A Brief on Valeri Shames

Valeri Shames on Coney Island Violence

Valeri Shames is the father of one of my close friends. He engineers architecture and lives with his wife and two children in Boca Raton, Florida, where he works as a freelancer. When I sat down for a ride with Valeri he told me what it was like to come to New York City in 1981, at the age of 19.
A young Ukrainian and his mother moved into a housing project at 124^th street and Park Avenue, where his walls crumbled to the point where he could greet his neighbors through the walls.
“That’s how I met my friend girlfriend. She was Hispanic and I was the only white guy in the building.” Shortly after, he moved to Brighton Beach, Coney Island, which was attracting many Ukrainians and Russians with its familiar ocean view. It reminded many of Odessa, a city in Ukraine by the Black Sea. Back in Harlem he didn’t stick out as a sore thumb because of his dark composure, it was safeguard of sorts that helped him assimilate and avoid the violence that would unfold.
He spoke of Slavic people who were leaving the capitulating Soviet Union in search of “a better life.” He described them as ethnocentric, street-wise, go-getters of the American dream.  They looked for success in odd jobs off the books and were embarrassed about taking on welfare. They associated welfare with laziness and poverty, which subsequently the associated with blacks in the city housing units.
Eventually, there was a problem. Black gangs and Soviet Russians engaged in a conflict. He didn’t recall who initiated it, but that blacks were driven by territory and Soviets were driven by racism.

Valeri recalled scenes where six black boys attacked two Soviet kids only to have a few Russians join them off the boardwalk for the fight.  It wasn’t unusual for teenagers to get into fights. In fact, it was quite common. Kids around Lincoln High School at Coney Island would get into fights after school. Mobs got involved and half a dozen bodies would pave the asphalt, some even comatose.

Valeri was inducted into American culture as an innocent bystander of gang violence. When I asked him if any specific groups were involved, he dismissed the idea of Bloods or Crypts. He reduced it to “the Russians attacked the Blacks and the Blacks attacked the Russians.

These short bursts of reactionary violence lead to better organization and the formation of the Russian mafia. Valeri’s cousin thought he saw an opportunity in their work and joined the trafficking of gasoline across state lines to circumvent taxation. When the operation went belly up the mafia began to pick of their own people with hires who came in from Eastern Europe on temporary visas. His cousin was targeted and survives a gunshot wound to the head, but was blinded in one eye.

His family was a victim of this conflict. Although an unstable and dangerous environment challenged him he took his love for physics to heart. At nineteen he pursued a career in engineering and continued his studies, gaining admission to Stevens Institute of Technology where he got his degree.
We rode on the i95 in his Mercedes E350 out of Boca Raton, Florida to Miami.

“On my left side you’ll see all the rich houses and people who are well off.” On the right you’ll see Little Havana, where bullets come like rain drops and Bed Stuy looks like Beverly Hills.” There was a snicker in his voice that may have been tuned to his success and to the naïveté of the gangs.