Jurijus Kadamovas is a Lithuanian national who was convicted in 2007, with his business partner Iouri Mikhel, of a federal hostage-taking conspiracy in which five people were abducted in the Los Angeles area and killed between October 2001 and January 2002. The two men ran a fish aquarium store called Designed Water World. According to the federal appeals court that heard the case, they lured their victims with business pretexts, held them, forced them or their associates to pay ransom, and then killed them.
The crew collected more than $1 million. A jury in Los Angeles found both men guilty on every count in January 2007 and recommended death the next month. Judge Dickran M. Tevrizian sentenced them to death in March 2007. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in 2018 and the Supreme Court declined to hear Kadamovas's case in 2019. On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted his sentence, along with 36 others on federal death row, to life without parole. In October 2026 the Bureau of Prisons listed him at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he has spent most of his years in prison and where, since 2023, he has been the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit over the isolation of the men held on its death row.
The court record says little about Kadamovas's life before the crimes. The government proved at trial that he was Lithuanian, and the federal appeals court described him as a Lithuanian national living in Los Angeles. A 2023 civil complaint filed on his behalf states that he is not a United States citizen. When his death sentence was commuted in December 2024, the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta described him as a man who had come to the United States from Lithuania, and his lawyer told The Epoch Times that the Lithuanian authorities had supported the request for clemency. His date of birth was not given in the court opinions; in October 2026 the federal Bureau of Prisons listed his age as 60.
His co-defendant, Iouri Mikhel, was a Russian national, according to the Solicitor General's brief in the case. Novaya Gazeta described Mikhel as a native of Leningrad. The two men owned Designed Water World together, and the store's office later became one of the places where victims were held. Kadamovas kept two houses, one in Sherman Oaks and one in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley.
Around the two men was a small group. The appeals court names Ainar Altmanis, Aleksejus Markovskis and Petro Krylov, along with Kadamovas's girlfriend, Natalya Solovyeva. In March 2002 the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles listed Kadamovas, Mikhel, Krylov and Altmanis among those charged, describing Kadamovas as Lithuanian and Krylov as Ukrainian.
The first victim was Meyer Muscatel, a real-estate developer from Sherman Oaks. Writing in the Jewish Journal in March 2002, the columnist Si Frumkin described him as a religious Jew who hoped to set up learning centers for disabled children. Frumkin wrote that Muscatel died in mid-October 2001 and that at first his death seemed unconnected to the later kidnappings.
The Ninth Circuit's account of the case sets the plan against him in October 2001. Mikhel posed as a businessman who wanted to buy real estate and asked Muscatel to look at a property. The house was Mikhel's own, and Kadamovas and Altmanis were waiting there. Kadamovas handcuffed him, and the two men questioned him about his money. When they could not get at it, Mikhel killed him. A father and son later found the body.
The group's main target was George Safiev, a wealthy Russian businessman. In December 2001 Kadamovas contacted Safiev's financial adviser, Rita Pekler, pretending that he wanted her advice on a real-estate deal, and had her pick him up. Frumkin described her as an accountant who worked for both Muscatel and Safiev. She was taken to a house where Mikhel, Altmanis and Krylov were waiting, and she told her captors that she was pregnant, according to the appeals court.
The plan was to use her to reach Safiev. When that failed, the court wrote, Mikhel and Kadamovas decided she had outlived her usefulness. She was killed. The court found that Kadamovas took part in her killing.
Later in December 2001 the group took Alexander Umansky, who owned an automobile shop. Frumkin described him as a friend of Nick Kharabadze who hoped to work in the film industry. Mikhel posed as a customer who needed car audio systems installed and asked Umansky for a ride. Kadamovas, Altmanis and Krylov were waiting at Kadamovas's house, where Kadamovas held a gun, and Kadamovas handcuffed and bound him.
Umansky was held for three days and forced to plead with his brother for money. The family went to the FBI, which advised them to pay only part of the ransom. The demand came to nearly $235,000, and the family paid. Umansky was killed anyway. The appeals court found that Kadamovas took part in his killing with Mikhel and Altmanis. An envelope bearing the telephone number used for the ransom calls was later found at Kadamovas's Sherman Oaks house.
In January 2002 the group returned to Safiev. Solovyeva telephoned Nick Kharabadze, Safiev's friend and business partner, and invited him to what she called a private club. It was the Designed Water World office, and Kadamovas was waiting behind the bar with a revolver hidden there. Kharabadze, 29, was a graduate of the University of Southern California who hoped to become a producer, according to Frumkin.
