Florida Man Chronicles
Banderite Swamp Monsters
If you missed the original “Florida Man,” the only thing worth recapping is that it focused on “Stevie Limo” who has lived in southern Florida for years, but returned to Manhattan in 2022, where he manned a booth at a Ukrainian festival on behalf of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF) to raise money for the “Free Ukraine Resistance Movement.” The UAFF owns 40% of the OUN-B headquarters building in Kyiv and is the financial arm of the “Bandera Organization” in the United States. What I didn’t mention is that until the mid-to-late 2000s, the UAFF owned a “lodge” in Hollywood, Florida—Mr. Limo’s former stomping grounds.
FLORIDA MAN 2
The “Ukrainian Liberation Front,” a coalition of OUN-B “facade structures,” staged a controversial takeover of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) over forty years ago, on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election as President of the United States. In October 1980, the biggest of the “Big Four” Ukrainian American fraternal organizations, the Ukrainian National Association (UNA) — headquartered in Jersey City and more closely associated with the Melnykite faction of the OUN — led a walkout at the 13th congress of the UCCA.
The trouble apparently started two years earlier with the Hollywood Banderites, according to John O. Flis, the Supreme President of the UNA, who subsequently reflected on “The infamy of the 13th congress” in four consecutive issues of the Ukrainian Weekly, the English-language newspaper published by the UNA. As told by Flis in Part 1, the walkout “left in the convention hall only the members of one political conviction, members of the Vzyvolny Front, (i.e. Liberation Front, commonly referred to as Banderivtsi). I must report to you the developments as I saw them for the last two years or so…”
When I became president of the Ukrainian National Association in July 1978, the first engagement in the UCCA with the Front, as I shall henceforth refer to said group, came about in this fashion. I received a letter from our UNA branch in Miami Beach, Fla., asking for aid in fighting off an effort by the Front group from nearby Hollywood, Fla., to take over the Miami Beach UCCA Branch which was up to that time in the hands of old and new immigrants and first-, second-, and third-generation American-born Ukrainians… I reasoned that a takeover of the Miami Beach UCCA Branch would once again either isolate or drive away from participation in Ukrainian organized life still another Ukrainian American community. Enough of this had been done in the past.
I therefore appealed to the Executive Board of the UCCA which resolved to leave the Miami Beach UCCA Branch to the Ukrainian Americans and to permit the Hollywood Ukrainians to form their own branch. Ignatius Billinsky, the [OUN-B affiliated] secretary of the UCCA, told me at that time: "he'll never forgive you!" He was referring, of course, to Wolodymyr Mazur, the [U.S.] "commendant" (commander) of the organization known as OUN-R [“Revolutionaries,” a.k.a. OUN-B], who was also the chairman of the admissions committee of the UCCA. Mr. Mazur was sent to Florida to see if some compromise could be reached. Since it was after a prior visit to Miami Beach by Mr. Mazur that the entire controversy started and since he sided entirely with the Front side, no agreement was reached, and Mr. Mazur came to the UCCA empty-handed and with a distorted story of the facts. And so it was, I was never forgiven by Mr. Mazur…”
By the time the “Liberation Front” took over the UCCA, the Justice Department sought to revoke the citizenship of Bohdan Koziy, a co-founder of the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian Cultural Center in Hollywood, Florida. Koziy, 58, was a veteran of the Ukrainian auxiliary police enlisted in the “Holocaust by Bullets.” He managed the Flying Cloud Motel near the beach in Fort Lauderdale, just north of Hollywood, both of which are part of the Miami metropolitan area. His denaturalization trial started in September 1981. That month, the first of several witnesses testified that Bohdan Koziy murdered numerous Jews in their village, as one of a handful of Ukrainian police officers stationed there. “Everything against me is fabrication,” Koziy told the Miami Herald, but there was no denying that he married the Nazi-installed mayor’s sixteen year old daughter. According to the Fort Lauderdale News,
Testifying on videotape, a Warsaw, Poland, construction company executive recounted the murder of a 4-year-old girl outside a Lysiec police station over 40 years ago — a murder he said was committed by Fort Lauderdale hotel owner Bohdan Koziy. The three-hour tape of Josef-Waclaw Jablonski was played before a packed West Palm Beach courtroom Friday… Jablonski told Justice Department attorney Michael Wolf that he knew Koziy as a young man growing up in Nazi-occupied Lysiec. The 4-year-old girl was the daughter of a Dr. Singer. Jablonski recounted how, in the fall of 1943, the girl screamed for her mother as a Ukrainian policeman pulled the girl into a courtyard and then shot her in the head…
Testifying in Polish through a Polish interpreter, the 54-year-old, barrel-chested Jablonski nervously twirled the thumbs of his clasped hands as he told Wolf of another shooting incident also in 1943 before the Singer child’s death. Watching from outside the police station fence, Jablonski saw Koziy and a “fat” German lead six or seven Jewish women from the police building, he said. Among the captives he noticed Salka Kandler, who he went to school with, and her sister Lucia, he said. Koziy, armed with a rifle, and the German, armed with a pistol, stayed on the building’s steps and started shooting, Jablonski testified.
