Whatever the motive, Feldman's secret underworld life apparently began unraveling last September.
That's when a local cop — posing undercover as a corrupt officer working as a bouncer — spotted Feldman inside an anonymous-looking club near Washington Avenue and Sixth Street called Stars Lounge. The place, the cop had found, wasn't really a bar at all. Sure, it was stocked with bottles of liquor, but many were purchased for five or six bucks at a local CVS. It had lights, tables, and bartenders, but the man running the joint, a 29-year-old from Aventura named Albert Takhalov, had very specific instructions for his bouncer.
Isaac Feldman allegedly helped rip off SoBe tourists.
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Only one kind of customer was allowed in: single men accompanied by glamorous women, whom a federal indictment calls Takhalov's "B-girls." They were a team of hot Eastern European women sent out to prowl nearby hotels and bars. They'd been carefully trained at clubs in Estonia to spot their marks: single tourists wearing nice watches or expensive shoes.
One such sucker was a traveler from Texas whom prosecutors call "K.W." On October 12, he was hanging out at the Delano Hotel when two girls who said they were from Finland started drinking with him. They persuaded him to accompany them to Stars Lounge, where he soon felt strangely drunk. The next morning, he woke up at the Delano with a splitting headache and no memory of how he'd gotten back to the hotel. He checked his account and found Stars had charged him more than $3,000.
Dozens of tourists were similarly scammed by the B-girls and the men who set up the fake clubs where they worked, prosecutors say.
Feldman's precise role isn't spelled out in the 41-page indictment filed April 15, but the undercover cop had no doubt the realtor was helping the schemers. He repeatedly saw Feldman with Takhalov at Stars Lounge, and on September 16, he listened as the two men talked about credit card machines. The credit companies recently had canceled their accounts because of fraud complaints.
A woman named Svetlana Coughlan told the cop that Feldman had recruited her to cook the bar's books, and Takhalov said he'd brought in Feldman as co-owner of Stars. Feldman even asked the undercover agent to run background checks on the B-girls — emphasizing he shouldn't use official Miami Beach channels.
On April 5, FBI agents swarmed Feldman's small condo in a three-story building in Bal Harbour. He, along with the 14 others, is charged with felony fraud. Through his attorney, Myles Malman, Feldman declined to comment. "He has pleaded not guilty and maintains his innocence," Malman says.
In Sunny Isles, his friends and family are still trying to figure out what happened.
"He is a good friend, a good father, and a very good person," Raisa Feldman says in an email from Haifa, Israel, where she lives now. "I guess he was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Yavis, though, wonders if he should have seen something else. "Not many people can make $6 million in a year and be totally legit," he says. "Who really knows what's in someone else's heart?"
