Boychukgate
Stolen fortunes of Ukrainian immigrants. Convergence of the Bandera cult and CIA cut-outs. Prelude to a feud in NYC's "Little Ukraine."
Twenty years ago, Mykola Bojczuk, a wealthy Ukrainian nationalist, passed away in a nursing home in Bridgewater, New Jersey, at which point his Russian-speaking son from the Soviet Union stood to inherit almost all of his estate. But when Stefan Bojczuk went to probate his father’s will from 1982, he discovered that “someone else had beaten him to the Somerset County Surrogate's Office.”
The Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF), an important front group for the OUN-B, or “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, had submitted another will from 2002, which Bojczuk barely managed to sign in the aftermath of a stroke, while also “suffering from very significant dementia.”
At the end of the day, Stefan Bojczuk won in court, but I’m reminded of a sensational anonymous complaint, alleging “ Large Scare Fraudulent Financial Activities ,” that was submitted to the New York State Attorney General’s office in 2019 about the OUN-B network, and the UAFF in particular, which owns 40% of the Banderite headquarters building in Kyiv.
In my recent documentary, “Big Trouble in Little Ukraine,” there is a moment when Walter Zaryckyj, the UAFF president since 2018, told Banderite youth in 1989 Canada, “our wealth is being passed over there [to the Soviet Union] because a lot of our old folks don’t write out wills.” Over a decade after the USSR collapsed, it seems the Banderites were still nervous about ex-Soviet citizens inheriting “our wealth.” “It’s as if we don’t have enough lawyers,” joked Zaryckyj, “including my friends, like Asha.” That was apparently a reference to Askold Lozynskyj, an important OUN-B member in the United States. According to the 2019 complaint,
For the record: Askold Lozynskyj made his money by taking advantage of Ukrainian organizations, but mainly from their members — Ukrainian immigrants that couldn’t speak and/or write English. Those people trusted him with everything. … Ukrainian immigrants, who didn’t have family and didn’t understand the English language, went to him for advice and procedures on how to prepare a will in order that after their passing, the building/assets that they owned would go to Ukrainian Organizations and/or churches. Yet somehow, after their death, those assets became properties of Askold Lozynskyj, Esq. That is how he started making money.
So it appears that the Bojczuk case was far from an isolated incident.
According to an internal OUN-B document from 2007 by Myron Swidersky (1925-2022), the vice president of the UAFF in the early-to-mid 2000s, Mykola Bojczuk was a young entrepreneur in 1940s western Ukraine, who worked in the economic sector of OUN-B and training camps for its Ukrainian Insurgent Army. After the war, in American-occupied Germany, Bojczuk was reportedly “further involved in the work of the economic sector, organizing an organizational enterprise.” This might have been the “luggage factory whose profits enabled him to bring a substantial nest egg to the United States in 1949.”
In 1941, before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Bojczuk is said to have gone into hiding from Soviet authorities that took over western Ukraine in 1939. They deported his wife and young son, Stefan, to Kazakhstan. As told by one article, “When the Germans invaded later that year, Bojczuk stayed behind and continued making money.” He fled westward in 1944, “one step behind the retreating Germans and ahead of the Red Army.” Bojczuk was only reunited with his son in 1994, over fifty years after they last saw each other. In the meantime, Mykola built a hotel, purchased a valuable tract of land, and married an American woman who owned a stone yard—all in New Jersey. By the 21st century, he was thought to be worth 30 million dollars. And maybe 40 million, according to Swidersky.
During the Cold War, Bojczuk was reportedly a financial supporter of the Banderites. For example, he paid for at least one of their trips to Taiwan for a conference of the “Anti-Communist League.” It’s unclear if this was the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), which was partnered with the Banderites’ Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), or the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), in which the ABN represented the “captive nations” of the Soviet Union. According to the Swidersky report, Bojczuk’s Days Inn hotel also hosted Banderite meetings, including the 1982 World Congress of the “Ukrainian Liberation Front,” the international coordinating body of OUN-B front groups.
