Iouri Gherman Mikhel did most of the killing himself. That was what the evidence showed and what the Ninth Circuit set down in 2018 when it affirmed his death sentence: it was Mikhel who closed the plastic bag over Meyer Muscatel's head and pinched his nose shut, Mikhel who shoved bags into Alexander Umansky's mouth and then twisted a rope around his neck, Mikhel who put a bag over Nick Kharabadze's head at the edge of the New Melones Reservoir and pulled a plastic tie tight around his throat. He told an accomplice that George Safiev, like Rita Pekler before him, had been hard to kill, "strong as a snake."
He was born in Leningrad on April 9, 1965, and by 2001 lived in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, where with Jurijus Kadamovas, a Lithuanian, he ran an aquarium store on Ventura Boulevard called Designed Water World. Between October 2001 and January 2002 the two men and a small crew lured five people to their homes or the store on business pretexts, held them, extracted ransoms and killed them. Every body was weighted and thrown from a bridge into the reservoir outside Yosemite National Park. Muscatel, a real-estate developer, was the first; his age is given as fifty-four in some accounts and fifty-eight in others. Pekler, thirty-nine and pregnant, was Safiev's financial adviser, taken as bait. Umansky, thirty-five, owned an auto shop; his family paid nearly $235,000 on the FBI's advice and after threats, and the money went to an account in the United Arab Emirates. Safiev, thirty-seven, a wealthy Russian businessman from Beverly Hills, and his partner Kharabadze, twenty-nine, were held four days while $940,000 was wired abroad for them. Afterward Mikhel faxed Safiev's partner in London a ransom note Safiev had signed before he died, asking for $4 million more.
It was also Mikhel who talked his way past a policeman who pulled the two cars over for following too closely on the way north with Safiev and Kharabadze inside, and Mikhel whom surveillance cameras caught at ATMs with the dead men's cards. Altogether the crew took in more than $1 million. After a father and son fishing near the Parrotts Ferry Bridge found Muscatel's body, an accomplice, Ainar Altmanis, confessed and led the FBI to the other four. Agents searching Mikhel's house found the original $4 million ransom note, the hostages' financial details, handcuffs bearing Safiev's and Kharabadze's DNA, fourteen handguns, a silencer and false passports.
Arrested in February 2002, he tried twice to escape. At the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles he smuggled in hacksaw blades, bolt cutters and a camcorder, carved a hole in his cell wall toward a stairwell and planned to rappel down the building to a waiting motorcycle gang; an inmate he tried to recruit told officials. Moved to San Bernardino, he wrote a letter offering $1 million to a man he believed was in the Mexican Mafia to break him out. He attempted suicide three times before trial, the last on the eve of opening statements, and appeared in court in jail clothes with the mark of a ligature on his neck; a prison psychologist found him depressed but competent.
At the trial, which began in July 2006, he took the stand for three days to describe himself as a wealthy smuggler and money launderer with no need for violent crime, then refused to be cross-examined, and the testimony was struck. He boycotted the penalty phase. On January 17, 2007, the jury convicted him and Kadamovas on every count, and on February 13 it recommended death for both after about three hours. Judge Dickran Tevrizian sentenced them on March 12, 2007, saying the killers had shown no mercy. The Russian government filed a brief in his support on appeal. The Ninth Circuit affirmed on May 9, 2018, and the Supreme Court declined review on October 7, 2019. On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted both men's sentences to life without parole.
Four accomplices were sentenced separately. Petro Krylov, whose jury accepted that he had acted under threats against his family, received life. Altmanis received twenty-three years and four months, Kadamovas's girlfriend Natalya Solovyeva fifteen years, and Aleksejus Markovskis twelve and a half.