Abergil brothers make the Guardian's list of world's biggest drug cartels

Israeli brothers Yitzhak and Meir Abergil have made the Guardian's list of the world's largest drug cartels. In an article publishedTuesday, the newspaper said that despite the imprisonment of both brothers last year, their criminal organization continues to do business on a large international scale.

"The Abergils have been one of the world's largest exporters of ecstasy, into the U.S. and elsewhere, and prolific in gambling and embezzlement too," the Guardian wrote.

  

The article was published after the arrest of Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, the leader of one of the world's most powerful criminal enterprises the Mexican Zetas.

Joining the Abergil brothers on the list was The Sinaloa cartel of Mexico, the Japanese Yamaguchi-gumi, Sointsevskaya Bratva of Russia and The 'Ndrangheta of Italy.

The Abergil brothers were indicted in a Los Angeles courthouse in July 2008 with three counts of money laundering and extortion, murder, and drug trafficking.

The indictments against the duo were based on a range of material, including wiretap evidence, and related to allegations in four separate incidents involving ordering the murder of Israeli drug dealer Sami Atias in Los Angeles, laundering money in the United States from the Trade Bank of Israel, extortion by threat of Israeli business people and trade in the drug Ecstasy.

Yitzhak and Meir were extradited to the United States in 2011 after a six-year long police investigation, along with the cooperation of American authorities.

Meir Abergil reached a plea bargain with the U.S. authorities later in 2011. He was sentenced to 42 months in prison for heading a crime organization, but the court considered the three years he served in Israel and the United States at the time of the trail, and was released.

In 2012, a U.S. court approved a plea bargain for Yitzhak Abergil by which he was convicted of involvement in murder, drug dealing, money laundering and extortion, and sentenced for ten years in an Israeli prison.