Florida Man
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INTRODUCTION
“It is good to be King” is how 55-year old “Stevie Limo” introduces himself on Facebook. Days after Russia invaded Ukraine, he asked the Banderite who launched a campaign to get me fired from my job in “Little Ukraine,” Manhattan, “Why didn’t someone Kick Moss’s ass.” In the coming weeks, Mr. Limo, whose real name is Steven Gbur, chose a profile picture inspired by the extremist Right Sector in Ukraine, and returned to New York City, where he is from, after many years in Florida. “What I can live without is liberal Trump hating morons like you,” he once commented.
In 1993-94, Steve Gbur became the CFO of Aventura Limo in Miami. The following year, he started to coach kids in South Florida’s Gold Coast Soccer Premier League. Five years ago, the youth league commissioner described Gbur as a hothead who antagonized people, known for “moving around the soccer circuit,” coaching, owning and sponsoring different teams, but never winning a competition. The founder of a “major sport marketing and promotions company” in South Florida said that Gbur doesn’t just “burn bridges,” he “nukes them.” According to one report, he’s had “14 employers in various Limo companies and Sports clubs.”
In early 2002, “Stevie Limo” quit his job at Aventura Limo, and bought a night club (Bash, co-founded by Sean Penn) and a soccer team. “I became curious as to where he was getting the money to make these investments,” recalled Mr. Goodman, the company owner, who cleaned out Gbur’s office and found his bank statements that spring. Throughout the month of June, Mr. Goodman, Mr. Limo, his attorney Mr. Drobenko, and two fraud investigators from BankUnited negotiated an agreement not to file charges if Gbur returned $100,000 of the money he took from Aventura’s clients. At the end of July, after receiving nothing, Mr. Goodman and the bank called the police again. Gbur subsequently turned himself in and was charged with first-degree grand theft, for which he spent some time in Dade County Jail.
“Stevie Limo” reportedly embezzled over $125,000 from Aventura’s clients, money he deposited into a business account belonging to USA Limo, Inc., which he founded in 1998. A couple months before leaving his job, Gbur established Score Nightclub, Inc. According to Mr. Goodman, later “it was discovered that he also took money from a credit line of the company for his own personal use in the amount of $377,000. A lawsuit was filed against him for this money and a judgement [of $200,000] was found in our favor, however no money was ever recovered.”
In 2006, by which time Steve Gbur’s nightclub reportedly owed the state over $100,000 in unpaid taxes and penalties, he reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. Gbur was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and agreed to pay $52,000 in restitution. He described the issue as “a business deal that went bad.” Two years later, Gbur asked the city of Boca Raton to invest in his 290,000 square foot, $55 million idea.
“Ice rink promoter has troubled past,” reported the Sun Sentinel, according to which the city wanted a “90,000 square-foot facility with two NHL-sized rinks and a third, larger, Olympic-sized rink.” The other bid was for $11 million. Gbur proposed to more than triple the size of the project to include “an indoor multipurpose field, a bowling alley and three full-sized courts for basketball and volleyball… a restaurant and bar, martial arts and boxing gym, cheerleading school, arcade and a sports medicine facility.” Gbur wanted the city to lend him thirty million dollars and twelve acres. “All I am is the gentleman that put this thing together,” Gbur told the newspaper. “I would hate to see a project get killed because of misinformation.” He subsequently withdrew the bid after the article came out. “THE ICEMAN LEAVETH,” said Boca Raton News.
According to his Facebook profile, Steve Gbur “studied” in New York at Fox’s Corner, a Lower East Side bar owned by “a bookie and loan-shark” that was “popular with gangsters.” As told in the New York Review of Books in 2006, the bar owner’s son, Stuey Ungar, “is generally reckoned to have been the most gifted card player of all time.” But Gbur was evidently schooled in the Ukrainian Youth Association (Спілка Украінської Молоді, CYM), the international youth wing of the OUN-B, or clandestine “Banderite” faction of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists headquartered in Munich during the Cold War. In the 1970s, Gbur was on the American CYM volleyball team alongside Wasyl Maczula, who later owned two bars in the “Ukrainian East Village,” one of them on the ground floor of the “Home of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front,” that is, the US headquarters of the OUN-B on 2nd Avenue in “Little Ukraine.”
