The fire within Russia’s gang warfare

Part 11 - Organized crime reaches gigantic proportions in Yeltsin territory

More than 100,000 ‘soldiers’, organized in 8,000 groups or ‘brigades’, with a core of about 387 vory v Zakone [the elite of former-USSR mobsters]." The Russian Ministry of the Interior, in a recent report to President Boris Yeltsin, gave a picture of the current situation of organized crime.
"Out of the 8,000 brigades," it stated, "at least 421 have international connections and branches in almost all Western European countries and in the U.S., Canada, Israel and Macao." In the region of Moscow alone over 130 gangs would be operating, admitted chief of the department fighting criminal organizations Dmitry Ogorodnikov. They have money and weapons, they spread fear and they don’t scorn contacts with politicians.
"Here, over 70 percent of officers have already been corrupted," Yuri Skuratov, former attorney general of the Russian Federation, wrote in a confidential report. "Corruption and organized crime make up an unbreakable and inextricable criminal continuum. Without corruption, organized crime could not exist."
A Russian weekly newpaper, Nezavysimaja Gazeta, some years ago published on its front page a map of the families who run the most important mobs in Moscow: a score of ‘brigades’ often known by the names of the neighbourhoods in which they operate: Lyubertsy, Dolgo-prudnaya, Baumanskaya.
According to the Moscow newspaper, Moscow’s Southeast uptown is the realm of the Lyubertsy (extortion, illegal textile trades), while in the Southwest the Solntsevo specialize in robberies. In the Northeast the Mytisci deal in car theft while the Daghestan clan control drug peddling and extortion on grocery stores.
Still according to Nezavysimaja Gazeta, Tchetchenyans are the most violent and numerous ethnic group (the Russian equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia) and mostly deal in extortion, drug peddling, prostitution, and weapons, art and foreign cars smuggling. Georgians specialize in bank fraud and kidnapping; Azeres, who are very active in weapons smuggling, also control food markets, fixing prices and extorting storekeepers.
The range of action of each brigade has no well-defined borders: e.g., Tchetchenyans and Georgians are everywhere. A couple of years ago they carried out a series of frauds against trade banks in the region of Irkutsk, in Siberia.
According to data released by the Russian Commission for the Struggle Against Organized Crime reporting to the Security Council, the largest ‘brigades’ are to be found mostly in the Caucasus and around Moscow. But the strongest connections have been developed by the Russian godfathers with people abroad, both with other mobs and with vory v Zakone who emigrated to Western Europe, Israel and North America.
According to the FBI, in the U.S. five powerful criminal organizations can rely on 220 gangs located in 17 cities.
Russian authorities deny that organized crime in their country could have reached the level of an organization like La Cosa Nostra or Yakuza, but the membership of the various groups is on the rise. So have the clashes between clans: in 1992 more than 7,500 armed men took part in gunfights that left 123 killed, while in 1994 Russian mobsters killed 156, and wounded 200.
In Moscow, where weapons can easily be bought on the black market, there are daily gunfights. But what is most upsetting is that there’s little discrimination. Occasionally, they fire into the crowd.
It happened on November 16, 1996, in Kaspiysk, a small town 12 km from Makhachkala, the capital of Daghestan, in the Russian Caucasus: a large building, where 130 people lived, was blown up. The dwellers were border guards of the FSB, the federal security service that replaced KGB, and other military personnel, along with their families. Sixty-seven died, including 20 children. A vengeance by smugglers against border police engaged in the struggle against illicit sturgeon fishing that serves to produce one of the region’s chief resources: caviar.
Threatening letters had been sent some weeks earlier to the commanding officer of Daghestan’s border guards.
Something similar happened on November 10, 1996, in a Moscow cemetery, where a remote-controlled bomb killed 13 and wounded 26 in the worst act of violence ever committed by organized crime in the Russian capital. The reason was the control of a stream of money that the government is granting to veterans and invalids organizations.
