The Nazis Next Door (31 page)

Abrams mulled over the publisher’s question. Was Soobzokov a Nazi? “I can’t know for sure,” Abrams said finally. “I believe Blum. He’s done fine work, responsible work. I believe his reporting.” But once they got into court, Abrams said, anything could happen. Calling someone a Nazi was about as serious a charge as you could make against a man. No matter how strong the evidence, there was no predicting how it might turn out.

Sulzberger was clearly uncomfortable. He wanted some time to think about it.

He called Abrams the next day, an air of resignation in his voice. “Let’s go ahead,” he said.

They had a deal, with the terms to be sealed from the public. A public announcement would not be good for either Soobzokov or the
New York Times
. There were some last-minute complaints from Soobzokov over how much of the settlement his lawyer would get, but he ultimately agreed to the terms. On June 14, 1983, Soobzokov got a check
in his name for $225,000 from a Wall Street bank—his half of the $450,000 settlement, with the other half going to his Long Island lawyer.

Again, the ex–Waffen SS officer had adroitly used the American justice system to take on a powerful institution—first the U.S. Justice Department, now the New York Times Company—and again, Tom Soobzokov had won. Vindication was his.

Two years later, on a hot summer’s night in Paterson, Tom Soobzokov’s luck finally began to run out. The first sign that something was amiss came from Soobzokov’s German shepherd, Tambo. The dog wasn’t barking. Tambo always seemed to be yapping, but on this night, he was just pacing
the alleyway in silence. It was almost 3:00 a.m. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, the dog walked. Next door, Soobzokov’s neighbor, Lidia, a Cuban immigrant in her early fifties, gazed from her second-floor bedroom window down at the dog in the alley that divided Soobzokov’s row house and her own home on Fourteenth Street. She couldn’t sleep. With no air conditioning in her home, she had the window opened wide. Lidia looked down, mesmerized, as Tambo just kept pacing anxiously. The silence was jarring. She had never seen him quite like this.

It had already been an odd time on Fourteenth Street. The day before, Lidia had noticed a taxi
with three passengers driving past her house. At least eight or nine times through the afternoon and evening, the taxi passed by with the three men inside. She lost count as she peered nervously out the front window. The men just looked out; they never stopped. The hardscrabble neighborhood didn’t usually get many taxis.

Then came two other men—a tall one and a short one—who knocked on her door and asked her if she was thinking of selling her house. That didn’t happen much in her neighborhood either. One of them seemed to be peering at the Soobzokovs’ house next door as they spoke. Then there was the episode the night before, when an agitated Soobzokov told Lidia that someone had almost run him over in a station wagon. He had gone to the police to report it.

And now there was Tambo, just pacing in silence in that dark alleyway.

It all seemed very strange, Lidia thought. Maybe she was imagining things. She had grown edgy ever since the Jewish militants had held their protests outside the house years earlier to denounce Soobzokov as a Nazi. During the raucous demonstrations, she used to peer out nervously from behind the curtains. “Qué están diciendo? Que están diciendo?” she would ask her daughter.
What are they saying? What are they saying?
She had never seen demonstrations like this back in Cuba. She was worried for Papa Soobzokov; he was a good man, a helpful neighbor, she thought, and he couldn’t have done the terrible things in the war that they said he did.

The Jewish protesters had finally moved on a few years earlier. With the story largely faded from the newspapers after Soobzokov’s courthouse victory, the demonstrators didn’t come around anymore. Even so, Lidia hadn’t really felt at ease in the neighborhood since.

With Tambo still pacing, Lidia finally fell into a restless sleep. An hour or so later, the doorbell awoke her.
Someone kept ringing, over and over. Bolting upright in bed, she checked the clock. It was just after 4:00 a.m. She scurried downstairs and peered outside to find a young man at the door motioning wildly toward the street. “Your car’s on fire!” he yelled. She opened the door. Sure enough, there was a car ablaze, but it wasn’t hers. It was Tom Soobzokov’s Buick, parked on the street between their two houses.

