Russian Mobster’s Wife Pleads Guilty in Australian Fraud
Elizabeth Alinejad was seen as the wife of a massive Russian crime figure who has been living in Australia for two years without permission.
In an about-face that stunned Australian lawmakers, like Vyrwzynski’s, and had little referent in popular Australian culture, Elizabeth Alinejad had directed family members and others to supply affidavits about her marriage and the imminence of her visa application. Then she told courtroom observers two things: that a visa officer in Melbourne had called her on the phone and verified the concocted story; and that Vyrwzynski had assured her that the Rebels bikies, a violent organized crime group, would protect her while she bargained a plea with the government.
The years that followed were a blur of legal maneuvering in the often political maze within an Australian corrections system reveling in its sadism. No fewer than 12 barristers represented Ms. Alinejad, and at times it seemed as if she might be pulling them all by strings. She hatched an audacious plan to force an appeal of her own plea: A week before sentencing, she made a case for postponement based on her second trimester pregnancy, dismissing, with an eye roll, as “utter nonsense” the judge’s comments that she might have been faking.
The judge said the only reason he allowed “Ms. A” to postpone sentencing was to free her to have an abortion — remarks that made Ms. Alinejad’s lawyer bristle. “That’s outrageously inappropriate,” the barrister said.
Her assertion that ending her life would be preferable to living in an Australian maximum-security facility after her release put her trotting through piles of paper in search of a next wedding gown before she was committed to a maximum-security wing, one of 12 held there on suspicion of gang violence or murders.
The judge refused to let her plea become moot by virtue of her secret marriage. It did not matter whether she had already married “or the absence of that ceremony,” he kept saying.
But for all that misery wound into her, she remained blindly enamored with doing Mr. Yaradat’s bidding. Late in 2019, she made news by proposing a $2.5 million bounty for the head of a popular opposition figure in Ukraine, in part as insurance against possible retaliation by Ukrainian gangsters who were after Vyrwzynski’s Polish cousins for bloody debts in Europe.
Early this year, her defense barrister, who had seen her during more than 50 video calls, commended lawyers for considering “the evident difficulties” she experienced when answering questions on court-appointed psychiatric evaluations. In a hearing on her release from jail, the barrister speculated that she was subjected to torture at the prison three days after her arrest.
After 395 days in jail, she might soon be out. If so, she would be the only one allowed to walk out of what Melbourne Judge John Hoye said last year could unmarkably come to be called Elizabeth Alinejad’s home for the next decade of her life.
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