MAFIYA EVOLUTIONS
When it thunders, even the thief crosses himself.
Russian proverb
Known above all for his insurgent status within the vorovskoi mir (see chapter 11), the career of Azeri gangster Rovshan Dzhaniyev demonstrates the impact of some of the shocks and forces which have been shaping the Russian underworld in recent years. This is ironic since in many ways he seems to have been unaware of them, believing his destiny was entirely his to make, but this probably reflects his decisive, not to say impulsive, manner and a belief, which several who met him noted, that the world was his for the taking. In 1992, when he was just seventeen, his father – ironically enough, a police officer – was murdered by a local gangster. When the killer was apprehended in 1996, Dzhaniyev smuggled a gun to the courtroom and shot him there and then. With a twitch of his trigger finger, he established his credentials as a fearless man of action and one who understands traditions of honour and revenge. Released from prison in Azerbaijan after a lenient two years, reflecting the court’s view of his mental state at the time (and perhaps also some sympathy for what he had done), he drifted into organised crime. In 2000, he shot a rival godfather on the street in Baku; again, he spent only a short time in prison, ostensibly on account of his mental health.
The impatient young gun rose on the backs of a series of convenient and mysterious (or maybe not so mysterious) murders as he moved from Azerbaijan to Ukraine and then Russia: of his patron Mir Seymur in 2003, of Azeri kingpin Elchin Aliyev (‘Elchin Yevlakh’) in St Petersburg, then of Hikmet Mukhtarov and Chingiz Ahundov, key figures in Moscow’s narcotics trade, who also controlled the city’s fruit and vegetable markets. These, incidentally, have since 1991 been lucrative targets, fought over regularly by the Caucasus gangsters in particular, given how much of the produce comes from their regions. In 1992, Azeris controlled the three main markets – Cheryomushky, Severny and Tsaritskinsky1 – and, while the geography of the city’s wholesalers has changed over time, bloody wars for them have raged periodically ever since.2 It is worth remembering that the Cosa Nostra made millions from their control of New York’s Fulton Street Fish Market through most of the twentieth century.3 Control of access to any commodity is valuable, and the markets are also great distribution hubs for all kinds of illegal commodities, from drugs to counterfeit goods.
By 2006, Dzhaniyev had a substantial stake in Moscow as well as Azerbaijan. However, his interests were almost exclusively in the criminal realm; he never made the jump out of pure gangsterdom into the worlds of politics and business. His gang was, as noted before, multi-ethnic, but united both by Dzhaniyev’s own charisma and also by a collective impatience with the underworld status quo. These were relatively young men in a hurry, who were tired of waiting for their turn at the top, or those who otherwise had found their careers becalmed.
In 2008, the global financial crisis had knock-on effects throughout the underworld, and in Russia it forced many of the smaller gangs and those less diversified in their economic interests into retreat. Competition for assets sharpened, and those groups without powerful political connections lost out. Dzhaniyev had never bothered cultivating a krysha in Moscow, and he paid for this with a number of reversals, such as the closure of the Cherkizovo market in eastern Moscow in 2009. Dzhaniyev largely dominated this massive and ramshackle bazaar, using it to sell illegal goods and services and demanding tribute from traders. This was a time when the city was looking to clean up its image, though, and he lacked the political connections to be able to prevent Moscow City Council from shutting the market down, taking a substantial economic hit in the process.