Relatives and friends of the chairperson of the fund for invalids of the Afghan war, Mikhail Likhodei who was killed in 1994, were meeting in the Kotliakovskoie cemetery at the time. Near his grave a table was loaded with food and vodka to honour the memory of the dead. In ones and twos, relatives, friends, and fund officials had assembled, about 150 people in all. The bomb, several kilograms of TNT, went off at around noon. The blast opened a two-metre deep crater and tore the victims’ bodies to pieces, blowing human parts up to 70 metres away. The bomb was wired to another grave some 40 metres away where the ‘hydraulic condenser’ that caused the explosion was located. The victims included Likhodei’s widow and the fund’s new chair, Sergei Trakhirov, 30, a father of two.
An unheard-of ferocity, the face of an undeclared war. Many people have died without a whimper and were forgotten after brief mourning. In Russia, where violence and corruption go dangerously hand in hand, one can die for no reason. But nobody appears to take notice.
The Russian mob has no vertical structure, such as that of La Cosa Nostra. "It looks somewhat like old ‘ndrangheta: there is no boss or group of bosses, but rather many horizontal structures controlling pieces of land, in general a town or a neighbourhood in a big city," explains RCMP Sergeant Reg King, one of Canada’s top experts of this phenomenon.
The vory v Zakone, i.e., the bosses of the main ‘brigades’, meet from time to time in a kind of summit (shodka). One of the most important meetings was held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1982. There was the need to decide whether the vory were to engage in politics or not. On one side there was Vaska Brilliant, who was against striking deals with politicians or openly declaring support. On the other side there were the bosses of Caucasus, the Georgians in particular, who favoured ‘flirting’ with people’s representatives. The latter included Djaby Ioseliani, who was later to become the right-hand man of Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s foreign minister at the time of perestroika and today the President of Georgia.
Other important summits were held in Moscow in 1947, Kazan in 1955, Krasnodar in 1956, Kislovodsk in 1979, and they served the purpose of refining criminal strategies. Those were the times when the mob, as declared by former CIA chief James Woolsey, was centered on the black market, and encouraged by the Soviet regime.
In those years in the Soviet empire the legitimate economy could not satisfy the needs of the people. Everybody got along as well as they could, and this ‘getting along’ brought about corruption in public officers and private citizens alike. This was the mob in the public eye: control of the distribution of goods coming from imports, from the black market, from State warehouses, from special stores, from legal open markets (those established to allow kholkhozs to sell a part of their products directly to consumers, at prices that were only kept in check by the presence of some State-managed stalls).
As Adriano Guerra writes in his book Russia after Communism, "a series of Mafia-like connections linked these activities to illegal exchanges, especially those flourishing in Moscow and Leningrad — now St. Petersburg — as hundreds of thousands of tourists could verify when they were swarmed by illegal (yet police-protected) moneychangers as soon as they arrived in the Russian capital."
Anatolij Volobujev, a former researcher at the USSR Ministry of Interior Scientific Research Institute, agrees: "Among the factors contributing to the development of this monstrous situation we must include the rigid distribution system of the planned economy, under a State monopoly, that disallowed a competition-based market economy (this system caused a great scarcity of goods, that makes for an environment ideally suited to the growth of mob structures)."
And he adds: "Another factor was the so-called nomenclature, i.e., the way managers were appointed and promoted. Nor is it to be forgotten that legality was mostly replaced by political considerations, i.e., by personal interests of party leaders at all levels."
Within this logic of corruption, when the system broke down the big gangs emerged, especially those based in Southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Tchetchenya. Those who study organized crime in the former Soviet Union, such General Gennadij Cebotarev, deputy chief of the police department fighting organized crime, agree in identifying in the "administrative command system" of Brezhnev’s years and in the shadow economy it generated two of the main causes that brought to the unchecked spreading of corruption and organized crime.
Most of the murders of the last 10 years were gang related that generally targeted members of rival factions, judges, MPs, bankers, police officers, and journalists, all who worked in that shady area where organized crime and politics met or overlapped.

(translated by Emanuele Oriano)

Publication Date: 2001-06-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=92