Israeli crime boss shot dead in Mexico was underworld ‘legend’
'Ben Suthi had been in a decades long feud with one of Israel’s top criminal organizations at the time of his killing, which Mexican authorities believe was a ‘settling of scores’
Tel Aviv native Ben Suthi was shot dead in broad daylight in an upscale shopping mall in Mexico City along with Alon Azoulay of Bat Yam.
Security camera footage published Friday by Mexican media showed the shooting of the two Israelis at close range.
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One of the shooters, Esperanza Gutierrez Rojano, has confessed to the shooting and initially claimed during police questioning that it was a crime of passion, saying Suthi cheated on her.
However, she later changed her story and gave details that led police to investigate organized crime links.
Suthi was 44 and Azoulay was 40, according to the Ynet news site, although other media outlets have reported different ages.
Suthi reportedly relocated to Mexico a few weeks ago. He is believed to have a child in the country, conceived during his last stint there after he fled Israel in 2001, escaping a sentence for murder during a furlough from prison.
In the 1990s Suthi was associated in Israel with the assassination of top criminal figures and a longstanding and violent feud with the Mosli criminal organization, one of Israel’s most powerful, according to a Friday report by Channel 13.
Their rivalry reportedly dated back decades. In one story cited in the report, Suthi, still a boy, tied two members of the Mosli family to a tree to humiliate them.
In 1997, Suthi orchestrated the attempted killing of criminal rival Manny Aslan at a Tel Aviv eatery. His accomplices in the murder, the Mckayten brothers, were caught red-handed, and one turned state’s witness, implicating Suthi in the crime. Suthi was arrested, refused to reveal who ordered him to kill Aslan, and was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
He escaped from prison in 2001 and fled to Central America, where he was suspected of involvement in violent crime and drug trafficking. He was arrested in Mexico in 2004 and exadited to Israel to finish his prison sentence, Ynet reported.
“Even in the police, and in the underworld, they knew who Ben Suthi was,” Eli Senyor, a crime reporter for Yedioth Ahronot, told Channel 13. “The fact that he sat in Israeli prison for many long years, and before that was on the run, all of that didn’t undermine his status — it did the opposite. He was becoming a legend.”
Senyor described his killing as “an earthquake in the underworld, nothing less.”
“There hasn’t been a killing of this magnitude in years,” Senyor said.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-crime-boss-shot-dead-in-mexico-was-underworld-legend/
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