Another neighborhood Ukrainian bar disappeared in the past few years after the Ukrainian Sports Club (Український Спортивний Клуб, YCK), located one block over, relocated to Brooklyn. The club and its soccer team, founded in 1947, are supposed to be apolitical, but it’s no coincidence that they use Banderite colors, red and black. Newsweek ran an article in 2014 on the tensions between “Little Ukraine” in Manhattan and “Little Odessa” in Brooklyn. “The narrative on Second Avenue is simple,” according to the author, “the inhabitants of Little Odessa don't care about Putin's takeover of Crimea because they are not real Ukrainians. They are Jews.”
Wasyl, president of the Ukrainian Sports Club, refuses to tell me his last name because of the “long reach” of Russian security services. He also has nothing nice to say about the Brooklyn “Ukrainians,” also his quotes. He shows me the bar of their community center, which is also a meeting place for Ukrainian nationalists, pointing proudly to the empty slots where the Russian vodka used to stand… Their diaspora, called the Second Wave, may have been smaller than Brighton Beach's [post-Soviet] Third, but no less wealthy. Their ‘Little Ukraine’ also has everything an immigrant from Kiev or Lviv might need unless it's a synagogue… Stepan Bandera—I brought his name up very carefully on Second Avenue. I didn't have to bring it up at all in Brighton Beach, since every person I speak to mentions him about two questions into our Crimean discussions… But the old fellows in their Sports Club venerate Bandera, while the Jews of Brighton Beach despise him for allying with the Nazis… Spending my days with these angry and suspicious people, I felt like I was witnessing balkanization within balkanization.
YCK (“Oosk”), the Sports Club, is not an OUN-B front like CYM (“Soom”). In 2016, YCK member Steve Gbur celebrated Donald Trump’s election, “Now WE have real CHANGE and HOPE.” By that point, he is said to have unsuccessfully sponsored OUN-B fixer Askold Lozynskyj for membership in the Sports Club. Raised by antisemitic Banderite parents in the neighborhood, where he got into youthful inter-ethnic turf wars with Poles and Puerto Ricans, Lozynskyj was presumably turned down because he is a conniving attorney. He allegedly “made his money by taking advantage of Ukrainian organizations, but mainly from their members — Ukrainian immigrants that couldn’t speak and/or write English.”
In the past several years, Lozynskyj started running the annual shareholder meetings and installing Banderite cronies at the Ukrainian National Home (UNH) on 2nd Avenue, like Andrew Stasiw, principal of the nearby St. George Academy, who once told me I’m awesome, and has said that his wife from Ukraine looks like she’s sixteen. As far as I know, Stasiw is still the president of the UNH, with Jerry Melnyk as the building manager, who leads the Manhattan branch of CYM next door. In 2019, Lozynskyj orchestrated a coup in ODFFU, Inc., the historic Banderite “facade structure” that technically owns the neighboring OUN-B building. Just over a month after a dubious “extraordinary convention” named a new board of directors that declared Lozynskyj the ODFFU building manager, Gbur started going after a fellow Banderite in YCK, and calling for a convention in that organization, headquartered one block over on 2nd Avenue.
The year before, Gbur picked a fight on the Facebook page of “Oselia CYM Ellenville,” the OUN-B’s main summer camp on the East Coast, formerly managed by Andrew Stasiw and once a point of pilgrimage for Banderites. A year after the 1959 KGB assassination of OUN-B leader Stepan Bandera in Munich, his successor and “lifelong friend” Stepan Lenkavsky made his first public appearance in the western hemisphere at the Ellenville camp. Lenkavsky wrote the OUN’s “Ten Commandments of a Ukrainian Nationalists,” and during the war, took the position that “regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.”
The camp sits in the foothills of the historically Jewish “Borscht Belt,” an area that supposedly resembles the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine where Banderite “Insurgents” (led by Roman Shukhevych) made their last stand against the Soviets. In 1962, Banderite veterans constructed a quasi-religious “Heroes’ Monument” there, including larger than life busts of Bandera and Shukhevych. In 2018, the Facebook page of the summer camp, which also has an ongoing ideological winter camp, shared an old postcard of the “ozero,” or lake, that served as a natural border with Camp Aishel. Disparaging the Jews next door was commonplace. “I remember rowboats on that lake,” commented former bar owner Wasyl Maczula. As someone else explained, “they weren’t ours—we kept stealing them from Camp Aishel next door. We even repainted one blue & yellow, but they didn’t fall for it.”
