Up next, he goes to a business meeting
and doesn't come back.
The meeting was normal.
What happened after was not normal.
His kidnappers seem capable of anything.
The man on the other end said,
"If you don't start sending the money,
we are gonna start selling body parts, like his liver."
It was like-- Oh, my God.
I couldn't believe what they were accused of doing.
The case leaves a money trail all over the globe.
Follow the money.
- Follow the money. - Follow the money.
Ultimately, the money leads detectives to a huge lake--
a hard place to find evidence.
We're talking about trying to find a needle in a haystack at this point.
It's really opened our eyes
to how evil people can be...
and use water as a method of getting rid of the bodies.
When he was 7 years old,
Alex Umansky and his family
immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine.
The family settled in Los Angeles.
Like many first-generation immigrants,
Alex embraced America as a land of limitless opportunity.
His parents moved here for a better life,
like all of us.
You know, we--
The situation in our country wasn't that easy,
and I think all the immigrants are like that.
Alex Umansky was young, good-looking,
vibrant guy who was trying to make his way in this world.
He had started his own business
called Hard Wired Auto Accessories.
They would put in fancy equipment into your car,
such as televisions and cameras.
Alex's business took off,
and he soon found love with another Ukrainian immigrant.
I fell in love with his personality.
We got engaged, and we were looking to get married.
I just recently saw a video from our engagement party,
and it was a full house
dancing and singing the whole time.
On the night of December 12, 2001,
Alex got the kind of call
a hard-charging entrepreneur loves.
He had a new client, with deep pockets.
He got a phone call in the evening.
Usually he speaks English.
He spoke Russian, too,
but his Russian was, like, not as good as English.
So he suddenly started speaking Russian,
and it was a good conversation.
He hang up, and he was very excited.
This new client wanted to spend a lot of money
on a state-of-the-art stereo system for his wife's car.
He said, "The person said money is not an object."
So that's always a good thing for a business.
It was his thing. It was his baby.
This business was his baby.
Alex and the caller made plans to meet the next day.
After that meeting, Alex didn't come home
and dropped out of contact.
It's just radio silence.
Um, people are paging him, trying to reach him.
It was very strange for him
to just completely go off the radar.
His two managers started calling me.
They said, "We can't reach him. We can't reach him.
We don't know what happened."
I started calling. We couldn't reach him.
Early the next day, Alex's worried father
went to his office to see if he was there.
He wasn't, but something unexpected was.
His father found a fax--
an invoice from a company they had never heard from
in the amount of $234,628
and demanding the payment of that money.
And at that same time, his brother Michael,
up in San Francisco received a similar fax,
demanding a similar amount of money.
A terrified Alex soon called
and said he'd been kidnapped.
The people holding him got on the phone
and left no doubt his life was in danger.
They made a threat to do things like
cut off Alex's fingers if the money wasn't paid,
to sell his body parts,
his kidney, his liver, if the money wasn't paid.
Alex's kidnappers ordered his family
to immediately send the ransom money to Dubai,
the largest city in the United Arab Emirates.
I left Ukraine to get away from
all the crime that was happening in '90s.
So we were all in shock
that something like this is happening in L.A.
Investigators believed
Alex was being held somewhere in Los Angeles.
The original ransom notes came from Russia.
The kidnappers ordered that the payments be wired
to a British bank in Dubai.
The case had gone global, and time was running short.
Changes it dramatically.
This is not just some local gang of thugs
who grab somebody from the street,
but a group that has tentacles around the world, potentially.
This was gonna take some time
to figure out who these abductors were,
and unfortunately for Alexander Umansky,
time was working against him.
In phone calls to the Umansky family
recorded by the FBI, Alex Umansky's kidnappers,
all apparently native Russian speakers,
insisted his ransom be paid immediately.
We were trying to be able
to locate the kidnappers, of course, on the phone.
There were no GPS's back then in 2001 in these cellphones.
People see TV shows, and they're like,
"Well, you can trace the phone calls and things like that."
Not so simple when you have calls of very short duration
happening on phones that are prepaid cellphones
that somebody is getting in a fictitious name
with a fictitious address.
The Umansky family didn't have the kind of money
Alex's kidnappers demanded,
but they quickly rounded up part of the ransom payment.
They wired $90,000 to Dubai
with a promise that more was coming.
We also were constantly asking for proof of life,
so he was getting on the phone on and off,
and he was alive.
That wasn't the only good news.
Someone, apparently one of the kidnappers,
had used Alex's debit card
less than 24 hours after he went missing.
A surveillance camera captured this image of the man.
He put his hand on his nose
or covering his face a little bit
because he knew he was being photographed
while he withdrew the money.
In the background, you can see a light-colored SUV.
The make of this white SUV was identified,
but the surveillance camera
did not capture the license plate.
The problem was that there were thousands of vehicles
just like this one in the Greater Los Angeles area.
Investigators were racing against the clock
to find Alex before he was killed.