Kharabadze was handcuffed and forced to lure Safiev, and both men were then held at Kadamovas's house for four days. Safiev was made to call his business partner and beg him to transfer $940,000 to a foreign account, which the partner did. Kadamovas recorded Safiev's voice so that it could be used for more extortion after his death. He also told Markovskis that he planned to keep abducting people until he had $50 million, according to the court. Novaya Gazeta, describing the trial testimony, reported that accomplices said the pair had talked about hunting wealthy Russians in New York, Florida and the Colorado ski resorts.
When the money had arrived, the two hostages were driven north. On the way the group was stopped by a police officer. Solovyeva later testified that Kadamovas said he would have killed the officer if he had seen the hostages. Both men were killed. In December 2024 the Union Democrat, the newspaper in Sonora, reported that Safiev and Kharabadze were killed in Tuolumne County.
After the killings Mikhel called Safiev's partner again and demanded another $4 million. The court found that the conspirators received more than $1 million in ransom in all, which they spent on high-end cars, renovations to their homes and lavish presents for their girlfriends. Prosecutors put the total at about $1.2 million, according to a Jerusalem Post report on the penalty verdict, and Novaya Gazeta gave the same figure. Ransom from the Umansky, Safiev and Kharabadze abductions was laundered abroad and deposited in accounts linked to Kadamovas and Mikhel, and another associate traveled to Germany to withdraw more of the money. The Jewish Journal reported in 2002 that two other men, said to be in the United Arab Emirates, were named as suspects in forwarding the ransom.
The FBI wiretapped the men's telephones and obtained cellphone data placing them in Tuolumne County on the days of the killings, according to the appeals court. Altmanis confessed and helped agents find four of the bodies. In mid-March 2002 the four victims were recovered in Tuolumne County, the Jewish Journal reported; Novaya Gazeta wrote that the FBI had located them in February. Jim Mele, a former Tuolumne County sheriff who was a patrol sergeant at the time, told the Union Democrat in 2024 that the county's sheriff's office did the recovery work.
Searches built the physical case. At Kadamovas's Encino house agents found a handgun, ammunition, a distinctive dagger linked to the money-laundering scheme and a pair of shoes whose prints matched evidence from the Muscatel killing. Carpet fibers from his house matched fibers on Kharabadze's clothing. At the Sherman Oaks house agents found the envelope with the ransom-call telephone number.
After their arrests, Kadamovas, Mikhel and Krylov were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. Mikhel planned an escape: the men would bore holes through their cell walls to reach a stairwell, force open a window's bars with a hydraulic pump and climb down the outside of the building to waiting motorcycles. Mikhel smuggled tools into his cell. Kadamovas, who had been housed elsewhere in the building, managed to move to a cell next to the stairwell. Mikhel tried to recruit another inmate, warning that guards might have to be killed, and that inmate told jail officials, according to the Solicitor General's brief.
Officials found no tunneling or contraband in Kadamovas's cell, but the appeals court said there was extensive other evidence tying him to the plan. The escape conspiracy became a count in the indictment.
A grand jury indicted Mikhel and Kadamovas; a second superseding indictment followed in 2004. The counts against Kadamovas were conspiracy to take hostages resulting in death and three counts of hostage taking resulting in death, under the federal Hostage Taking Act; conspiracy to launder monetary instruments; conspiracy to escape from custody; and criminal forfeiture. The government sought the death penalty. The court opinions do not say which three abductions the substantive hostage counts named.
Altmanis, Markovskis and Solovyeva pleaded guilty and testified for the government. Krylov was tried and convicted separately.
Kadamovas's appointed lawyers were Richard Lasting, who had earlier capital experience, and Marcia Brewer, both named to the case in 2002. In November 2005 Brewer told the court she did not have time to prepare, and Sonia Chahin was appointed in her place about ten months before trial. Kadamovas asked for more time so that his new lawyer could prepare, and the trial court refused. The appeals court later found that this did not violate the federal law guaranteeing capital defendants two lawyers, and that any technical error would have been harmless. Lasting billed more than 4,000 hours on the case and Chahin almost 900 before trial.
Kadamovas also asked to be tried separately from Mikhel, or at least to have a separate penalty hearing. The judge refused, and the appeals court found no abuse of discretion.
The guilt phase began in July 2006 and lasted five months. The jury was anonymous. Scores of witnesses testified over more than thirty trial days. Mikhel took the stand and testified on direct examination for three days, then refused to be cross-examined; on Kadamovas's motion the court struck his testimony and told the jury to disregard it. Novaya Gazeta reported that three cooperating accomplices described Kadamovas's plans to the jury.