She hurried out the door to alert Soobzokov, her own dog following close behind. She ran up the steps of her neighbor’s porch—the same porch where she and Papa Soobzokov spent many an evening drinking and laughing with their families; the same porch where he’d sat and watched those angry protesters chanting his name. She pounded on the front door. No one answered. She began rapping on the window. Still no one came. The air conditioner was humming loudly, and she figured Soobzokov and his wife, Katie, were asleep upstairs and couldn’t hear her. Louder and louder she banged. The fire was still blazing. A minute passed, then two, then three. She almost gave up. Finally, the commotion woke up the Soobzokovs. Papa Soobzokov hustled downstairs for the door. Don’t answer it! Katie yelled as she ran after him. It’s the dead of night! Reassured at seeing his friend Lidia, Soobzokov opened the front door. “Tu carro, tu carro!” she yelled, pointing to the street.
Your car, your car!

Soobzokov’s eyes grew big as he glimpsed the flames. He reached for the screen door and began to open it. He turned back toward Katie, who had come downstairs behind him.

An instant later, a thunderous explosion echoed through the night. Blocks away, neighbors were wakened by the blast, their windows shattered. Lidia was blown backward off the porch. Katie was thrust back inside the house and slammed against a wall. Soobzokov himself was thrown in the air amid a hail of wood, glass, blood, and debris, landing motionless in the rubble. He lay silent, barely conscious. Katie screamed for him. She could see that his right leg had been blown off below the knee.

Neighbors from all around streamed out into the dark to see what had happened. Soon, ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars with sirens blaring were everywhere, tending to the victims near the sinkhole that was once Soobzokov’s porch. Reporters were not far behind. Tambo was dead. Lidia and Soobzokov’s wife were gashed by the flying debris. Inside the house, Soobzokov’s grown daughter and his four-year-old grandchild were also hurt. But it was Soobzokov himself who took the brunt of the blast, with the lower half of his body mangled. An ambulance rushed him to a nearby hospital, still alive, for the start of an eight-hour marathon surgery. Somehow, he had survived the bombing.

Local police and FBI agents swarmed the crime scene. There they found yellow wiring,
screws, piping, and other remnants of a nine-inch-long pipe bomb. It had been booby-trapped to the screen door with a clothespin. Near the car they found a gas can, used to douse the Buick and fuel the fire that would lure Soobzokov out of the house. Whoever planned this had mapped out every move.

Suspicion focused immediately on the Jewish militant groups that had put Soobzokov in their crosshairs years before. The militants did nothing to deflect the attention. In fact, they reveled in the bombing. “We claim no responsibility, but we applaud the act,”
Mordechai Levy, a leader of the Jewish Defense Organization—a splinter group of the JDL—said, just hours afterward. “Violence is not a good thing, but sometimes it’s a necessary thing.” Just a week earlier, Levy had spoken to a Jewish group in Paterson to denounce Soobzokov’s Nazi ties, and he was planning to start up the protests at his house again after a long absence.

Now that same house was the scene of a crime that many people in Paterson considered unthinkable.

Neighbors milling around the crime scene talked about what a nice man Soobzokov was. Shocked city leaders condemned the violence. Some locals said they couldn’t quite fathom why accusations from the distant past might have led someone to commit such an act of violence. “Nazi Germany died 40 years ago,” one college student in the neighborhood said. “If he was involved,” another neighbor said of Soobzokov, “he was probably doing what he was ordered, as a regular army officer. He was doing what his country asked
of him.”

Howard Blum, the author of
Wanted!
, was awakened early that morning by a phone call from a New Jersey reporter. What did he think about the bombing? the reporter wanted to know. What bombing? he asked. Blum knew nothing about it, and he was shaken
by the news. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. When he wrote his book eight years earlier, he had wanted to see justice done, but not vigilante justice. Nazis were supposed to be prosecuted and deported, not bombed in their homes.

So, the reporter asked Blum, did he feel responsible for what had happened? No, Blum answered. But part of him really did. Had he set all this in motion? he wondered. Was he the reason Tom Soobzokov was lying in a hospital ER with his leg blown off?

Hours after the bombing, investigators were already at the hospital to interview Lidia as she recovered from the gashes left by the flying shards of glass and debris. They wanted to know about everything, from the bombing itself to the roaming taxi and the strange men looking to buy her house. It was the start of what would prove a long slog for the investigators.

They weren’t the only ones anxious to talk to Lidia. As she lay in her hospital bed, a call came through
to her room. “You saved him this time,” the caller said, “but next time he won’t be so lucky.”

