A father and son coming back from a fishing trip found the first body in the New Melones Reservoir, near the Parrotts Ferry Bridge, in the foothills below Yosemite. It was Meyer Muscatel, a Los Angeles real-estate developer, whose age is given as fifty-four in some accounts and fifty-eight in others. By the time the FBI had recovered the others, the Bureau had a Lithuanian and a Russian from the San Fernando Valley on wiretap talking about ransom money, and cellphone records showing both men driving north on Highway 99 toward the reservoir on each of the days five people had died.
Jurijus Kadamovas was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, on October 22, 1966. With Iouri Mikhel, a Russian, he ran an aquarium business in Los Angeles called Designed Water World, and around them gathered a small crew: Petro Krylov, Ainar Altmanis, Aleksejus Markovskis and Kadamovas's girlfriend, Natalya Solovyeva. The method never changed. Someone was lured with a business pretext to a house that turned out to belong to Mikhel or Kadamovas, handcuffed and bound with plastic ties, questioned about money, made to beg relatives or partners for ransom, and killed once the money stopped being useful.
Muscatel was the first, in October 2001. Mikhel posed as a buyer and asked him to look at a property; it was Mikhel's own house, and Kadamovas and Altmanis were waiting. They took his wallet and cards, but his bank froze the account. When it was clear they would get nothing, the two men injected him with Dimedrol, a sedating antihistamine, and Mikhel suffocated him with a plastic bag while he was held down. They drove his body north in Kadamovas's van and dropped it on the bridge curb, leaving blood, before throwing it into the water. Kadamovas later told Markovskis, by Markovskis's account, that he had once thrown "a fat Jew" off a bridge and thought it very funny.
Their real target was George Safiev, thirty-seven, a wealthy Russian businessman. In December 2001 Kadamovas posed as a client of Safiev's financial adviser, Rita Pekler, thirty-nine, and had her drive him to a house he said he wanted to buy. Held there, she told them she was pregnant and afraid that the alcohol or drugs they threatened her with would harm the baby. She called Safiev; he said he was too busy, and left for Russia. With her usefulness gone, they injected her with Dimedrol, strangled her and threw her from the same bridge. Her surname is sometimes spelled Peckler.
Later that month Krylov proposed his former boss, Alexander Umansky, thirty-five, who owned an automobile shop. Mikhel posed as a customer wanting audio systems installed and got a ride to Kadamovas's house. Umansky was held for three days and made to call his brother and plead for money. The family went to the FBI, which advised them to pay part of the demand of nearly $235,000; after a call threatening other relatives, they paid the rest. By then Altmanis had bought weight plates from a used sporting goods store. Mikhel tried to suffocate Umansky with plastic bags and tape while Kadamovas held him and pinched his nose; when that failed, Mikhel and Altmanis strangled him with a rope. With the body in the van, the men had dinner at Mikhel's house with his girlfriend, then drove to the reservoir.
In January 2002 Safiev was back. Solovyeva telephoned his friend and business partner, Nick Kharabadze, twenty-nine, and invited him to what she called a private club; it was the aquarium company's office, with Kadamovas behind the bar and a revolver underneath it. Kharabadze was handcuffed to a chair and made to call Safiev in. For four days both men were kept at Kadamovas's house while Safiev was forced to ask his partner Konstantinos Tezhik to wire $940,000 abroad. Kadamovas recorded Safiev's voice to use for extortion after he was dead, and told Markovskis he meant to keep taking people and dropping them in the reservoir until he had $50 million, if he had to pile the bodies up to the surface. When the money arrived, the two hostages were plied with vodka and driven north. A policeman pulled the cars over for following too closely; Mikhel talked to him and he waved them on. Kadamovas said afterward, Solovyeva testified, that he would have killed the officer if he had seen the hostages. Both men were suffocated and thrown from the Stevenot Bridge, weighted.
Even then Mikhel faxed Tezhik a ransom note Safiev had signed before he died, asking for $4 million more. In all the crew collected more than $1 million and spent it on cars, home renovations, gifts and holidays. Altmanis, learning that the FBI was looking at him, confessed and led agents to the last four bodies. Searches turned up handcuffs carrying Safiev's and Kharabadze's DNA, fourteen handguns, a silencer and false passports at Mikhel's home, and at Kadamovas's two houses weight plates with no bar to go with them, the number used for the Umansky ransom calls, and a pair of shoes that matched the prints left in Muscatel's blood on the bridge. Carpet from his house matched fibers on Kharabadze's clothes.
The two were arrested in February 2002. In jail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, Mikhel organized a plan to bore through the cell walls to a stairwell and rappel down the building to a waiting motorcycle gang; Kadamovas arranged to move to a cell beside that stairwell. An inmate told the guards. Altmanis, Markovskis and Solovyeva pleaded guilty and testified; Krylov was convicted separately.
The trial before Judge Dickran Tevrizian began in July 2006 and lasted five months. Mikhel testified for three days, then refused cross-examination, and the testimony was struck. On January 17, 2007, the jury convicted both men on every count. On February 13, after about three hours, it found every aggravating factor the government alleged, found no mitigating factor for either man, and recommended death. Kadamovas's mitigation case had consisted largely of statistics on violence in prisons and in the former Soviet Union. He was sentenced to death on March 12, 2007, on each of the four capital counts.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed on May 9, 2018, rejecting arguments that the Hostage Taking Act required a link to international terrorism and that Lithuania's abolition of the death penalty should weigh against the sentence; the Russian government filed a brief in Mikhel's support. In January 2023, held in the Special Confinement Unit at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Kadamovas was the named plaintiff in a class action by the ACLU of Indiana alleging that its isolation violated the Eighth Amendment. In December 2024 the outgoing President commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences, Kadamovas's and Mikhel's among them, to life without parole.