He and his older brother, Gennady, were raised in a Jewish household by their paternal grandparents, Yosef and Riva after Nayfeld's father was jailed in a gulag and his mother subsequently abandoned the family.
Nayfeld made his money in the black market through a series of no-show jobs and embezzling from the state before immigrating to America with his family.
[1] Boris Nayfeld arrived in JFK Airport on December 7, 1979 as a Soviet Jewish refugee under the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.
[1] After this, Nayfeld became lead enforcer for Ukrainian mob boss Marat Balagula, whom he had met after first arrived in America and had done some arson jobs for him.
[4] Nayfeld's initial entry into drug trafficking was smuggling kilos of cocaine from Brooklyn into West Germany.
Together with Italo–Polish gangster Ricardo Fanchini, Nayfeld ran a successful heroin-smuggling operation that transported China White from Thailand to the United States.
[5] After being smuggled into Singapore, the drug was hidden in television picture tubes and shipped to Warsaw via a Belgium-based import-export company.
Things were going well for Nayfeld, and he spent his time in either a luxury apartment in Antwerp with his mistress and son or in his family home in Egbertville, Staten Island with his wife and their two children opposite a nature reserve.
[7][page needed] With all the money he was making with his heroin-smuggling ring, and his previous partners either dead or in jail, Nayfeld emerged as the new Russian crime boss of Brighton Beach.
Later, he and his co-defendants, the Dozortsev brothers, Nikolai and Arthur, pleaded guilty to laundering the drug money which belonged to themselves and Ricardo Fanchini.
[6] Nayfeld was sentenced to five years in prison, where he served his time at FCI Englewood, and where he became friendly with former governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich.
[11] He pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit extortion, and after cooperating with prosecutors, was sentenced to 23 months incarcerated, 18 which he served during him awaiting trial, and three years of probation.