Mickey Cohen — gangster (la kingpin) with roots in the Russian Empire
Mickey Cohen (born Meyer Harris Cohen) was an American organised crime figure and the dominant mob boss of Los Angeles from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Born in Brooklyn to parents who had emigrated from Kyiv (Russian Empire), he became a boxer before rising through the bootlegging and gambling rackets to rule LA's underworld.
Tracing the roots — Kyiv
Born in Brooklyn in 1913, the youngest of six children of Max Cohen and Fanny Skovron — Jewish immigrants from Kyiv — Cohen moved to Los Angeles as a child and entered the criminal world through boxing. His Kyiv origins, filtered through Brooklyn poverty, shaped the toughness and the outsider's contempt for respectability that defined his criminal career.
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Kyiv. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.