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 thr*at
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 g*ng 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 k*lled.
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.
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.
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.
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 ex*cuted
where they collected
all kinds of evidence...
g*ns, 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 g*ng
were arrested.
Investigators
were all but convinced
the kidnap victims
had been k*lled,
but if the bodies
couldn't be found,
proving m*rder
would not be easy.
They had very, very
compelling evidence,
but they did not have
the bodies.
It wouldn't be optimal
to try a case involving a m*rder
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,
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.
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 d*ed
through accident or m*rder,
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.
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 k*lled
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 K*llers 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 k*lling 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.