It took a week before Soobzokov, badly injured and heavily drugged, was well enough for investigators to talk to him at the hospital. Even then, doctors would let him answer only yes-or-no questions because he was so weak. Did he know who had done this to him? Soobzokov nodded yes.
Did he think it was the JDL? Again, he nodded yes. He knew more, he indicated to investigators with a silent nod of the head, but that would have to wait for another day.

His family was at his bedside at the hospital for weeks. Through all the investigations, all the accusations, all the protests, his wife and children had always stood by him, no matter what, and they surely weren’t going to abandon him now. “I guess I won’t be able to do the tango anymore,” he told Katie with a wan smile, motioning to his amputated leg. He grew serious as he turned to his son, Aslan, who had rushed back from the Middle East to be with his father as soon as he learned of the bombing. “I can’t believe they did this to me,”
Soobzokov said finally.

Not long after, Soobzokov came down with pneumonia. Already weak, he fell in and out of consciousness and soon lapsed into a coma. Twenty-two days after the bombing, on September 6, 1985, at 9:21 a.m., Tom Soobzokov died. The cause of death was listed as “multiple traumatic injuries.” He was sixty-one.

Soobzokov had always been a survivor. For more than four decades, he had found protection from the many threats that came his way. The Nazis had protected him. The CIA and the FBI had protected him. His political friends in New Jersey had protected him. Even the American justice system had protected him. But no one could protect him from the vengeance of a vigilante with a pipe bomb.

Less than five hours before Soobzokov died, sixty miles north on Long Island, a drummer in a rock band who was returning from an early-morning gig stopped at a 7-Eleven around 4:30 a.m. and noticed flames in front of a nearby house. He rushed over and banged on the door to alert the residents. Inside, a Latvian immigrant named Elmars Sprogis, a seventy-year-old retired construction worker who had also been accused of collaborating with the Nazis,
heard the banging and went to see what was happening. When he opened the door, a huge explosion rocked the neighborhood. This time, it was the Good Samaritan outside the door who took the force of the blow, losing his right leg in the blast. Sprogis himself was not hurt.

“Listen carefully,” an anonymous caller told the local newspaper minutes later. “Jewish Defense League. Nazi War Criminal. Bomb. Never again.” Once more, Jewish militants publicly denied responsibility, but once more, they praised the bombing as “a righteous act . . . It was a brave and noble act.”

The parallels in the two bombings were undeniable. Sprogis, like Soobzokov, had faced deportation after the Justice Department accused him of complicity with the Nazis in Eastern Europe. Like Soobzokov, Sprogis admitted to some involvement with the Nazis; he acknowledged that as a deputy police chief in Latvia, he had arrested Jews, confiscated their property, and turned them over to the Nazis, who he knew would likely kill them. Like Soobzokov, he won his case anyway; an appeals court found that “Sprogis seems only to have passively accommodated the Nazis,” rather than actively persecuted anyone. In the court’s view, that wasn’t enough to deport him.

Just as in Soobzokov’s case, the dismissal of the court case against Sprogis enraged Jewish groups. Just like Soobzokov, someone went after Sprogis with a bomb tripwired at his front door, with a fire lit in the street as a diversion sometime after 4:00 a.m. And as they did with Soobzokov, Jewish militants cheered the ugly vigilante justice, declaring that violence had begot violence.

If there was any doubt the two bombings were connected, the FBI soon settled the question. Forensics testing established that the materials used in the Long Island bombing at Sprogis’s home were practically identical
to remants of the bomb left sixty miles away at Tom Soobzokov’s home in New Jersey. This was no copycat crime. The FBI had a serial bomber on its hands. Someone was trying to kill accused Nazi war criminals.

12

Backlash

April 15, 1987

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Ignored for decades, Nazis in America had suddenly become a political flash point by the time Ronald Reagan was in the White House, with anger fomenting on all sides. The vigilantes leaving bombs on the doorsteps of ex-Nazis were only part of the firestorm. Many conservative Cold Warriors were furious, too, but for very different reasons. While the Jewish militants were angry that the American justice system hadn’t gone far enough to track down ex-Nazis, the conservatives were upset that it had gone
too
far, playing right into the hands of the Communists, they charged. Inside the gates of the White House, the conservative critics found a fierce ally in President Reagan’s own firebrand advisor, Pat Buchanan.