Chop It Up - With Douglas Century: Recent Episodes
Douglas Century
Chop It Up is a podcast that is hosted by New York Times bestselling author Douglas Century. This podcast focuses on subjects such as true crime, hip hop, and sports.Douglas Century is the author and coauthor of numerous bestselling books including Hunting El Chapo, Under and Alone, Brotherhood of Warriors, Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter, and Takedown: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire, a finalist for the 2003 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. In 2020, he won a Christopher Award for No Surrender.In July 2022, Century published The Last Boss of Brighton: Boris "Biba" Nayfeld and the Rise of the Russian Mob in America (William Morrow) and coauthored, with legendary rapper Ice-T and his former partner-in-crime Spike, Split Decision: Life Stories (Simon & Schuster).A veteran investigative journalist, Century’s work on organized crime, hip hop and sports has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Tablet and the Guardian.
In this bombshell exposé, I drill down deep on my assertion that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most brazen, powerful, and wealthiest mobster of all time. Yes, of all time! And it’s not just my opinion: in this episode, I meticulously detail—and back up with first-hand interviews—how Putin acquired his vast fortune. Elon Musk himself says that “Putin is significantly richer than I am”—making the Russian president the wealthiest man on earth.
You’ll learn about Putin’s origins as a vicious teenaged streetfighter, eventually a judo black belt. After being a KGB officer, he rose to power as deputy mayor St. Petersburg by working hand-in-glove with one of the deadliest Russian mobsters—a one-armed gangster named Kumarin. You’ll see Putin and his inner circle using criminal and prison slang (from “fenya”). In other words, unlike any other Russian leader, he publicly “talks the talk” of a gangster. Putin also walks the walk: his enemies have often been killed in macabre ways. You’ll see one of his closest friends, once a billionaire oligarch, now in exile, describing Putin as a “mafia godfather.”
And you won’t want to miss the shocking video footage of “Putin’s Palace”—the world’s sprawling private residence on the shores of the Black Sea, worth a reported $1.4 billion—bigger and more lavish than the palace of any king or queen. Described by Putin critic Alexei Navalny as "the world's largest bribe," it was built apparently for Putin's girlfriend. Thousands of Russians risked their lives taking to the streets in protest when footage of Putin's Palace were first exposed.
Recent Book Releases:
Last Boss of Brighton: Boris "Biba" Nayfeld and the Ride of the Russian Mob in America.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Boss-Brig...
Indigo: https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/...
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-...
Split Decision: Life Stories
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Split-Decision...
Indigo:
Andrew “Drew” Hogan is a highly decorated Special Agent (retired) with the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 2018, Drew and I coauthored the bestselling book, Hunting El Chapo, and I’m excited he could join me to chop it up about his work studying, tracking and ultimately masterminding the capture of Joaquin Guzman Loera, a.k.a. “El Chapo”—according to Forbes magazine, the richest drug lord of his era. The manhunt for this elusive drug-trafficker was a sprawling operation, involving dozens of agencies and hundreds of brave members of law enforcement and the Mexican Marines. But in my opinion, without the dogged high-tech detective work of Drew Hogan, Chapo would today likely still be a free man in the Sierra Madre mountains of Sinaloa. Featuring never-before-seen photos snapped by Drew himself on his phone during the capture op, this episode takes you inside the day-to-day reality of the “Narcos” world like nothing you’ve ever seen before!
Steven “Seva” Kaplan, is a musician, actor and journalist often called “founder and father of Russian radio in the United States,” was born in Moscow in GET YEAR. From a prominent artistic family, Seva was a young table-tennis champion and, later, a dissident against the communist regime. When Seva came to New York after the fall of the USSR, he quickly found success and fame hosting the only program offering daily news and programming for Russian-speaking immigrants. Seva joins me to chop it up about survival under the repressive Soviet totalitarian regime, the bloody rise of Russian organized crime in America and, in particular, his stranger-than-fiction relationship with Boris “Biba” Nayfeld, the Russian gangster who once accepted a contract-murder job to take Seva “off the airwaves.” Near the end of our interview, Seva drops an absolute bombshell revelation about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current connections to notorious organized crime figures.
In this episode, I chop it up with Boris “Biba” Nayfeld, the infamous Russian mobster, and Steven “Seva” Kaplan, an acclaimed radio and TV host in New York about … well, there’s no other way to put it: the murder that very nearly happened. In 1999, Boris was given a contract to kill Seva. For the first time, the two men talk publicly about who ordered the murder-for-hire job, the cat-and-mouse game that followed, and the ultimate “happy” ending--it's a true crime story that is truly stranger than fiction. The energetic, often hilarious back-and-forth between Boris, who joins us live from Moscow (glass of vodka in hand) and Seva, stuck in traffic in Manhattan, gives us an episode that is beyond belief.