According to Hamechadesh, the owner of the cell phone store in Geula-Mea Shearim that has been the site of many protests, some violent, might be giving in.

After posting the story of Rav Ahron Kotler and mafia boss Joe Bonanno, someone sent me another fascinating story of a connection between a rav and the mafia used to save Jews.

great story!

"Protection" rackets happen all over the place. The person or group, often mafia of some sort, extorts his victim, the local business owners, to pay him for protection services. He offers, in exchange for a fee, to protect them from damage to their property and business, from theft, and the like. Often they pressure the resisting business-owner by showing what things they need protection from by wreaking havoc on the business, causing damage until they acquiesce.

In the Geula neighborhood of Jerusalem, the thugs, the ones who call themselves the sikrikim, wreak havoc on the local businesses. In the name of God they break windows, damage property, cause injury to people when they feel something is detrimental to their neighborhood, to their lifestyle.

Or, maybe they do so for other reasons. Maybe all that fighting, all that rioting, all that damage caused to shops in the name of tzniyus and whatever other excuses they used to justify their behavior, was all just the beginning of the extortion of a protection racket. Maybe they were just showing the local shops what will happen if they do not have the protection.

Bechadrei is reporting that yesterday they smashed the windows of a local ice cream shop and also left in the shop rotten fish and soiled diapers. In addition, they continued their fight against the Ohr HaChaim bookstore by gluing shut the locks on the store overnight.

That is nothing new, except perhaps the intensity. They have been doing this for a while. But now, according to the Bechadrei report, some young guys from the neighborhood have approached the storeowners who have suffered the damage and they offered protection services for a significant fee, promising that if they pay for the protection, their stores will no longer be attacked by the sikrikim thugs.

So, was it really all done in the name of God, in the name of keeping their lifestyle pure as they see it, or was it just a lead-up to a protection racket?

Or maybe they were really doing it to keep the neighborhood, and the protection is being offered by other people, enterprising young men. I'd like to see, if they are not in coordination with the thugs, how they plan to fend off the thugs next time they come to protest a shop.

The biggest fear in Tel Aviv right now is to be sitting in a restaurant when one of the local mafia dons walks in and sits down to eat. Be it the Alperons, the Abutbols, the Rosensteins, the Abergils...

You could be minding your own business, eating your shwarma, when your life is turned over completely. In walks a mafia guy, and the next thing you know, you could be a witness to, if not an innocent bystandar fatality, a mafia revenge hit or something..

The mafia keep getting bolder and bolder, and innocent bystanders are paying the price...

Chicago really gets a bad rap.

There was some mafia hit yesterday and some big cheese got whacked. The caption on the photo says, "Chicago is here: Policeman crouching over body of Atzmon Gerbi, yesterday in Bat Yam".

Saturday night, we were returning from a nice Shabbos spent in Jerusalem. It was about 10:45pm or so, and we stopped to fill up with gas (prices were always ridiculous, so the new price increase has little affect on anything) at the Paz gas station just after Shaar HaGay on Highway 38.

I pull up to the self serve lane and start filling the tank. Generally, I take out the keys form the ignition when I get out to pump gas, but my kids were listening to a cassette (yes I still have a cassette player in my car, not a cd player), so I left it on for them.

A digression for some description: the area in the gas station just in front of where we are is a parking area for people going in to buy stuff in the station, along with an air pump for tires. There are always a number of cars parked there. There were some on Saturday night as well, including one or two I had seen pull up as I was waiting for my turn at the gas pump.

So, as the gas is pumping, I was washing the back window of the car. Just then I hear a screech and a smash, like the sound of a car smashing into another. I look up and see a small dark car, having smashed past another small red car, speeding towards me in reverse. He must have been doing about 50 or 60 kmph in reverse, and he was swerving. I thought he was either going to smash into my car, or into the gas pumps and we would all die. Sure enough, he avoided us both and sped away on the other side of the same pump. He turned the car around and sped out of the gas station the wrong way (he egressed through the entry) and sped away turning left (illegaly) towards Highway 1.

All of the sudden I saw about 5 or 6 other people jumping out of a few cars - the red car, another big white van that was partially blocking the gas station exit, and another car. Right away I ran to the front of the car and took out the car keys. At that moment I suspected the guy had stolen that dark car. I remembered that there were stories that in this gas station it is common that when people leave their keys in the ignition while pumping gas, sometimes somebody jumps in and steals the car. So I ran over and took the keys out of the ignition.

(BTW, this is all happening so fast, I did that as the car was speeding by me still)

As I was taking out the keys, I see the people who had jumped out of cars screaming to stop the car and running in various directions. One guy was carrying some sort of stick. Another guy was waving a gun around (about 3 feet in front of me). And all 5 or 6 guys were wearing sweat shirts with hoods.

As the guy sped away, they all got back in their cars and left to chase him (I guess).

Nobody knew what that was all about. The gas station attendant called the police I think, but while we were there nobody showed up. Meanwhile we were all talking about what it might have been. The main suggestions were either an undercover policeman trying to arrest someone on a drug deal or something like that, and the guy got away. the other suggestion was that it was meant to be a mafia/gang hit, and the guy got away. I finished pumping the gas and left. I saw nothing about it in any of the news media yesterday....