It was in 1982 that Mykola Bojczuk signed his original will, according to which his wife would inherit almost everything upon his death. It did not stipulate what would happen if she died before him. Because Bojczuk never officially adopted his two step-children, that meant almost everything would go to his only biological child in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. The scrivener of the will said that he warned Bojczuk about this possibility, who responded, “no, no, no, he’s a communist.” But they never changed a thing. It was said that Stefan Bojczuk “grew up to be the head electrician at a large Soviet cotton mill” in Kazakhstan. In 1994, he “arrived unannounced” in Bridgewater. If at first Mykola Bojczuk declined to change his will out of procrastination or stubbornness, later it might have been because he reconnected with son, who made him a grandfather, and eventually took over the Days Inn hotel. Stefan’s step-sister alleged that Mykola was afraid of him.
In any case, Mykola Bojczuk’s second wife died in September 2001. He was 88 years old. In the coming months, he “suffered a series of debilitating strokes,” after which Stefan successfully applied for guardianship, defeating his step-siblings in court. A pair of physicians who examined Mykola at a nursing home in Bridgewater submitted affidavits to the court that he was “mentally incompetent.”
On March 22, 2002, a Ukrainian American neurologist examined Mykola, and found him to be “suffering from very significant dementia.” According to him, “Mr. Bojczuk is not oriented to place or time. He does not know where he is. He did not know such obvious things as the identify of the President that he could not pass any mini mental examination.” Three days later, a psychiatrist agreed that the patient was “not oriented to day, date or place. His higher cognitive functions and memory are impaired. His judgement and insight are impaired.”
Another three days later, and Mykola Bojczuk received a visit from Peter Paluch, the treasurer of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (2001-2005), which acts as the financial arm of the OUN-B “Land Leadership of America.” Paluch was accompanied by a pair of Banderites to witness him sign a new will that said Bojczuk, “being of sound and disposing mind,” decided to split a million dollars between his “adopted son” and a granddaughter in Ukraine, leave the rest of his estate to the UAFF, and name “my friend” Paluch as the executor.
They made a mistake; Bojczuk did not adopt his step-children. Also, as noted by Stefan Bojczuk’s lawyers, the signature on this will was “far above and to the right of the signature line, and appears to be written in a feeble hand.” According to them, the document was prepared by “an attorney, Myron Smorodsky, who, on information and belief … was the attorney for Paluch and/or the UAFF.” This lawyer who helped the UAFF was not known to be associated with the Banderites, but a circle of CIA-backed Ukrainian nationalists based in New York.
Myron Smorodsky (1944-2020) was a co-founder of the Ukrainian American Bar Association and two-time president of this organization (1978-79, 1990-93). As recently as 2019, he was its communications director. During his legal career, Smorodsky apparently defended Ukrainian Nazi collaborators from prosecution by the U.S. government, and served as legal counsel to the Ukrainian mission to the UN, the Ukrainian consulate in New York, and the Ukrainian embassy in Washington. Later, he “worked on estates involving decedents who died in the U.S. but left Ukrainian beneficiaries.” Smorodsky may not have been a Banderite, but his mother trained soldiers in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
During the Cold War, Mykola Lebed (1909-98) led a small OUN faction of ex-Banderites that the CIA put in charge of a front company based in New York City called the Prolog Research Corporation. Smorodsky was the same age as Roman Kupchinsky (1944-2010), a Ukrainian American Vietnam veteran1 who became a “full-fledged CIA officer” and president of Prolog after Lebed took a step back from the operation. As the youngest member of Prolog, the CIA reported that Kupchinsky “maintains close connections with student groups in the New York area.” That included the “Committee for the Defense of Soviet Political Prisoners” (CDSPP) that Myron Smorodsky joined. Some of its other early members, Adrian Karatnycky and Alexander Motyl, became part-time student employees of Lebed’s CIA front.
