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Sunday, October 29, 2023

The Ira Bloom Murder-For-Hire Case

     In the domestic battle over who gets what in a divorce one of the most contentious issues often centers around who will acquire principal access to and responsibility for the children. Parents who believe they have received a raw deal in the custody fight are embittered. Quite often they are fathers who resent supporting children from whom they have become estranged. Some parents who have lost custody to ex-spouses they consider unfit to raise their children have taken the law into their own hands. A few of these parents, motivated by hatred, the need for control and the desire to win, have resorted to murder.

     Zhanna Portnov, a political refugee from Russia, emigrated to the United States in 1992. Two years later she met and married Ira A. Bloom, a violent and sadistic criminal who made Portnov as miserable in America as she had been in her home country. The couple lived in Enfield, Connecticut.

     In the summer of 2004 following a string of restraining orders, Zhanna divorced Bloom and gained custody of their 8-year-old son. Bloom, dissatisfied with his three-day-a-week visitation schedule, petitioned the judge for full custody. Six weeks before the August 2005 custody hearing Mr. Bloom began planning to have his ex-wife murdered.

     Following their divorce Ira Bloom moved to East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a town outside of Springfield. From there he would plot his wife's death and commit the mistake most murder-for-hire masterminds make: he reached out to the wrong person to help him carry out his mission. Bloom asked his friend Donald Levesque, a petty criminal and drug snitch who claimed underworld connections, to find a hitman who would carjack Zhanna as she drove home from the chiropractor's office in Enfield where she worked as a receptionist. Bloom wanted the hit man to rape then kill his ex-wife. Pursuant to his plan the killer would dump her body somewhere in Hartford, Connecticut.

     Levesque, snitch that he was, went to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tax and Firearms (AFT) where he informed agents of Bloom's murder-for-hire scheme. (Levesque was a regular, paid ATF confidential informant.) Because murder-for-hire is a state as well as a federal offense the ATF had jurisdiction in the case.

     The informant told ATF agents that Ira Bloom had promised him $15,000 out of his dead ex-wife's $100,000 life insurance payout. Working with local law enforcement agencies in Connecticut and Massachusetts the ATF launched its investigation.

     On July 8, 2005 Donald Levesque and Ira Bloom met in a restaurant in Enfield. The snitch wore a hidden recorder and had driven a car to the meeting that was wired for sound. To the amazement of the officers and agents surveilling the meeting, Ira Bloom arrived with a woman he had just met. Seated in a booth Bloom began talking about his battle to regain custody of his son. He said, "I'm really tired of this game anyway. This will save me. I mean, I only owe my lawyer about $500 right now. If we go to court on August 12 I'll owe him about another fifteen grand by then. So everything's gone. I mean, she's dead."

     Before the meeting broke-up Donald Levesque, acting on instructions from his ATF handlers, asked Bloom for a hand-drawn map showing the route to the target's place of employment. "You think I'm gonna give you a map?" Bloom said. "We'll all go to jail." But the snitch persisted and a few minutes later the murder-for-hire mastermind sketched a crude map on a napkin.

     In Levesque's car outside the restaurant he and Bloom with the mastermind's date sitting in the back seat continued discussing the hit. When enough had been said to justify an arrest local police officers and federal agents rushed the car. Just before being yanked out of the vehicle Ira Bloom looked at Levesque and said, "Don, what did you do to me?"

     In October 2006 Ira Bloom was tried in Hartford, Connecticut before a federal jury. While the defendant did not take the stand on his own behalf his attorney, in his closing argument, characterized the conversation in the restaurant as nothing more that his client's blowing off steam to impress his date. The jury after deliberating three hours found the defendant guilty of conspiracy to murder his ex-wife. Following a series of appeals federal judge Alfred V. Covello in April 2008 sentenced the 48-year-old Bloom to the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison.

4 comments:

  1. Snitches who operate in the gray zone between entrapment and informing deserve little respect. The probability that a crime would ever have taken place without their involvement is essentially nil.

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    1. No you are wrong sorry he had already had he brake line cut by him stalked her you have no idea she's no saint either but she wasn't trying to murder him he even was contacting someone in Callie to kill her for him so sorry snitches is a cruel word informant better snitches do it because they want a break or lower charges for crimes they committed or to just stay out of jail informants do it because it's the rite thing to do and to help or save someone you sound rude or you got snitched on and are bias lol

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  2. Ira lived in the mobile home park next to Walmart on Boston rd when this all went down. When I first met him, all he talked about was his crazy abusive ex-wife and how she got custody of their son and how he wanted to take him to Israel. I even called DSS and anonymously reported the abuse he claimed happened at the longmeadow Jewish community center soccer fields. I called from a pay phone on Boston rd and gave all the details Ira had about that incident, date, time, etc

    DSS never looked into it, Ira started acting crazier after that and asked me if I would kill his ex-wife, he also asked for ideas on how to do it. After that I reached out to a friend of his, a much older Jewish gentleman who I want to say was a doctor of psychology and told him Ira wasn’t doing well, this guy was paying a lot of Ira’s bills and seemed to really care about his well-being.

    I also had a friend anonymously call springfield police and report that Ira was looking for someone to kill his ex, on the off chance he was serious.

    I wonder if the Levesque’s would have set Ira up if I hadn’t had my friend call police and report everything he said to me.

    Though I did hear a different story when this all went down, I was told by a state trooper that police and ATF agents already had everything they needed to arrest Ira in Massachusetts, then they lured him over state lines into Connecticut to repeat everything he already said. From what I was told he would’ve gotten a much lighter sentence, if he had been arrested in Mass.

    I also had the misfortune of having judge sacks for my visitation hearings, his is a dishonorable scumbag, just like marie lyons. I have no doubt sacks could tell how unhinged Ira was and unleashed him upon his ex-wife.

    Springfield is so dirty, I have evidence of springfield police officers helping a girl get away with driving without insurance, driving with a rejection sticker for safety and suspended registration. Then the hampden county district attorney’s office and judge william hadley helped cover it up, they even produced a fake receipt and presented it as evidence.

    They do their best to hurt people, our legal system is a joke.

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  3. Have you ever heard of the Tammy Lynds case? She was found just feet off the side of Fox rd in Springfield, MA back in 1994. This year a blogger Hell’s Acres worked with Richard Lynds(he recently passed away), currently there are 19 posts in his series, covering what little information there is on her case.

    I only bring up Tammys case because someone told Ira that I had something to do with her death. Her cause of death was never determined and her case wasn’t listed on the Hampden District Attorneys unsolved homicide page until 2012, after Richard Lynds approached the district attorney’s office hoping for answers. He was told that Tammy’s file was lost and there was nothing that could be done.

    I’m very curious who gave Ira the idea that I had anything to do with Tammys death. My name was never in the paper, we didn’t have mutual friends and her cause of death still hasn’t determined.

    I was recently told about a car fire in springfield sometime after Molly Bish went missing from warren,ma 30 minutes away. I was told this car fit the description Mollys mother gave. I was also told the owner matched the suspect description.

    I know there’s a chance this car fire might not have been reported, but there would still be a listing for it in the registry of motor vehicle files.

    If you read the blogs, Tammy also met Molly Bish.
    Did the same person who killed
    Molly and Tammy tell Ira that I was involved in Tammy’s death?

    Once is happenstance( this guy knew both these girl), Twice is a coincidence ( car fire), is there a third? ( did this person tell Ira details about how Tammy was killed, when she wasn’t listed as a murder victim).

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