One woman came up to Koziy and pleaded for mercy, but her pleas went unheeded, Jablonski said. All the captives were shot and killed, he said. Jablonski said the German went back inside and returned a short while later with two Jewish men, including one he recognized as the Kandler sisters’ older brother Bernard. At one point, one man fled through the police station gate trying to escape, but Koziy soon caught him and dragged him by the collar back to the police station, Jablonski said. Jablonski described what happened on their return. “(Koziy) took out his pistol and put it to his head and he shot him,” he said. The second man was also shot…
After the men and women were killed, Jablonski said their bodies were taken on a horse-drawn cart to the nearby Jewish cemetery… Jablonski said he waited as the cart passed through the police gate. “I wanted to make sure it was really Salka,” he said, his eyes lowered. “We were school mates. We were really good friends.” … Earlier, Jablonski had described seeing Koziy once a week on Lysiec’s main streets. He recalled watching Koziy’s wedding reception through the windows at the home of the grandfather of Koziy’s wife, Yaroslava. Jablonski’s deposition was recorded by the Justice Department in Warsaw in January.
Since Bohdan Koziy’s legal troubles began in 1979, he received assistance from the New York law firm of Flis, Lozynskyj & Steck — as in UNA Supreme President John O. Flis, and OUN-B affiliated attorney Askold Lozynskyj, one of the usual suspects on the Bandera Lobby Blog. Lozynskyj represented “Don” Koziy for at least fifteen years, but not in the Florida courts. Flis, Lozynskyj & Steck coordinated a Legal Defense Fund for Ukrainians in the crosshairs of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Flis described Lozynskyj as an architect of the Banderite UCCA takeover. “When in trouble” at the 13th Congress, OUN-B “commandant” Volodymyr Mazur allegedly “looked to Askold Lozynskyj who was hovering about him with procedural and substantive advice.”
The Koziy case was especially troubling to Lozynskyj and other Nationalists for the precedent that it set. Not only was the Justice Department trying to deport Bohdan Koziy for lying to immigration authorities about his Nazi past, but concealing his membership in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists! Askold Lozynskyj sounded the alarm in September 1981:
Thus, the government contends, any OUN member who failed to reveal said membership at the time of applying for entry into the United States should now be subject to denaturalization. Inasmuch as no judicial precedent has been set for the latter assertion, the instant matter would appear to be the test case of OUN membership. Unquestionably, should the government prove successful in the subject action, new defendants would appear plentiful for further Soviet evidentiary initiative and the OSI’s zeal. The cost of defending the instant action is enormous… The Legal Defense Fund feels that this string must be cut at this juncture, especially in view of the implication that the Koziy case presents for former members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
And not just “former members”! More likely than not, Bohdan Koziy remained part of the OUN-B in the United States. James C. Paine, the district judge (appointed by President Jimmy Carter) that presided over Koziy’s denaturalization case, found Koziy to be guilty of “concealing his admitted membership in the OUN, Bandera Group and an organization in the United States known as the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine [ODFFU], Inc.” He concluded that Koziy’s “active participation” in the OUN “made him a member of and a participant in a movement hostile to the United States,” and worthy of denaturalization. Koziy’s “expert witness” who “testified that the OUN was never hostile to the United States” was, according to historian Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, not only “Bandera’s first hagiographer,” but “an OUN-B member and, prior to the Second World War, head of a division of the propaganda apparatus in the national executive.”
As told by John O. Flis, the ODFFU, which Koziy admitted joining, was “the leading [U.S.] organization in the Vyzvolny Front apparatus.” The ODFFU purchased its Manhattan headquarters building (the “Home of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front”) in the 1970s with a loan from the OUN-B that ballooned with interest over the coming decades, with the understanding that the ODFFU only owned the property on paper. This helps to explain the ODFFU’s eventually strained relationship with the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF) as the financial arm of OUN-B in the United States, which formerly owned the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Hollywood, Florida. My understanding is that the unpaid ODFFU loan played a role in the inter-Banderite drama of recent years that led Askold Lozynskyj and others to organize a “coup d’etat” of that organization in 2019. There were many different angles to the ODFFU power grab, but one way of looking at it is that the OUN-B appointed board members of the UAFF seized control of the building.
