,
21 tweets,
11 min read
Read on Twitter
Thread about evidence largely overlooked by the FBI that suggested a connection between a 1930s New York "kidnap-gang" and the Org. for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODWU), founded in 1931 as the US affiliate/branch of the pro-Nazi terrorist Org. of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). 
For starters, officials didn't acknowledge that the kidnap victims all had Jewish surnames: 32yo Arthur Fried, White Plains, Dec. 1937; 12yo Peter Levine, New Rochelle, Feb. 1938; & from Brooklyn in 1938: George Mishkin, March; 33yo Ben Farber, April; 19yo Norman Miller, July.
The Brooklynite victims & their families didn't call police — a ransom was privately negotiated for their release. The others inadvertently involved the FBI & media. Fried was soon presumed dead and 12yo Peter Levine (son of a local Jewish leader)'s body was found in Long Island.
FBI later said it had evidence connecting the Fried & Levine cases. 19yo Norman Miller helped the FBI locate the site where he was held, which the G-Men established as the basement of the Ukrainian National Home in Manhattan. Four ppl would admit to cremating Fried's body there.
The Ukrainian National Home basement's horrors captivated newspapers. The FBI found bones, a bloody chute leading to the cellar, and a German machine gun in a secret 100sqft space (a suspected "gangland execution chamber") riddled with bullet holes next to the furnace room.
The press spoke of a "Ukrainian Hall kidnap-gang," prosecutors at first suspected a more sinister plot (a nonexistent "tunnel of death" beneath the basement w/ corpses of "insurance murders"), & the ODWU's HQ was UPSTAIRS, but ODWU wasn't yet on the FBI or NY gov't's radar...(!?)
The FBI determined the "kidnap syndicate" to consist of four people: Demetrius Gula, John Virga, William Jacknis & Joseph Sacoda. The first three blamed Fried's murder on Sacoda, a "former porter at the [Ukrainian] hall" who was already in prison on a parole violation, but...
Sacoda, the alleged "gang" lynchpin, said Arthur Fried was shot by Demetrius Gula, whose father ran a bar in the UNH basement & lived almost literally next door (likely the basis of the tunnel theory)... Sacoda and Gula were the first to be executed under the 1932 Lindbergh Law.
Communist journalist Alfred E. Kahn, executive director of the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda (board directors incl. Hellen Keller, Thomas Mann, William Dodd), alleged an overlooked Gula-ODWU connection without providing evidence for this charge, but I've found some...
Not a smoking gun but: not only did Gula's "gang" cremate a body and stink up the building where ODWU's HQ was located, the latter's attorney/"fixer" Michael Piznak turned to Gula's father (here called the Ukr Nat'l Home's owner) 3-4 yrs before to bail out a suspected Nazi agent.
Sayers and Kahn claimed that Demetrius Gula was associated with the ODWU's flying school, which maybe they were aware had its 1st meeting at the NYC Ukrainian National Home in 1934, listing "our offices" (unclear if "our"=ODWU +/or "Ukrainian Aviation School") on the 3rd floor.
In September 1937, 3 months before Arthur Fried was abducted, the retiring president of the Ukr. Youth's League of North America made a controversial speech accusing the ODWU of being a fascistic "un-American" menace & the pro-ODWU "Svoboda" NJ newspaper of "working for Fascism."
In September 1939, during the first wks of WW2, 4 months before Sacoda+Gula died in Sing Sing prison's electric chair, the Svoboda deputy editor/United Ukrainian Orgs of America president Emil Revyuk gave dramatic testimony about the ODWU to the House Un-American Activities Cmte.
A day after Emil Revyuk testified to HUAC in Sep. 1939 re: ODWU's control of Svoboda & other orgs including his group (UUOA), their collusion with+fundraising for OUN, and covert Nazi influence behind this network, Chairman Dies announced the "time had come" to test HUAC's power.
After HUAC quickly moved on from investigating Ukrainian fascists to the US Communist Party, the ODWU finally came to the FBI's attention. It was once noted in passing the group relocated its HQ from the Ukrainian National Home in NYC after the FBI showed up, and...
...the same goes for the minor bombshell about Gula's dad's ties to the lawyer Michael Piznak, a central figure in the ODWU and later Lev Dobriansky's @UkrCongComAm (UCCA, successor to the UUOA which Revyuk was prez of and fwd'd many 1000s of $$$ from ODWU to OUN in the 1930s)...
The FBI received memos from the ADL alleging Piznak to be at the center of an ODWU scheme to take over the UYLNA in 1939 and Svoboda's publisher, the Ukrainian National Association, in 1941. ADL also alleged he once helped the legal defense of a "Black Tom" explosion defendant.
Mykola Lebed, de facto interim OUN-B leader during WW2 turned CIA agent & FBI CI, allegedly trained by Gestapo in torture techniques, feuded in the 60s w/ Dobriansky (who called Lebed "soft on communism") + others from UCCA. Lebed was sure OUN-B & old Nazis paid off Dobriansky.
When ODWU leader A.A. Granovsky appeared before the Dies Committee/HUAC to defend his US Org, "a revolutionary movement...definitely not sympathetic to Hitler...[that] must work underground to some degree," he admitted a "UPS" in Berlin regularly briefed the US Ukrainian press...
The Ukrainian Press Service (led by Riko Yary) was a propaganda bureau set up by the OUN in Berlin the same year as the ODWU. At least 4 central UPS people, most notably Volodymyr Stakhiv & Myroslav Prokop, worked for the CIA+Lebed's "Prolog" propaganda corp. during the Cold War.
It appears almost as if FBI was unaware of ODWU til 1939-40, then assumed it had already cleared the OUN terrorist affiliate of ties to the "kidnap-gang" despite the suspicious circumstances, incl. a clear motive for ODWU (deeply anti-Semitic & desperate to fundraise for the OUN)
