobzokov, presented him with an American flag at a ceremony honoring his many civic contributions in Paterson. On this day, Roe’s task in Baltimore was clear: get the government to back off. Why, the congressman demanded to know, was a Social Security investigator nosing around into a bunch of made-up Nazi accusations against an upstanding citizen like Tom Soobzokov?

Soon after, Fier was called into his supervisor’s office for a dressing-down. The investigator was veering far outside his lane of authority, his boss advised him. He was supposed to be tracking down Social Security cheats, not Nazis. Besides, the statute of limitations on Soobzokov’s supposed crimes had already passed. Stand down, he was told.

Fier was undeterred. He was going ahead with his Nazi investigation—with or without his boss’s approval. On his own, he went to the Germans to seek war-era records on Soobzokov, digging up a document that identified him as a Waffen SS lieutenant at the end of the war. This was a critical piece of corroboration, he believed. He shopped the case to prosecutors outside his own agency. And he went looking for a new ally, a man he had heard was equally disgruntled over the government’s bungled handling of fugitive Nazis. His name was Tony DeVito.

Fier had never met DeVito, the gruff-talking INS investigator from Hell’s Kitchen who had bumped heads with his own bosses over the prosecution of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan. But from all that he’d heard and read about DeVito, Fier thought he might find a partner in the INS investigator. DeVito knew nothing of all the drama
quietly unfolding in New Jersey around Soobzokov until the day Fier drove up from Baltimore to New York on his own time in April 1973, found DeVito during a recess in the Ryan trial, and sat him down at an immigration office cubicle for what turned into a lengthy off-the-books meeting. With three manila folders marked “Soobzokov” in hand, Fier gave DeVito a rundown of everything he was hearing in Paterson—and all the interference he was getting from his bosses. DeVito didn’t need much persuading to take an interest. Here was another Nazi case that, somehow, seemed to have been ignored for decades. It seemed practically ready for prosecution. As he finished reading the files Fier had gathered, a smiling DeVito slapped his new Nazi-hunting partner on the back excitedly. “Jesus Christ!” DeVito yelled. “This case is made to order!”