Dzhaniyev was still looking for shortcuts into the big league, though, and seems to have decided that taking down Aslan ‘Ded Khasan’ Usoyan was the way to do this. His expectation seems to have been that this would shatter Usoyan’s network and allow him to take over many of its members and businesses. He may have been behind the 2010 assassination attempt on Usoyan, but certainly this became an increasingly bitter struggle. When Dzhaniyev and his lieutenant Dzhemo Mikeladze sponsored men to be crowned as vory v zakone at a skhodka in Dubai in December 2012 – part of a ceremony at which sixteen were elevated – Usoyan repudiated this as not in accordance with the rules of the vorovskoi mir.4 (Technically true, but it is doubtful if anyone cares much these days.) Presumably from the perspective that an enemy’s enemy is, if not a friend, at least useful, Usoyan’s blood foe Tariel Oniani then backed the coronations, even though earlier that year he had wrested control of the Pokrovsky vegetable warehouses – one of Moscow’s main produce centres – from Dzhaniyev.5
Usoyan probably had the firepower to take on Dzhaniyev, had he been willing to escalate, but his vulnerability was precisely that he had so much more to lose. Such a war would likely have forced the state to respond, and also left him vulnerable to Oniani, a much greater threat. Instead, he had to rely on underworld politics, such as the following missive distributed in 2013:
By the Thief’s Custom, the Thief’s Way is forever spread! Peace, prosperity and prosperity for the Thieves and Our Home from the Lord God! We greet you as respectable people who sincerely support the course of Thieves and the life of Thieves. By this message, we Thieves warn you prisoners that Rovshan ‘Lenkoran’ and Gia Uglav ‘Takhi’ are whores, seducing people in our house and spreading disorder amongst our people. Arrestees, take into account that those who help them and their evil spirits, both in their deeds and in their image, are essentially the same, they too are whores, and so everyone who considers themselves a decent prisoner should act accordingly. We will limit ourselves to this, wishing you all the best from the Lord God, protection and unity, let Our House prosper.6
Dzhaniyev, much more a vor of the old school, had less to lose, cared less about the implications of his actions, and didn’t see as far into the future. Although it is unlikely he was behind Usoyan’s actual death in 2013, he certainly did not at first try and quash the idea, and, in the short term, it did nothing to weaken his reputation. For a criminal with a relatively small network and resources, notoriety can be a crucial asset, as it means that he is taken more seriously by his peers. This encourages more disgruntled criminals to join with him, creating something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nonetheless, it is also a dangerous thing to be an insurgent. Whether he had a hand in Usoyan’s death or not, Dzhaniyev made a trebly convenient scapegoat: plausible, inconvenient and not so strong that moving against him could trigger some wider mob war.7 Shortly after, one of Dzhaniyev’s closest allies in Abkhazia was gunned down in Sukhumi,8 and another was murdered in Moscow.9 Dzhaniyev went to ground; according to rumour he was variously killed in Turkey, arrested in Azerbaijan, and alive and well in Dubai.10
Then, in 2014, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the subsequent rapid worsening of its relations with the West led to a sudden economic crisis. Again, gangs without allies, political cover and deep pockets were vulnerable. Amongst the criminals who had defected to Dzhaniyev were a number involved in the heroin trade, a key potential revenue stream Dzhaniyev considered trying to tap, but he was impatient with the complex logistics involved. Such ideas came to nothing, and so Dzhaniyev was suddenly not only a pariah but, even more seriously, an impoverished one. In such circumstances, there seems to be very little honour amongst thieves. People began to redefect away from his gang, and some of them knew his whereabouts and his plans. The end was near.
He had actually been moving between Azerbaijan and Turkey, but rumours of his earlier murder in Istanbul proved prescient: in August 2016, he was being driven through the centre of the city when, while stopped at a traffic light, his Range Rover was riddled with bullets from a silenced assault rifle.11 But in any case, the day he dropped out of sight, his enemies, with the usual piranha sensitivities of organised crime, scented blood and began settling old scores and seizing assets. For example, Mikeladze was arrested shortly after Usoyan’s death and sent to prison on drug charges; his other henchman, ‘Timokha’, fled back to his native Belarus but was shot and killed there in 2014.12 By the end of 2016, Dzhaniyev’s gang was essentially dead.
Obviously Dzhaniyev’s own nature pretty much ensured that this was going to be a short and bloody tale. But it is also striking how far its trajectory was shaped by some key external developments, blows taken and chances missed. Organised crime in Russia and Eurasia is still powerful, of course, even if in many places transformed from its ‘bandit’ roots. However, such progress as has been made – and the final chapter will try to reach some conclusions about that – depends to a considerable extent on continued stability within the underworld, and how it continues to adapt to new pressures and new opportunities.
The first big shock: 2008
Until 2008, we thought that so long as we paid off the cops and the officials, everything was going to go great, that the money would keep coming in, that the future was safe.
