Was Viktor Zelinger a mobster or a desperate refugee?
The answer, after a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn on Thursday, seemed to be that he was both.
Mr. Zelinger, 45, pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering, admitting that he had helped run an illegal gambling club and had threatened debtors to make them pay.
When he was arrested in Switzerland in 2022, prosecutors said that he had led a ruthless crew linked to an Eastern European mafia group known as Thieves in Law that wreaked havoc in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island.
The slew of charges against him included directing a May 2016 arson in a residential building on Voorhies Avenue where a high-stakes poker game was being held. The blaze nearly killed two teenagers and left a firefighter with career-ending injuries, prosecutors said.
The game competed with his own illegal gambling spot on Coney Island Avenue, where players were plied with free alcohol, cocaine and massages, according to court documents. Months later, as investigators closed in, Mr. Zelinger left the country permanently.
A grand jury indictment unsealed that October included charges against Mr. Zelinger and eight others; two other defendants were later added to the case. All were convicted or pleaded guilty to racketeering and related charges.
But Mr. Zelinger’s lawyer, Susan Kellman, painted a dramatically different story of his life, arguing that he was a dedicated father whose life had been upended by illness and war.
In a motion filed last year, she wrote that after moving back to his native Ukraine in 2016, he had married a woman who was diagnosed with a brain tumor after giving birth to the last of their three children.
When war broke out, it became impossible to find treatment, and she died from her illness, Ms. Kellman wrote. Mr. Zelinger was then displaced by fighting along with his children, then ages 6, 4 and 2. The family lived in their car and traveled by night to avoid the fighting, finally escaping to Slovenia before making their way to Switzerland, she wrote.
“If he’s the boss or he has links to the Eastern European mafia, whatever that is, it would have seemed to me he would have had a much easier time when he was overseas fighting for his life and his family’s life,” Ms. Kellman said at a hearing last year.
“But there was nobody there to help him.”
Once they were settled in Switzerland, Mr. Zelinger received a phone call telling him to report to a local police station to enroll the children in school, according to his account. But it was a trap. When he arrived, he was arrested, and the children were put in an orphanage. But “miraculously,” in Ms. Kellman’s words, they were rescued by the chief rabbi of Zurich, who arranged for them to be sent to live with their grandmother in Brooklyn.
Mr. Zelinger’s family was not present at the hearing on Thursday, which lasted 90 minutes as Magistrate Judge Vera M. Scanlon parsed the complicated plea agreement. Mr. Zelinger pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering but admitted to a role in other crimes, allowing those to be factored into the judge’s decision on sentencing. He wore prison khakis and a dark, close-cropped beard at the hearing and was aided by a Russian interpreter.
The maximum penalty on the charges under federal sentencing guidelines would be 20 years. But the prosecutor in the case, Victor Zapana of the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, said on Thursday that he and the defense had agreed to recommend a sentence of five to six years. That hearing is scheduled for July 18 before Judge Brian M. Cogan.
Mr. Zelinger, who moved to Brooklyn in 2001 and later became a citizen, is likely to lose his U.S. citizenship and be deported once his sentence is completed.