After Bohdan Koziy lost his appeal, the Justice Department wanted to deport him to the Soviet Union. Instead, Koziy fled to Costa Rica, “based on what he perceived to be a hostile political environment in the United States.” According to the Ukrainian Weekly, “he believed that the U.S. Justice Department and principally its Office of Special Investigations were being unduly influenced by certain interest groups,” in other words, Jews. After Costa Rican police tried to arrest Koziy for extradition to the Soviet Union, he reportedly “held a gun to his head” until they backed off, but the extradition fell through, because Moscow failed to guarantee that Koziy would not be executed. Bohdan Koziy safely remained in legal limbo until 2003, when Poland demanded the 80 year old Banderite’s extradition, a week before he died.
FLORIDA MAN 3
Andrew J. Futey, the president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, hails from Ohio, but he has a luxurious home in suburban and affluent Osprey, Florida, about 70 miles south of Tampa. With piercing light blue eyes, Futey often has a deer-in-the-headlights look. His year-round tan reminds me of his most important predecessor, the late Lev Dobriansky, whom Reagan appointed as the U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas a couple years after the Banderite takeover of the UCCA.
In fact, Futey’s father Bohdan chaired the “infamous” 13th Congress. According to John O. Flis, “Futey never relinquished the gavel to his assistants during the entire convention… a ‘first’ in the annals of the UCCA.” The walkout began as Bohdan Futey triumphantly declared a controversial vote to be unanimous because the non-Banderite opposition abstained. “The UCCA was finally in the hands of one political party,” Flis bemoaned. Futey urged the UNA to rejoin the UCCA under Banderite leadership. Two decades later, they did, but in the years to come, Ronald Reagan appointed Futey to chair the U.S. Foreign Claims Commission, and journalist Russ Bellant interviewed an OUN-B member who apparently described Futey as one of “the contact points between the OUN-B and the Reagan White House.”
The UCCA stagnated under Banderite domination, and allegedly grew corrupt. In 2019, shortly before he died, Jaroslaw Fedun, who chaired the UCCA’s audit committee, wrote a complaint to be submitted to the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau. Fedun claimed to be “shocked and appalled to discover recently that this organization does not serve the interest of its members.” He was largely concerned with the UCCA’s “excessive” payroll, and allegedly discovered that Andrew Futey collects two salaries, one as President and another as Office Director. Something else that bothered Fedun was “relatives on the board of directors.” He identified Askold Lozynskyj as the UCCA’s legal counsel, Lozynskyj’s wife as the chief of external affairs, and his sister as another board member. Fedun suggested that the audit “committee” only consisted of himself and a former “commandant” of OUN-B.
For the Futeys, the case of John Demjanjuk in Parma, Ohio hit closer to home than Bohdan Koziy. Demjanjuk, at first thought to be the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka, became the most well known OSI case. In fact, he guarded a different Nazi death camp, Sobibor. Bohdan Futey, according to historian Christoph Schiessl, was “one of Demjanjuk’s first attorneys.” Demjanjuk’s main lawyer from the United States was the son of a former Displaced Persons Commissioner who grew into an ally of the Banderite “Liberation Front.” (During Koziy’s denaturalization trial, the US government presented the Truman-era DP Commission’s official list of “inimical organizations” including the OUN.) As an old man, years after almost being executed in Israel, and shortly before he died in 2012, Demjanjuk was convicted in Germany “as an accessory to 28,060 murders at Sobibor.” Andrew Futey, then an executive vice president of the UCCA, doubted the fairness of the German trial. “All they could say was, ‘He was there [at Sobibor].’ Where’s the justice?” he commented. When the former death camp guard died, Askold Lozynskyj, a vocal defender of Demjanjuk’s “innocence,” mourned him as a “martyr” of the “Holocaust industry.”
In 1991, Ohio’s new Republican governor, George Voinovich, appointed twenty five year old Andrew Futey as an executive assistant, and deputy personnel director for boards and commissions. “In his new capacity,” boasted the Ukrainian Weekly, “Mr. Futey will recommend to the governor appointments to the many boards and commissions established by the State of Ohio.” According to a promotional bio, Futey “served as a policy advisor to the Governor with direct oversight of several Cabinet level state departments. He was responsible for the implementation of gubernatorial policy and enactment of the legislative agenda for each of these state departments. He was also responsible for the management and oversight of the Governor’s offices of Minority Affairs, Multi-Cultural and Ethnic Affairs, and Veterans Affairs.”