Gbur interrupted the reminiscing with a comment directed at the Facebook page: “why remind us of how bad of a job you have done considering the condition of the ozero today. shame on you.” A sneaker reseller who worked at the camp responded, to which Gbur said, “you can defiantly [sic] control the landscaping and i’m not your fucken bud.” Later that summer, “Stevie Limo” asked, “Do you really think this CUNT would make a better president than Trump,” referring to one of the Democratic candidates. In November 2019, Gbur fired off an email to the members of the Sports Club, at first to blast its Communications Director, a woman who runs the local Saturday School held by the Banderite youth organization in the ODFFU building. “Ulana,” he wrote to all the members, “So in other words, you would like us to do all the work so you can send Willie [AKA Wasyl, the president] a bill later and get paid. Brilliant!!!”
Willie, I always knew YCK to be a volunteer organization. When did that change? Why are you foolishly spending the clubs money on a website and a communication director, that bills us $40 an hour, when most of our members don’t even known what a web site or Facebook is… I have been operating a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/NY.Ukrainians.FC) for years and have never gotten paid. Plus my page has more pictures and 7 times the number of followers as her page does. Nor did i ever get paid for my time designing the clubs new Logo’s, Crest, Pennant, Patches, Banner, Cups, Flyers, Tee-shirts, Uniforms, Warm-Ups, Caps, Hoodies, etc… Plus, I ordered all these things at my cost and then had to fight with you to get paid. Since you are paying people now, maybe [the coach] and i should send you our bill for our past service… There’s NO Real Board of Directors… Willie, you have a fiduciary duty to the club as president that you are not living up to. There is no transparency! There is no democratic process! WHY?
Over the coming month, Askold Lozynskyj and co. escalated their “unlawful behavior,” according to a lawsuit filed by the “old board” of ODFFU, Inc.
On or about November 18, 2019, Askold Lozynskyj (‘Lozynskyj’) who is aligned with Respondents, contacted the City of New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development and changed the registration of the ODFFU’s building to his name, in an attempt to declare himself as the managing agent for the building.
On or about the 22nd or 23rd of November, Lozynskyj (claiming to be in the role of building manager) contacted ODFFU’s residential and commercial tenants and demanded that they pay their December rents to him as the new managing agent and showed said tenants the paperwork from the City … with his name listed as managing agent. Lozynskyj also met with the owners of … one of the ODFFU’s commercial tenants and threatened to terminate their lease if they did not send their rent checks for December to him.
Further, Lozynskyj met with the owners of another of the ODFFU’s commercial tenants and threatened to take them to court if they did not send their commercial rent check for December to him. Yet still, Lozynskyj met with several of the ODFFU’s residential tenants and threatened to terminate their apartment leases or not renew their apartment leases if they did not send their residential checks for December to him.
Over the last month, Respondents and Lozynskyj have sent communications to the Ukrainian National Federal Credit Union (‘UNFCU’), the Supervisory Committee of the Board of Directors of the UNFCU and the National Credit Union Administration (‘NCUA’), which is the regulatory agency that supervises federal credit unions … in an attempt to exert further pressure on several [UNFCU] board members … who are also on the Board of ODFFU, Inc.
On January 1, 2020, Steve Gbur shared an image that said “Happy New Year — Now Let’s Reelect President Trump,” and Askold Lozynskyj invited comrades to join him in “rebuilding” the Manhattan branch of ODFFU, because apparently at some point the more active Brooklyn Banderites formed an umbrella New York City branch. “This department is unfortunately inactive but virtually captured by thieves from Brooklyn,” he wrote on New Year’s Day, also Stepan Bandera’s birthday. Two weeks later, Lozynskyj organized an “emergency” meeting of the Manhattan branch in the ODFFU building which he was in the process of taking over. Rival ODFFU members tried to serve him a cease and desist letter. He denounced the group as a “gang of thugs” and “post-Soviet style property raiders.” In his subsequent “memo to members of the Ukrainian community,” Lozynskyj warned, “there are crooks, provocateurs and essentially bad people within its ranks… fight your enemies but beware your so called Ukrainian friends. They represent an equal if not greater danger.”
Earlier this year, the “old board” of the Ukrainian Sports Club was surprised with a “Special Meeting” that declared a new leadership. At first, it seemed to reduce the OUN-B influence in that organization to zero, because among those tossed from the board was Bo Pryjmak—the husband of Ulana and one of the handful of people that Lozynskyj invited to “rebuild” the Manhattan branch of ODFFU. But the “new board” of YCK allegedly has its own shady attorney pulling the strings: Walter Drobenko, the brother of Steve Gbur’s ex-wife, who bailed out “Stevie Limo” in Florida, and whose son is married to the daughter of Christine Balko, the treasurer of the “new board” of ODFFU (Organization for Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine).