In 2020, a friend from the Toronto-based “Committee for the Defense of Valentyn Moroz” (CDVM) recalled that Smorodsky had “worked closely with Roman Kupchinsky and Prolog.” The CDVM was spearheaded by top Banderites in Canada, such as Stepan Bandera’s son Andriy, and Oleh Romanyshyn, a nephew of OUN-B leaders Yaroslav and Slava Stetsko. According to a declassified CIA document, the Banderite-led CDVM “played a very active role in 1973-74 in mobilizing Canadian public opinion around the question of persecution in the USSR. In the USA similar type committees were also active, but with less measure of success.” The CDSPP, established in 1972, “has taken a less ideological role while agitating among left and liberal intelligentsia on matters concerning dissent in Ukraine and in the USSR.” Apparently the two organizations learned to work together. Andy Semotiuk, a Ukrainian Canadian lawyer from the CDVM, helped to facilitate this when he moved to New York, joined the CDSPP, and befriended Smorodsky. “In the years that followed,” according to Semotiuk, who now writes for Forbes,
Myron and I worked on estates involving decedents who died in the U.S. but left Ukrainian beneficiaries. We worked together while I was practicing in California for ten years, and later when I was in New York and finally after I returned to Canada again. Myron was very knowledgeable about wills and estates and litigated Ukrainian estate cases successfully in the U.S. He helped to defend Ukrainians that were wrongfully accused of collaboration with the Nazis, a task that was not always easy.
The CIA pulled the plug on the Prolog Research Corporation when the Cold War ended. Cooperation between the CDVM and CDSPP however paved the way for a greater convergence of Banderites and ex-Prolog staffers in the years to come. After CIA funding for Lebed’s OUN faction dried up, several Prologers went on to help the U.S. government “promote democracy” in the former Soviet Union. Adrian Karatnycky, from the CDSPP, became the president of Freedom House (1993-2004), and his wife Nadia Diuk (1954-2019) rose through the ranks of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a founder of which infamously said in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Prolog was “a fascinating place” to work, Diuk once remembered, “but after a while it became very clear to me that Kupchinsky was the gravitational force that brought together a number of intersecting universes.”
From 1990 to 2002, Roman Kupchinsky directed Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian language service of the US-funded Radio Liberty, which was established by the CIA. Kupchinsky led Radio Svoboda in the years that it got set up in Ukraine, but Andriy Haidamakha, a former editor of the OUN-B’s newspaper in Munich, almost the same age as Kupchinsky, was put in charge of the Kyiv bureau that they founded together. Haidamakha kept that job until 2000, when he was crowned the next international leader of OUN-B—a first for his generation of Ukrainian nationalists, and a first for someone from the postwar Ukrainian diaspora. I suspect this represented a turning point for the Banderites’ relationship with Washington.
As the OUN-B prepared its “10th Great Assembly” that “elected” Andriy Haidamakha, the “Land Leadership of America” organized the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), an important Banderite front group based in Washington and New York. CUSUR, some readers already know, was spearheaded by the “informational arm” of the UAFF, which was synonymous with the US branch of the OUN-B’s information service that shared its headquarters with a Stepan Bandera museum in London. Haidamakha proudly described the CUSUR’s annual conferences in Washington as the work of “Bandera nationalists and the patriotic sections of the Ukrainian [American] community.”
Petro Paluch, the UAFF treasurer who took advantage of Mykola Bojczuk in 2002, served on the steering committee that organized CUSUR’s main event that year. So did a pair of ex-Prolog staffers: Nadia Diuk and Adrian Karatnycky, the president of Freedom House, which sponsored the event along with the National Endowment for Democracy’s Democratic and Republican party affiliates. Over two decades, Karatnycky and Alexander Motyl, another veteran of Prolog and the CDSPP, have been recurring speakers at CUSUR conferences. I’ve even seen Karatnycky hanging out with Walter Zaryckyj, the UAFF president since 2018, who has led the CUSUR since its inception. So I’ve been curious about this convergence of Banderites and the Prolog crowd, and find it very intriguing that someone else who “worked closely” with that CIA front group conspired with the UAFF to defraud Bojczuk.
