Another ex-prisoner remarked on the fact that a number of the words —shmon for “search,” musor for “cop,” fraier for “noncriminal” (also translatable as “sucker”)—seemed to come from Hebrew or Yiddish.27 Perhaps this is a testament to the role that the largely Jewish port city of Odessa, once the smugglers’ capital of Russia, played in the development of thieves’ culture.