When I worked in the neighborhood, every once in a while I saw Balko coming and going from the Banderite building, usually with Walter Zaryckyj, the US leader of OUN-B, according to whom “we have plenary power.” According to the anonymous, sensational whistleblower complaint from 2019 that started this blog, not only was Balko an architect of the OUN-B plan to toss the “thieves from Brooklyn,” that is, re-establish total control of the ODFFU and its Manhattan building — the headquarters of multiple OUN-B “facade structures” in the US. Allegedly:
In the past, she was forced to resign from Self Reliance NY Federal Credit Union for stealing members’ Social Security numbers and the addresses of their families in Ukraine to whom they sent money through electronic fund transfers. She was lucky that Board didn’t notify the FBI of such atrocities. Her actions led to many crimes in Ukraine, as she provided the details of such money transfers to the mafia-affiliated OUN (R) [i.e. OUN-B] members in Ukraine. Her specialty is to manipulate other people. Her other special skills include IT-related procedures, e-mail addresses alterations, communications, etc. She also is not a member of ODFFU, but she lies and presents herself as an ODFFU member, lying to people, making up stories, talking all kind of garbage about the current ODFFU, Inc. Board members.
Months after Walter Drobenko negotiated for Mr. Goodman and UnitedBank to give Steve Gbur the opportunity to repay them $100,000, the New York Times named Gbur’s attorney in “A Family Tale of Infidelity, Drugs, Suicide and Caviar.” While Gbur was grinding in Florida, Drobenko tragically came to inherit a business. The Sobol family used to own Caviarteria. After the father died in 1992, his two sons took over, but one reportedly “shot himself in the head using two handguns” in 2001, leaving behind his brother (represented by Drobenko) and ex-wife. “This was a sacrifice to save the business, a sacrifice for the family,” she said.
Six months after this article, the brother was found dead in his apartment with a bag around his head. According to the New York Post, his widow said “there was some legal discord with Drobenko over the business, which she declines to discuss.” Three years later, Gbur reached a plea agreement with prosecutors in Florida, and Drobenko officially took over Caviarteria. In 1998, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that most of the global caviar trade was illegal. As told by the Times, the first son “began importing much of his caviar from the United Arab Emirates and Lithuania, where, according to his deposition, he would telephone some mysterious person named Igor, tell him how much caviar he wanted, and it would arrive in New York.”
Steve Gbur arrived in “Little Ukraine” earlier this year, if only to man a booth at the annual springtime St. George Ukrainian festival for the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF), the financial arm of OUN-B in the United States that owns 40% of the OUN-B headquarters building in Kyiv. Gbur is known for peddling jerseys, which make up much of his wardrobe, at Ukrainian festivals. So far this year, Gbur has raised almost $14,000 for the UAFF to send to the obscure “Free Ukraine Resistance Movement” (FURM) in southern Ukraine, a “partisan outfit” that has received some (perhaps undue) credit for having “taken out arms depots and killed collaborators.” The FURM, formerly known as the far-right “Capitulation Resistance Movement,” is coordinated by Andriy Levus, who announced in February that he is a leading OUN-B member. Levus and his 2.5 year old “Resistance Movement,” puppeteered by the Bandera Organization, played an important role in sabotaging Volodymyr Zelensky’s peace agenda after his landslide election victories in 2019. That story will largely be the focus of an upcoming, long-overdue series on the Bandera Lobby Blog.
Also this year, Gbur could be seen coming and going from the ODFFU building, and began to co-chair the Audit Committee of the Ukrainian Sports Club, at least according to the “new board.” YCK bought a new building in Brooklyn, but on its soccer team’s Facebook page managed by Gbur, the address listed is for the OUN-B headquarters in Manhattan. This upcoming Friday, Gbur is organizing a “USA vs England Watch Party” for YCK members at the ODFFU building, including a “UkieTailgate” followed by a poker tournament, ostensibly to raise money for wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
The conflicts within ODFFU and YCK are connected. A few months ago, Steve Gbur got heated at a Sports Club meeting after somebody said he doesn’t “know shit about soccer.” More upsetting for Gbur, the longtime coach allegedly told him “to go back to Florida.” Later, in an email, Gbur declared, “It’s time for him to retire and let someone else manage the teams. And NO!!! I don’t want to do it but if I did we would be in the premier division in 2 years. He can still deal with the league and be the face of the club but his time managing the teams is over. show me what he has accomplished in the last 40 years… If it was up to me I would have a [5x larger] budget of $250K for the teams…” Emailing all of YCK, Gbur asked, “Can someone please explain to me why is it that I am always the bad guy… I reacted and again I’m the bad guy. So please, can someone explain to me why is it that I am always the bad guy.”