In 2004, the Superior Court of New Jersey ruled in favor of Stefan Bojczuk, and threw out the 2002 will. A year later, after fighting another lawsuit from Bojczuk, the UAFF “agreed to pay the estate $40,000 to settle a tortious interference claim.” In that time, instead of inheriting millions, the UAFF also paid $57,173.56 to Myroslaw Smorodsky; $29,231.47 to a tax attorney and consultants hired by Smorodsky; $66,226.00 in additional legal bills for UAFF members who approached Bojczuk; and some additional expenses for a grand total of $195,383.01. According to the UAFF’s tax filing in 2005, it ran a deficit of more than $250,000 in the past fiscal year.
At the “11th Great Assembly” of OUN-B, which apparently took place in 2005, Haidamakha was “re-elected” to a second term as Providnyk (Leader). Meanwhile the “Main Directorate” of the Bandera Organization established a commission to investigate the UAFF’s botched handling of Bojczuk. Three OUN-B members were appointed to the investigative committee: Irene Mycak, the head of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress’ National Holodomor Awareness Committee; Michael Koziupa, the president of another Banderite front group based in New York; and Volodymyr Karpynets, who at some point served as the financial officer of the OUN-B “Land Leadership in Great Britain,” and passed away less than a month ago.
In the spring of 2009, after the “12th Great Assembly” saw Stefan Romaniw of Australia ascend the Banderite throne, the Main Directorate canceled the work of the commission, and tasked its chief financial officer, “Tadej Mirnyj,” to write a final report on the Bojczuk affair. “Mirnyj,” evidently, is another name for Petro Lapczak, the chairman of the London branch of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, who I’ve previously said is allegedly one of the British Banderites that oversees the international “OUN Fund,” which the UAFF represents in the United States. Lapczak acknowledged that the execution of the 2002 will “cannot be claimed to have taken place in transparent normal conditions.” He also noted that Theodore Oleshchuk, who chaired the UAFF until 2006, failed to cooperate with the commission. Lapczak put the blame on Oleshchuk, Paluch, and other UAFF representatives known to have been in the loop, but not the foundation itself.
Because Oleshchuk and Paluch allegedly worked in secret from some UAFF board members, their scheme was “not a consequence of the decision of the Volya Foundation,” which is the Ukrainian name of the UAFF. That being said, Petro Lapczak did not recommend any actions against those he held responsible, just that they compensate the UAFF for its legal bills, and that the OUN-B leadership should “contribute to improving and consolidating the future activities of the foundation.” (Oleshchuk, a former “Land Leader of America,” remained on the UAFF board until 2018.) Furthermore, he recommended that “consideration be given to the consolidation of the internal mechanism for retaining the leadership of the Volya Foundation in the hands of the TPA [‘Land Leadership of America’]” when the latter comes under new management.
Epilogue: Banderite Feud in NYC
In 2013-17, Stefan Kaczurak was the deputy head of the OUN-B in the United States and the financial officer of the “Land Leadership of America” (TPA, Terenovoho Provodu Ameryky), while at the same time serving as the treasurer of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation and the president of the OUN-B’s Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms of Ukraine (ODFFU). He also managed the Banderite headquarters building in Manhattan, which is technically owned by ODFFU. In the United States, Kaczurak was evidently the real power behind the throne in those days.
Around 2016, “to better secure the property” in New York, the U.S. leadership of OUN-B decided to create a new ODFFU-affiliated foundation which would take control of the organization’s most valuable asset. But before that could be accomplished, the TPA and UAFF came under new management, which organized a rival ODFFU board of directors that almost instantly appointed Askold Lozynskyj as the new building manager. Lozynskyj, the Banderite lawyer accused of getting rich by taking advantage of Ukrainian immigrants who hired him to prepare their wills, was an architect of the ODFFU takeover.