Son of an avtoritet, 201413
As of writing, in late 2017, the Russian underworld is at once relatively calm – the odd assassination notwithstanding – and under growing pressure. It is by no means certain that a new round of major criminal conflicts is coming and, even if it does erupt, it will not reach the same pitch or be as indiscriminate as those of the 1990s. Yet such a prospect is closer than at any time since then. One could draw a parallel with Europe on the eve of the First World War. There are ambitious, rising powers with little stake in the status quo, eager to win their ‘place in the sun’; there are others desperate to maintain that status quo, but fearing a war that would be at best expensive, at worst ruinous. After all, some – let’s call them the Ottoman Empires of the underworld – now no longer have the practical strength to match their status and possessions. Meanwhile, international rivalries are sublimated and fought out by proxy in the imperial struggle for colonies. There are limits to the explanatory power of that analogy, but it is certainly the case that the current underworld status quo is under threat, in part because of revanchist or insurgent groups such as the late, unlamented Dzhaniyev’s, in part because of the imperial aspirations of figures such as Tariel Oniani, in part because once-mighty combines such as the Far Eastern Association of Thieves are in decline, and in part because of the scramble over new criminal opportunities.
The durability of the post-1990s underworld situation, and the division of spoils it embodied, depended on the extent to which it accurately reflected the relative strength of various gangs. As one Russian police officer told me, ‘so long as there was a balance between guns and krysha on the one hand and revenue on the other, all went well’.14 The world turns, though, and all empires decay; the status quo was inevitably going to become anachronistic, even under ideal circumstances. The lack of social mobility, epitomised by the rise of the Azeri upstart Dzhaniyev, is just one example of what Marxists might consider the inherent contradictions of this criminal order. In any case, these were not to be ideal circumstances, as the Russian underworld would be reshaped by a series of challenges, most notably the 2008 global economic slowdown and the 2014 Russian economic crisis, and the emergence of new opportunities.
The global financial crisis in 2008 had a serious impact on Russia, especially given the dependence of its economy on oil and gas exports.15 The ruble tumbled in value (despite the government burning through more than $130 billion of its foreign exchange reserves to prop it up) and real incomes fell almost 7 per cent in just twelve months. After years of impressive growth, Russia fell into recession, with serious impacts on the underworld. Many gangs suddenly found themselves in trouble: there was far less scope for protection racketeering and, as government contracts were suspended or scaled down, opportunities for embezzlement likewise declined. However, others benefited from the situation. Sometimes this was because their main assets were in foreign currencies (which now were worth more rubles) or they had control of still-valuable physical assets. At other times it was because their main businesses were suited to the new environment: dealing in counterfeit or smuggled goods, for example, as people looked to cheaper ways of maintaining their lifestyles, or loan-sharking. The result was a flurry of small-scale conflicts and consolidations. Some smaller gangs were forced to integrate into larger, more prosperous networks, often simply so that their chieftains could continue to afford to pay off the police and their own henchmen alike.
So the (criminal) market contractions of 2008 spelled doom for some, but created great opportunities for others. The larger, more diversified groups cherry-picked those underworld assets they wanted and snapped them up at fire-sale prices. Gangs able to tap into state resources, whether government funds or the ability to flash a badge or grant or withhold a permit, did best. In other words, the 2008 crisis further strengthened the incestuous links between corrupt officials, the state machine and the underworld, especially at the local level.
The sanctions will serve to drive more Russian gangs into Europe, in my opinion; with the domestic economy in crisis and the euro worth that much more against the ruble, why wouldn’t they?
Europol analyst, 201516
Much the same is true of the shallower but longer financial slowdown created by low oil prices and the imposition of sanctions on Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine. Three examples from Moscow help illustrate the impact.17 For some, desperation demands diversification, and for desperation one would be hard pressed to come up with a better place than Kapotnya, in south-eastern Moscow. Jammed uncomfortably up against the multi-lane MKAD ring road, Kapotnya is hardly an appealing place at the best of times; its traffic-clogged streets (no metro here) are lined with ugly late-Soviet brick low-rises, shrouded by the fumes from the massive Moscow Oil Refinery. One of the poorest of Moscow’s neighbourhoods, Kapotnya is known as a haven for the homeless, the hopeless – and some of the city’s cheapest and most disreputable brothels. As times get harder for ordinary Russians, the impoverished souls who once would go to local houses of ill repute now gravitate towards the even cheaper and more desperate individual prostitutes of the streets. Facing a fall in their revenues, the brothel owners in part have diversified to selling narcotics, their premises becoming modern-day equivalents of the old opium den. There users can buy and take cheap and destructive opiates and methamphetamines, even the infamous krokodil, a highly addictive and dangerous street drug that gets its name from the way users’ skin can become scaly and green-tinged. To move into drug dealing, the brothel keepers typically have to get deeper into debt with the gangsters who previously just took a cut in return for leaving them free to ply their trade.