And now they got another surprise break.
Alex's Umansky's father saw something
on a West Hollywood telephone pole--
something he normally might not have noticed.
It was a poster about a woman who'd recently disappeared.
Ruven, Alex's dad, sees her "missing" posters
around West Hollywood and thinks,
"Strange that two Russian-- you know, Russians are missing."
And he forwards that information to the FBI.
39-year-old Rita Pekler went missing
one week before Alex Umansky disappeared.
Rita was a Russian national, another immigrant to America
with deep ties to the post-Soviet émigré communities
in Southern California.
How strange it is that two Ukrainian Russians
are missing in this small area of Los Angeles.
For Rita Pekler, it was a mystery
since no money had been demanded.
Why was she kidnapped?
And what is the connection between Pekler and Umansky,
two people who had seemingly never met each other
before in their lives?
Investigators soon learned of more immigrants
who had apparently been kidnapped.
DeWitt: The FBI learned that two additional
Russian-speaking individuals had been kidnapped.
One of them was George Safiev. The other was Nick Kharabadze.
Nick and George had started a movie production company.
This film company was based in the Los Angeles area,
the last place these producing partners
were seen before they disappeared.
And there was a direct connection to Rita Pekler.
She took care of the business side of their company.
Rita Pekler was actually their accountant.
DeWitt: Now they had four potential victims,
all from the Russian community or from the former Soviet Union,
who seemed to have some dealings
with Russian-speaking individuals
shortly before their disappearance.
So many questions and so few answers,
but for now, priority number one
was to locate the victims and hopefully find them alive.
When four people from Greater Los Angeles
were kidnapped, investigators from the U.S.
and all over the world were on the case,
and all of them came to the same conclusion
on the best way to find the kidnappers.
One of the most important parts of the investigative process
in this case involved, um,
the good old adage of "follow the money."
What was unusual about this kidnapping for me,
and probably anybody,
is that we had overseas transfers of money requested.
The agents have no leads,
but one big one is, "follow the money."
Across the globe, the vast majority
of financial transfers are handled electronically.
The system is designed, for obvious reasons,
to leave a record.
But some countries have notoriously opaque oversight
on these transactions.
The kidnappers apparently hoped this would be the case
with the United Arab Emirates, the UAE.
When this came along, everything was uncharted territory.
We have no treaty with the UAE.
But law enforcement in the UAE
proved eager to help the investigation.
That turned out later to be a very critical link
in helping the FBI to determine who the kidnappers were.
The FBI and UAE investigators
were able to target the Dubai bank
where the ransom payments were sent,
and they arrested two Russian nationals
who picked up those payments.
It turns out they didn't know
anything about the ransom proceeds.
There were basically pawns doing a service for somebody else,
but that was their compartmentalized role.
These men immediately cooperated with investigators
and turned over all documentation
related to their instructions to pick up the money.
Investigators soon discovered
the ultimate destination for the ransom payments.
That money all came back to Los Angeles
to a small business on a little strip
of Ventura Boulevard in the Valley,
an aquarium store named Designed Water World.
Designed Water World turns out to be a business
that was owned by Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas.
Iouri Mikhel was from Moscow.
He did have a criminal history there.
Jurijus Kadamovas was a former citizen of Lithuania
who had no criminal history in the United States
but was another person who appeared
to live beyond his means.
They owned houses throughout the area.
Mikhel lived in Encino
in a really beautiful house in the Hills.
So it really started to raise questions
about who these two people really were.
The pair's phones were tapped,
and all their business interests were surveilled.
This turned up an interesting potential clue
in the person of an apparent employee,
Ainar Altmanis,
himself an immigrant from the former Soviet Union.
When they followed Mr. Altmanis around for days,
he was driving a white Lincoln Navigator,
which appeared to be the car
that was captured in the ATM surveillance video
connected to the Umansky kidnapping.
Was this man Ainar Altmanis
or one of his employers?
It was impossible to say.
But with the kidnap victims' lives possibly in the balance
and plenty of potential evidence,
authorities searched all of the alleged kidnappers' businesses
and uncovered a treasure trove of evidence.
They executed 19 search warrants that day
where they collected all kinds of evidence--
guns, silencers...
Dimedrol that was used to sedate the victims...
bank records that tied back to the many money transfers
of the ransom proceeds that were later traced.
Iouri Mikhel, Jurijus Kadamovas,
Ainar Altmanis, and one more member
of the suspected kidnap gang were arrested.
Investigators were all but convinced
the kidnap victims had been killed,
but if the bodies couldn't be found,
proving murder would not be easy.
DeWitt: They had very, very compelling evidence,
but they did not have the bodies.
It wouldn't be optimal to try a case involving a murder
if you don't have the body.
In February of 2002, four men in Los Angeles
were arrested for the kidnapping
of a group of immigrants from Eastern Europe.
