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Dec 31,2006 - Jan7,2006 |
The Ruthless Russian Connection
Part 10 - Post-Soviet mobsters run world’s largest crime syndicate
By Antonio Nicaso
Originally Published: 2001-06-24
The mob that came in from the cold is merciless, but also powerful. If it has to kill, it doesn’t 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 didn’t 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. They’re Chechynians and Georgians and they represent the real threat."
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