The OUN-B’s legally dubious “extraordinary convention” of ODFFU on September 28, 2019, denounced as a coup d’etat by the existing board of directors, prompted the anonymous complaint to the New York State Attorney General’s office that morning, which immediately got back to the Banderites. “Please be advised that someone in the SK [Stefan Kaczurak] camp (we can only surmise) has pulled a defamatory trigger on our entire community,” Walter Zaryckyj warned his colleagues later that day. “Please keep all of this in mind when contemplating the results of any attempted reconciliation btw the legitimate forces in ODFFU (seeking reform) and the forces constituting the existing ODFFU BOD (seeking more of the same)!!”
On February 24, 2017, an alleged “grey cardinal” of the OUN-B sent a letter to the leading members of the Banderite network in the United States. This was Bohdan Harhaj of New York, who complained about the ineffectiveness of the TPA and UAFF since they came under new management in 2013-14. Harhaj seemed to hint that when he led the UAFF (2007-13), he also chaired the TPA. Now his successors appeared to be “sleeping in a blissful dream!” Although Harhaj remained on the UAFF board of directors, along with other prominent OUN-B members (Theodore Oleshchuk, Bohdan Fedorak, and Pavlo Bandriwsky), they were allegedly shut out of the decision-making process. The situation was reversed in the next year, after Walter Zaryckyj became the new chairman of the TPA and UAFF. As for Stefan Kaczurak, his side of the story seems to be reflected in a 2016 TPA report, which explained that the “Volya Foundation” (UAFF) is the “financial wing” of the “Land Leadership.”
The board of the Volya Foundation, according to the original tradition, was deliberately appointed by the Land Leader of America after each Grand Assembly. The composition of the foundation’s board mirrored the executive of the TPA, which strategically includes 2 members who are responsible for specific programs of the foundation … Currently, the Volya Foundation consists of 7 members of the organization (left over from the previous TPA), but this does not reflect the current TPA executive as it should. This sometimes makes it difficult to carry out certain work at the organizational and, most importantly, at the public level due to personal reasons. Thanks to the majority vote, we are able to resolve financial transactions/difficulties. It should be emphasized that thanks to friend Dovbush [Stefan Kaczurak] and mainly friend Sun [Helen Turyk], everything is done with great difficulty but in a professional manner - in accordance with government requirements.
Helen Turyk, who replaced Peter Paluch as the UAFF treasurer in 2006 and became the ODFFU bookkeeper in 2010, at first resisted the 2019 “coup,” but she joined the winning side after Askold Lozynskyj and company seized the building in Manhattan. The “Kaczurak camp” allegedly wanted things to be clean and above-board in their clandestine Banderite network—and to curtail what they might have called its criminal elements. Their OUN-B rivals would howl at that sentence. Walter Zaryckyj, for example, has declared that Kaczurak is going to jail.
Under Kaczurak’s management of the Banderite building, the UAFF and Center for US-Ukrainian Relations were evicted for non-payment of rent. The 2019 complaint declared that Walter Zaryckyj and his CUSUR sidekick Mykola Hryckowian “were expelled from the NYC Ukrainian community for fraud, lying, stealing and many other things.” As for Hryckowian, “Several times he was caught stealing the money donated by the [ODFFU] membership during Christmas caroling fund raising, called Koliada, and other donations.” (Traditionally, this is the main source of income for the TPA.) The international Bojczukgate commission even found Hryckowian to be partially responsible for that fiasco twenty years ago. In 2019, the Banderites installed him as the ODFFU president.
Theodore Oleshchuk, the former “Land Leader of America” who chaired the UAFF during the Bojczuk affair, passed away as the Banderite feud for control of the ODFFU and its headquarters building spilled into court. Just over a year before the “coup,” and his death, Oleshchuk was removed from the UAFF leadership, along with Kaczurak and its former president. Ironically, Kaczurak’s “old board” of ODFFU, which allegedly opposed the “criminal element” in OUN-B, was reconstituted in 2020 under the leadership of Dmitri Lenczuk, Oleshchuk’s grandson in New Jersey. Serhii Kuzan, a former rising star of OUN-B in Ukraine, who also seemed to part ways with the Bandera Organization in 2019, befriended the Oleshchuk-Lenczuk family during the Kaczurak years. He indicated support for the “Kaczurak camp” in ODFFU, which got steamrolled by the OUN-B, but the Kuzan team appears to be poised for a comeback, and that could turn the tables in New York again.