The trouble is that this kind of gangster, the small-scale local hoodlum, also feels the pinch. Typical is ‘Dvornik’ (‘Doorman’), a thug-made-moderately-good who was arrested in 2015. His problem was that not only did he have a lifestyle to maintain that involved high-stakes gambling and imported – and thus especially expensive considering the ruble’s depreciation – whisky, but he had a crew who expected to be paid and he also owed tribute to a bigger-time gangster in return for the right to practise his rackets. As one police officer involved in the case put it, ‘he had assumed that everything was going to go like before, or even better. He hadn’t saved or made plans in case the spring ran dry.’18
A gang leader who can’t pay his crew has no gang; a gangster who can’t pay his debts has no future. As a result, ‘Dvornik’ had no option but to lean more heavily on the businesses on his turf, not least pushing those brothel keepers all the harder. And he was not the only one, as the local cops who also expected their regular payments in order to turn a blind eye were feeling the pinch and increasing their own demands accordingly. This is what led to his downfall; when one of his victims said he was unable to pay, ‘Dvornik’ personally delivered a savage beating so as to deter others from pleading poverty. His victim, though, ended up in hospital; the police had no choice but to investigate and, between forensic evidence and witness statements, ‘Dvornik’ was soon behind bars. The fact that, because of the pressure on his income, he had started to skimp on his bribes to the local police may also have had a bearing on the case.
Some brothel keepers simply could not cope in these conditions, and their businesses folded. Those who survived, though, generally did so by diversifying into even more dangerous ventures, such as narcotics, and this in turn meant that they fell further into the control of organised crime. In many cases, they accumulated more debt. The local gangsters, themselves under pressure, often simply sold their debts on to the larger, richer gangs in the city, those whose activities were already sufficiently diversified that they could ride out the present storm.
Many of the businesses on ‘Dvornik’s’ turf came under the sway of the vor known as ‘Rak’ (‘Crayfish’), the local representative of Tariel Oniani’s network. If ‘Dvornik’ was essentially a thug, a predator extorting what he could, ‘Rak’ was a professional, a criminal businessman, whose abilities lay in maximising the value of those assets that came into his hands. He earned his klichka, his nickname, because of a crayfish’s willingness to eat pretty much anything and this applied to his criminal enterprises, too. He found new uses for the brothels which came under his sway, not least as places to launder and move counterfeit money, or he reduced their running costs by staffing them with trafficked sex slaves from Central Asia. The depressing fact is that this actually got the approval of corrupt local police officers: the higher the turnover of the business, and the more serious the crimes involved, then the heftier the bribes they could expect. In this way, in Kapotnya at least, Russia’s economic crisis meant hard times for consumers and small businesses, and the petty gangsters and corrupt officials preying on both.
Of course, one cannot extrapolate too much from a single neighbourhood, especially not one which is an impoverished and squalid outlier by Moscow’s standards. (Although one could retort that Moscow itself is a wealthy and opulent outlier by Russia’s standards.) Nonetheless, new opportunities arose for those individuals and groups able to seize them in the midst of crisis. The devaluation of the ruble again meant that those gangs whose businesses earned dollars, euros or other harder currencies had disproportionate domestic spending power. One of the most significant of these is the drug trade, but those gangs able to offer foreign criminals money-laundering services, for example, also expect their fees in kind. Hacking is also not a ruble business, for instance, nor is the international trade in women or weapons.
The day of the cheeserunners
Russia declares war on cheese, cracks down on ‘dairy mafia’
CNN headline, 201519
Thus, the greatest opportunities fell to those gangsters able to operate across Russia’s borders. However, for many this meant having to develop new connections and alliances, which in turn brought complications. For example, one ‘Pyotr Banana’ built up a lucrative niche criminal enterprise after the 2008 financial slowdown on the back of a small Moscow-based trucking company he took over from his older brother after the latter died in a road accident that some think was actually a razborka, a gangland settling of scores. Initially he stuck with the existing formula of using spare space on shipments to move contraband and counterfeit goods, but he soon realised that there was serious money to be made smuggling heroin. By 2012, he was running monthly shipments into Belarus, for sale to a local gang which would then move it into Lithuania, and these represented his main source of income. After 2014, though, heroin was increasingly complemented with a new commodity being smuggled back into Russia: cheese.