During a late-December holiday break in the trial, Judge Tevrizian told the parties that a search committee had asked him to put his name forward for the post of United States Attorney, according to Kadamovas's later petition to the Supreme Court. The petition says the judge remarked that he would take a salary of one dollar a year because he did not believe in double dipping. The defense moved for recusal about a month later, citing local reports that he was the frontrunner. The judge denied the motion, disclosed that he had interviewed for the post, and withdrew his name when the motion was filed.
The appeals court held that the motion came too late, noting that the defense learned of the grounds on December 28, 2006, but waited until January 30, 2007, to file. The government's Supreme Court brief gives the filing date as January 29, 2007. The appeals court also found that the motion failed on its merits.
The jury began deliberating on January 16, 2007. The next day it returned separate verdicts for each defendant, finding both guilty on all counts.
The penalty phase began on January 24, 2007. The government argued four statutory and five non-statutory aggravating factors. Kadamovas put forward nine mitigating factors, and his penalty-phase evidence dealt largely with rates of violence in prisons. The judge refused his request to put Lithuania's abolition of the death penalty before the jury as a mitigating factor. The government, for its part, offered a dagger with swastikas on its handle and testimony about an antisemitic remark that Markovskis attributed to Kadamovas about the death of Muscatel.
On February 13, 2007, the jury unanimously recommended death for both men. It found every aggravating factor the government had alleged and no mitigating factor for either defendant. The Jerusalem Post reported that the jurors deliberated for less than a day. On March 12, 2007, Judge Tevrizian sentenced both men to death, Novaya Gazeta reported. The death sentences ran on each of the four capital counts; the other counts carried 240 months, and the court ordered forfeiture of more than $1 million.
Kadamovas and Mikhel appealed together. The case was argued in Pasadena on January 10, 2018, before Judges Jay S. Bybee, Milan D. Smith Jr. and Michelle T. Friedland, and on May 9, 2018, the Ninth Circuit affirmed both convictions and both death sentences in an opinion by Judge Bybee.
The panel rejected the argument that the Hostage Taking Act reaches only conduct tied to international terrorism, holding that the statute says nothing about terrorism and was a valid use of Congress's power to carry out a treaty. It found no error in the anonymous jury, in the removal of a spectator, in the government's strike of a juror, or in the reasonable-doubt instruction. It held that Mikhel's struck testimony did not on its face incriminate Kadamovas and that any error was harmless. On the escape count it found no reversible error in the limits placed on cross-examination, and it held that the admission of an inadmissible hearsay letter was harmless.
On the penalty phase, the panel held that the jury could reasonably find that both men posed a danger in the future, that the admission of the dagger was within the trial court's discretion and the testimony about the remark was not plain error, and that the jury was not required to find that Kadamovas had no prior criminal record. Excluding Lithuania's abolition of the death penalty as mitigation was not an abuse of discretion. The panel called a prosecution comparison between prison life and the victims' deaths improper, but not plain error.
Rehearing was denied on September 7, 2018. Kadamovas's petition for certiorari, filed on January 14, 2019, by his lawyer Benjamin L. Coleman, asked the Supreme Court to read the Hostage Taking Act in light of its underlying treaty and to decide whether the judge should have stepped aside. The Solicitor General opposed it, and the Court denied review on October 7, 2019.
Kadamovas was held in the Special Confinement Unit, the federal death row at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, from 2007, according to a complaint filed for him in 2023. On January 12, 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana and the law firm Faegre Drinker Biddle and Reath filed a class action in his name in federal court in Indiana, arguing that the isolation of the unit's prisoners was cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The ACLU said 38 men were then held in the unit.
The complaint said Kadamovas had been a Phase II prisoner since 2014, allowed recreation with one other prisoner five times a week and time with that prisoner in a leisure room twice a week, and that these periods were often cancelled. It described serious physical ailments and said 15 years of isolation had caused him depression, stress and anxiety. It also stated that he had not been disciplined by the Bureau of Prisons since 2010. The court found in March 2023 that the claims could proceed, denied a motion to dismiss in September 2024, and in January 2025 stayed the case and denied class certification without prejudice after the clemency actions changed the population of the unit, according to the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse at the University of Michigan. The case remained open in November 2025.
On December 23, 2024, President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row to life without the possibility of parole. Kadamovas was on the White House list, as was Mikhel. In Sonora, Mele told the Union Democrat that some crimes shock the public's conscience enough to warrant the death penalty, and that Tuolumne County had been central to recovering the bodies. Kadamovas's lawyer, Timothy Foley, told The Epoch Times that the Lithuanian authorities had supported the request.