Even if that should come to pass, evidently it is not so simple for the “Land Leadership of America” to appoint a new board of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation. That was a problem for the TPA in the Kaczurak years, and the OUN-B commission that investigated the Bojczuk affair, because the Banderites formed a new TPA in 2004, but it took 2-3 years to install a more cooperative UAFF board.
Since the ODFFU conflict erupted (2019), and the next “Grand Assembly” took place in Ukraine (2022), it seems likely that the OUN-B would have established another commission to investigate the uproar in New York. Just so that an especially shady clique of Banderites from the Ukrainian diaspora can declare (to quote Walter Zaryckyj), “We have plenary power” in the U.S. network, UAFF leaders have undoubtedly burned far more OUN-B resources on lawyers, and jeopardized losing their Manhattan building altogether after the Supreme Court of New York County appointed a receiver to take over the property.
Indeed, there are echoes of the Bojczuk affair in this conflict. Take for example Bohdan Shandor, another two-time president of the Ukrainian American Bar Association (1982-84, 2019-20). According to Myron Swidersky’s 2007 report, Mykola Bojczuk had agreed to meet with Shandor in 2001 to discuss “the eventual registration of his property to the Volya Foundation [UAFF] and to create a corporation under the foundation, of which M. Bojczuk would be the chairman.” Supposedly Bojczuk, at 88 years old, agreed to this at a meeting with Bohdan Shandor and UAFF treasurer Petro Paluch in 2001, but negotiations broke down after “an unpleasant fight” about Shandor’s bill. As the old man’s health deteriorated, the Banderites got a new lawyer, Myron Smorodsky, and Shandor went running to Stefan Bojczuk to give him legal advice about fending off the UAFF.
In 2020, Bohdan Shandor worked on Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, which had a “Ukrainians for Trump” group closely tied to the Palatine, Illinois branch of ODFFU that appears to have hosted the controversial “extraordinary convention” in 2019. Shandor subsequently became one of the lawyers hired by the “new board” of ODFFU that put Askold Lozynskyj, an advisor to “Ukrainian Americans for Biden,” in charge of the OUN-B building in Manhattan. “This cabal, that’s what I’ll call them,” Shandor told an ODFFU convention in October 2022, outlining a conspiracy “that Mr. Kaczurak and others working with him, starting in 2008, began a plan of action whereby they would seize control” of the Banderite headquarters. And “according to the most recent real estate appraisals that I’ve seen,” this property in New York was valued “in excess of 30 million dollars”—roughly the size of the Bojczuk estate.
Thanks for reading. This story will be continued as we explore another angle of the Banderite feud in the New York area: “The Battle of the Banks” in “Little Ukraine,” Manhattan. If you want to support my work, you can “Buy Me a Coffee.” Also, if you live in New York, or visit soon, I’m still offering “Hidden History of Little Ukraine” tours.
The Vietnam war, according to Roman Kupchinsky, was “a classroom where I studied Ukrainian nationalism, as a result of which I began to see the Vietnamese enemy in a different light.” In the 1980s, the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations began to pursue Mykola Lebed. The CIA managed to protect him behind the scenes, but for good measure, Kupchinsky publicly led a lonely campaign on his behalf. In those days, he predicted, “If, someday in the future, the United States ever comes to rely upon Soviet evidence to try American ‘war criminals’ of the Vietnam War, I shall no doubt figure on some list given by the Vietnamese government to the Justice Department, and thirty Vietnamese ‘witnesses’ will come forward to identify me as a murderer of women and children in some hamlet.” In 2008, he struck a different tone, “begging the Lord forgiveness for my acts against his children — the ‘Gooks’...”