Futey joined the Ohio Lottery Commission in 1998, Voinovich’s last year as governor. In 2003, the Foreign Minister of Ukraine appointed Futey as the Honorary Consul of Ukraine for Ohio and Kentucky, which he remains. The following year, prosecutors recommended jail time for Andrew Futey, 38, reported to be a “Republican lobbyist who admitted helping a rogue stockbroker gain state investment business.” Futey pled guilty to a misdemeanor complicity charge after he was ensnared in a corruption probe thought to be a career killer for the Treasurer of Ohio, who now sits on the state’s Supreme Court.
Andrew Futey was elected president of the UCCA in 2016, and two years later became a vice president of the Ukrainian World Congress. His vice president in the UCCA appears to be another well-paid Banderite proxy, who allegedly takes a second salary as the director of the UCCA’s Ukrainian National Information Service. I suspect that Futey is not a full member of OUN-B, but more like a sympathetic consultant who sold his soul to the “Bandera Group” years ago. In September 2019, he sent greetings as UCCA president to the controversial “extraordinary convention” outside Chicago at which the OUN-B declared a new ODFFU board of directors, and ignited a Banderite legal battle in New York.
FLORIDA MAN 4
Bohdan Shandor is a Ukrainian American lawyer in Bonita Springs, Florida. He served as president of the Ukrainian American Bar Association in 1982-84 (succeeded by Bohdan Futey), and again in 2019-20. Under his leadership, the UABA joined the National Council of the UCCA a few years ago. In 1980, John O. Flis credited Askold Lozynskyj with realizing that although the OUN-B “could not muster a majority in the Presidium or in the Executive Board, it could by secret preparation, without exciting the opposition, muster a majority in the National Council which as the highest UCCA organ ‘could do no wrong.’”
In November 2019, UABA president Bohdan Shandor reviewed “The Devil Next Door,” the Netflix series on the Demjanjuk saga. Apparently his main takeaway from “the tragic story of John Demjanjuk” was that “we need to be constantly mindful of the successors to the KGB who continue to attempt to foment division, sow mistrust and instill hatred amongst Americans.” He concluded that Demjanjuk “never should have lost his citizenship and never should have been deported to Israel in the first place.”
In 2020, Shandor worked on the Trump campaign, apparently as its point person for “Ukrainians for Trump,” also known as the Suburban Council of Ukrainian Voters (SCUV), headquartered in the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian Cultural Center in Palatine, Illinois. In September 2019, the Palatine branch of ODFFU likely hosted the controversial “extraordinary convention” in nearby Bloomingdale, which declared a new ODFFU board of directors including the SCUV president, and appointed Askold Lozynskyj as the new building manager in Manhattan. A year later, Shandor wrote a letter to the Ukrainian Weekly: “A vote for Biden is a vote for the extreme radical left.” Lozynskyj, meanwhile, advised “Ukrainian Americans for Biden.” According to Shandor, his “first encounter” with ODFFU was in 2020. About a year ago, he became the outside general counsel to this OUN-B “facade structure.”
Bohdan Shandor’s family hails from western Ukraine. His mother was born in Lviv, and his father Vincent was from Uzhhorod, which sits on the border with Slovakia. Before World War II, Vincent Shandor was “head of the Carpatho-Ukrainian Representation” in Prague. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bohdan Shandor believes that Hungarians fired the first shots of World War II against Ukrainians in “Czech Ruthenia.” But the most interesting thing about Shandor’s family is that he is related by marriage to an archconservative member of Congress.
“Ukrainian American elected to Congress,” the Ukrainian Weekly beamed in 2010 about Andy Harris in Maryland, who joined the far-right Freedom Caucus. “His mother was born and raised in Ivano-Frankivsk, and his grandfather was a Ukrainian Catholic priest and a chaplain in Ukrainian Insurgent Army, according to Ukrainian American attorney Bohdan Shandor.” The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the 1940s paramilitary arm of OUN-B led by former Nazi collaborators, butchered Poles, Jews, and any Ukrainians that got in its way. According to The Intercept, “Harris’ father fought in the pro-Hitler Hungarian army, and Harris often refers to him as an anti-communist fighter.”
The Maryland politician, described as “Viktor Orbán’s Biggest Fanboy” in Congress, co-chairs both the Ukraine Caucus and Hungarian Caucus. In January 2021, shortly after the Capitol riot, Harris tried to bring a gun into the House Chamber. A couple months later, he closed out a webinar organized by the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, an OUN-B front, by marveling that Ukraine is “one area where broad bipartisanship clearly exists,” and stressing, “when this pandemic is over we have to make sure we have the world in a geopolitical position we want it in.”