A joint motion filed on December 30, 2024, in Kadamovas's Indiana case addressed how the commuted men would be housed, according to a later court filing. President Donald Trump's Executive Order 14164 then directed the Attorney General to ensure that the men whose sentences had been commuted were imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they posed.
On April 16, 2025, Kadamovas, Mikhel and 19 other men whose sentences had been commuted sued in federal court in Washington, D.C., to block their transfer to the federal supermax prison, ADX Florence, in Colorado. The complaint said Kadamovas, then 58, had several serious and poorly controlled medical and mental health conditions, and that the Bureau of Prisons had at first found him unsuited to placement at ADX. It cited his notice of a hearing on a referral for transfer to the ADX general population.
Judge Timothy J. Kelly denied the first request for an injunction on May 27, 2025, on the ground that the prisoners had not finished the prison system's appeals, but ordered the government to give 48 hours' written notice of any transfer. On October 21, 2025, after finishing those appeals, Kadamovas, Mikhel and 15 other prisoners filed a new case. On February 11, 2026, Judge Kelly granted a preliminary injunction on their due process claim that barred the government from moving any plaintiff to ADX Florence while the case continued. He entered a new injunction with the same relief on May 5, 2026. The government said that month it had withdrawn the challenged decisions and begun a new process, and on July 24, 2026, the court approved a stipulation barring transfers until at least 14 days after any new final decision. The injunction remained in effect in August 2026, according to the Clearinghouse.
In October 2026 the Bureau of Prisons listed Jurijus Kadamovas, register number 21050-112, at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, with a release date of life.
Accounts differ on several points. The amount of ransom is given as more than $1 million by the appeals court and as about $1.2 million in the Jerusalem Post report and in Novaya Gazeta. The 2002 Jewish Journal column placed the abductions of Pekler, Umansky and Kharabadze in early and mid-December, while the appeals court places the Kharabadze and Safiev abductions in January 2002. The same column reported ransom demands of $5 million for Safiev and $250,000 for Umansky; the court gives nearly $235,000 as the Umansky demand and $940,000 as the amount wired for Safiev, followed by a demand for $4 million more. Novaya Gazeta reported that the trial lasted seven months; the appeals court says the guilt phase lasted five months. The Epoch Times described Kadamovas as coming from Russia and Mikhel from Lithuania, the reverse of the court record and of the lawyer it quoted.
The words of the antisemitic remark that Markovskis attributed to Kadamovas came from a cooperating witness, and on appeal the only question was whether the testimony should have been admitted. Kadamovas's own account of the crimes was not reported.
October 2001: Meyer Muscatel is abducted and killed.
December 2001: Rita Pekler is abducted and killed.
Later in December 2001: Alexander Umansky is held for three days; his family pays a ransom demand of nearly $235,000; he is killed.
January 2002: Nick Kharabadze and George Safiev are abducted and held for four days; $940,000 is wired abroad; both are killed.
Early 2002: Kadamovas and Mikhel are arrested; Altmanis confesses and helps the FBI find four of the bodies.
Mid-March 2002: Four victims are recovered in Tuolumne County.
March 28, 2002: The Jewish Journal reports Kadamovas among those charged.
2004: Second superseding indictment.
November 2005: Sonia Chahin replaces Marcia Brewer as one of his two lawyers.
July 2006: The guilt phase of the trial begins in Los Angeles.
December 28, 2006: The defense learns that Judge Tevrizian was approached about the post of United States Attorney.
January 17, 2007: The jury finds Kadamovas and Mikhel guilty on all counts.
January 24, 2007: The penalty phase begins.
February 13, 2007: The jury recommends death.
March 12, 2007: Judge Tevrizian sentences both men to death.
2007: Kadamovas enters the Special Confinement Unit at USP Terre Haute.
January 10, 2018: Appeal argued in Pasadena.
May 9, 2018: The Ninth Circuit affirms.
September 7, 2018: Rehearing denied.
January 14, 2019: Petition for certiorari filed.
October 7, 2019: The Supreme Court denies review.
January 12, 2023: The ACLU of Indiana files Kadamovas v. Federal Bureau of Prisons.
September 2024: The Indiana court denies a motion to dismiss.
December 23, 2024: President Biden commutes his death sentence to life without parole.
April 16, 2025: He joins the first Washington lawsuit against transfer to ADX Florence.
May 27, 2025: The first injunction request is denied.
October 21, 2025: He joins the second Washington lawsuit.
February 11, 2026: Judge Kelly bars the plaintiffs' transfer to ADX Florence.
May 5, 2026: A new preliminary injunction is entered.
October 27, 2026: The Bureau of Prisons lists him at USP Terre Haute, serving life.