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| June 18- June 25 |
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The mob that came in from the cold is merciless, but also powerful. If it has to kill, it doesnt think twice about it. In the past 10 years in Russia there have been thousands of killings. And in 1987 there was a plan to murder Mikhail Gorbachev, as revealed in a confidential report by the Russian police. The KGB foiled the assassination attempt. They caught the killer, Teimuraz Abaidze, and identified the man who hired him as Georgian boss Kuchuuri, an alleged friend of Dzhuber Patiashvili who a few years later would become first secretary of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party. There are those who are willing to do anything. Those, anyway, with a sense for business. "Back in the times of the Soviet Union the bosses were hand in glove with the Communist Party nomenclature," explains Aleksandr Maksimov, the author of the book Russian Crime. "Now they have practically everything in their hands." Including the Duma, the Russian parliament. In May 1997 there was an advertisement on an Internet site which offered anyone, for $2,000, the opportunity of becoming a voluntary assistant to an MP, which allowed the use of a Duma letterhead and to come and go freely in the parliament building. It didnt take much persuading for mobsters to jump into the action. Today in Russia 450 MPs have more than 15,000 parliamentary assistants, many of whom are connected to criminal organizations. Vladimir Pchelkin has 294, Nikolai Medvedev 166. "Aleksandr Filatov," says Maksimov, "is the MP with the highest number of assistants murdered. The latest, Anatoly Frantskevich, was killed in May 1997." Under the bosses crossfire, however, have also fallen courageous and independent politicians such as Andrei Aidzerdzis who had defied the mobsters, and Galina Starovoitova, the only woman who had succeeded in politics in the post-communist years and who was trying to moralize public life in her city of St. Petersburg. "But talking about Russian Mafia means next to nothing," warns Pino Arlacchi, deputy Secretary General of the UN and author of several publications about the Mafia. "About 90 percent of these are street gangs (numbering tens of thousands) or organizations formed by former party officials or former police officers who have accumulated illegal fortunes, and which can be compared to Mafia as it is meant in Italy and other countries because of their use of violence. Then there is the criminal elite, the remaining 10 percent, which resembles the traditional Mafia and which has an ethnic base, international connections, and investments in Europe and North America. Theyre Chechynians and Georgians and they represent the real threat." In short, no more an "under"-world, free-falling in a spiral of blood with no rules. Boris Yeltsin himself sounded the alarm: "The world has come to consider Russia as a powerful bastion of the mobs," the Russian president declared in February 1993, participating in a national conference on organized crime. "We are surpassing countries, like Italy, that have traditionally been in the front lines. There are criminal structures literally corroding our country from top to bottom." In any case, different from other mobs which almost always infiltrate a fundamentally healthy body, manage illegal activities, and at best launder their money, exploiting acquaintances in the bank system and some offshore facilities. In Russia organized crime, which had been living off the "black" economy characteristic of the Soviet system, has now assumed control of the legal economy as well. As Antonella Scott and Vladimir Sapozhnikov explain in their magazine article Geopolitics of the mobs in the former USSR: "The mob is nowadays the most powerful force in Russia. It is so omnipresent in the new post-Soviet economy that a businessperson finds it difficult to avoid a negative connotation: people see businessperson and mobster as synonymous." In Moscow, for instance, it has been computed that almost all commercial enterprises are managed either directly or indirectly by criminal groups. Its impossible to open a shop without having to deal with the bosses who are now controlling everything, from hotels to taxis to building companies. They control up to 80 percent of the bank and insurance activities. Pjotr Filippov, a consultant to the Kremlin, in a report to President Yeltsin published on the front page by the Izvestija newspaper some years ago, wrote that nobody can avoid the mobsters rule: "The racket eats away about 30 percent of the price increases and about 20 percent of the turnover, i.e., about half the profit, which go directly in the pockets of the bosses, who immediately send them abroad." If you also consider that Russia, in addition to being the worlds richest country in terms of natural resources (it occupies one seventh of the world surface, it has 150 million inhabitants and is a nuclear power), is also the largest clandestine weapons market, its easy to see that we are talking about the most colossal criminal system ever conceived and realized in the history of international economy. A rough idea of the turnover of the Russian bosses can be had by following the calculations Alan Friedman made for the International Herald Tribune. According to the U.S. journalist, in 1993 the outflow of capital from Russia had reached a rate of two billion dollars per month. This is what Alexandr Kartashev, deputy chief of the Russian Ministry of Interiors Task Force against Organized Crime, defined as the "shadow economy" that since 1994 has fruited about a trillion and a half rubles. Lets try and summarize. The owners of these immense riches, obtained without rules and in an extremely short time, under conditions of unequalled levels of public official corruption, can literally buy any state official, at any level of the hierarchy. And if they cannot bribe him, they can always intimidate him, frighten him, and blackmail him. In 1995 a group of mobsters threatened to blow up the central water reservoir in Moscow, and another targeted the hospital and a public building in Adygea: in both cases the threats were accompanied by requests for money (a million dollars in Moscow and 500 million rubles in Adygea). Can it be thought that all the mobs in the world have not turned their eyes to such a paradise, where unfettered arbitrium rules and mobs obtain mind-boggling fortunes? Can there be a better place than Russia for laundering the dirty capital coming from drug dealing? According to several experts the abundance of U.S. dollars on Russias domestic market should be the result of sinister connections of Russian mobsters with several crime syndicates, from ndrangheta to Sicilian Mafia, from Chinese Triads to Colombian cartels. The wild privatization following the fall of the Soviet empire and the sale of state property at ridiculous prices became, de facto, the most profitable way of employing shady capital. (Translated by Emanuele Oriano) |
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