One of these men, 42-year-old Ainar Altmanis,
wanted to make a deal with prosecutors.
So Altmanis came in to be interviewed,
and the very first question
that he was asked by the agents was,
"Where are the victims? What happened to the victims?"
And he slammed his hands down on the table,
and he said he knew everything.
And he said, "They're gone. They're all gone."
Altmanis said the victims' bodies had been dumped
in the New Melones reservoir
about 350 miles north of Los Angeles.
You're looking at one of the larger reservoirs in California,
and it's 300 feet deep.
It still strikes you as trying to find
a needle in a haystack to find four human beings
at the bottom of a reservoir that big and that deep.
DeWitt: He led them to the locations
where the bodies were dumped.
The bodies were driven up to Northern California,
and they were dumped off of one of two different bridges
with weights tied around their bodies.
There are all sorts of forensic disciplines,
but very few people are expert
at finding corpses in large bodies of water.
The Ralstons-- Gene and his wife, Sandy--
had been at it for decades.
Since we started using this equipment
in August of 2000,
we have found 127 victims underwater.
All of the people found by the Ralstons
were drowning victims.
But whether the victims died through accident or murder,
the technology is the same.
It allows investigators to use sound
to see in deep water,
in places sunlight can't penetrate.
The equipment is called side-scan sonar.
It uses sound to generate images of things,
much like medical ultrasound
in that it casts a beam of sound out,
and then it listens for the return reflection.
Anything that's on the bottom will have a shadow behind it
because the transducer housing the system
is towed about 10 to 15 feet off of the bottom.
A device called a towfish
is dragged below the waterline.
It sends out a sound signal that bounces back to a monitor,
creating accurate images of the bottom of a body of water.
If a human body is on the bottom,
it "reads" differently
than things that would normally be down there.
Side-scan sonar enables us to see things with sound
that you could not see by light.
Generally, the object you're searching for
has a higher density,
therefore a greater intensity of return signal.
The more dense the object is, the greater the reflectivity.
The recovery team went to the spots
Ainar Altmanis said the bodies were dumped--
two bridges that span the reservoir.
The Ralstons, with a lot of experience
reading these images, immediately recognized
four anomalous shapes on the bottom of the reservoir.
They told police these were human bodies.
The bodies were ultimately recovered
through a submersible device with a hook.
This image was later identified
as the body of George Safiev.
Close by was the body of Nick Kharabadze.
Rita Pekler's body was found under another bridge.
The last body to be brought up from the bottom of the reservoir
was Alex Umansky's.
They absolutely destroyed his parents' life.
What they've done to their son, they completely destroyed them.
They could never recover from this.
They're different people from that time on.
I think he deserves to be remembered.
That's how good he was.
Authorities ultimately learned
of a fifth kidnap victim.
58 year-old real-estate developer Meyer Muscatel
had been kidnapped in October.
His body was found by a fisherman
at the reservoir months earlier.
Why had these five people been targeted?
Their families would be the least likely to report
their kidnapping to law enforcement.
As one would imagine, there's a deep level of mistrust
in the Soviet Union between the citizenry and the government,
and so if something happened to you,
the government wouldn't be
the first thought in your mind to run to
to ask for help.
The kidnappers thought,
incorrectly with some of the victims,
that they all had access to large amounts of cash.
Rita Pekler was targeted
simply to lure her employers into the plot.
The victims were all killed simply for money.
More than one million dollars was ultimately paid out.
Essentially this blood money
was their income, their livelihood.
And that money was then traced--
laboriously, painstakingly by the FBI
and with the help of special agents from the IRS--
to the purchase of high-end luxury items
such as payments on a Ferrari,
the purchase of mink coats,
the purchase of cars, the purchase of homes.
Prosecutors believe Alex Umansky met the same fate
as the other victims.
He was lured to his death
on the pretense of a normal business meeting.
Soon after he arrived and was subdued,
he was kept alive just long enough
to let his family members know he was in mortal danger.
As soon as some of the money arrived,
he was suffocated with a plastic bag and strangled.
All the bodies were weighted down
and thrown into the reservoir,
the killers thinking the ransom money couldn't be traced
and the bodies never found.
But money leaves a trail...
and, thanks to new technology,
in this case, so did the victims' bodies.
Ainar Altmanis received a sentence of 23 years.
Co-conspirator Petro Krylov got life in prison.
The Ringleaders, Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas,
were found guilty of kidnapping and killing all five victims.
Both men, convinced they'd get rich committing crimes
that couldn't be traced, were sentenced to death.
Those particular death verdicts were the first death verdicts
that had been returned by a jury
in the Central District of California at that time
in over 50 years.
It was critically important
to be able to have that technology
to recover those bodies.
If, at the end of the day, we knew there were bodies
down there but couldn't identify where they were,
couldn't find them, couldn't recover them,
that would have ultimately been very difficult
for the victims' family members to handle,
as well as difficult for our case
and the evidence that we needed to present at our trial.