As ‘Pyotr Banana’ discovered, Belarus had long been a turntable for all kinds of smuggling to and from Europe, with counterfeit cigarettes and heroin heading west, stolen cars and untaxed luxury goods passing east.20 When the Kremlin slapped counter-sanctions on Western foodstuffs in 2014, consumers seeking their Italian salami and French cheeses had to turn to the black market, and Belarus became one of the key suppliers. Ironically, Moscow’s efforts to prevent such sanctions busting through the ‘grey market’ – legitimate companies trying to bypass the control regime – only handed a greater market share to the outright criminal smugglers, who had the years of experience and corrupt contacts to move shipments across the border. Lest this sound trivial, consider than a single ‘cheeserunner’ gang broken up in 2015 was accused of earning two billion roubles (some $34 million) in just six months.21
‘Pyotr Banana’, though, had little personal experience in either acquiring or dealing in these commodities. In order to be able to break into this unexpected realm of what some call the sery gastronom, the ‘grey delicatessen’, he had to acquire a variety of new partners. One was a Belarusian official connected with an agrokombinat or food and agriculture corporation, who handled the importation, recruited through a brother-in-law who was a member of the gang which bought ‘Pyotr Banana’s’ heroin. Then there was an official at Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia’s Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance, who somehow got the shipments duly certified for sale. Finally, although some of the cheese then ended up in Moscow’s supermarkets, most was moved through produkty corner shops, and this required ‘Pyotr Banana’ also to partner with a Dagestani gang that controlled a string of them.
On one level, this is a classic example of the kind of on-the-fly entrepreneurialism that has long been a Russian strength, selling heroin for euros and banned groceries for rubles. In the process, though, ‘Pyotr Banana’ became dependent on corrupt officials over whom he had relatively little leverage and a gang from the North Caucasus with distinctly prickly relations with the Slav and Georgian groups dominating Moscow’s underworld. This may prove an uncomfortable position for him in the future, but he, like many other lower- and middle-ranking criminal-entrepreneurs, has had to take whatever opportunities came his way.
On the one hand, times are hard, but on the other hand, there are all kinds of great new ways to make money, from buying guns from the Donbas to smuggling embargoed goods into the country. What’s sure is that nothing will stand still – and that means . . . more pressure on the current order.
Interpol analyst, 201522
Successive economic squeezes have made the struggle for control of key revenue streams – especially new ones – all the more important. The Afghan heroin Northern Route was and is the most lucrative, of course, but also the hardest to break into. Nonetheless, it has meant that gangs along the main arteries, able either to participate directly or simply to demand tribute for safe passage, have become increasingly wealthy. With wealth, gangs can corrupt officials, bankroll further opportunities, keep leaders and ‘soldiers’ happy and attract new recruits, including disaffected members of other gangs.
The upsurge in criminal connections with Belarus has likewise been a bonanza for the gangs of nearby Russian cities such as Bryansk and especially – because of its location on the Moscow–Minsk road – Smolensk. These gangs were, to be blunt, hardly glittering prizes in the Russian underworld. Before 2014, they were very much the impoverished country cousins of the powerful Moscow and St Petersburg networks. However, they then began prospering unexpectedly because of their ability to ‘tax’ the through-flow of smuggled goods. This gave them the extra resources to be able to attract more members, bribe officials and invest in new criminal businesses.
In the longer term, though, China offers greater opportunities, even if they are distinctly harder for Russian gangs to tap and may indeed require a willingness to accept a subordinate position. The decay of the Far Eastern Association of Thieves after Yevgeny Vasin’s death in 2001 and the failure of a skhodka held in 2012 to try and resolve disputes between the ‘easterners’ has left this market very much up for grabs, as discussed in chapter 9. Conflicts between interior and coastal and border gangs look set to intensify, with Chinese and other Asian gangs (including some yakuza and Koreans) eager to capitalise on the outcome.
As Vladimir Putin increasingly legitimises his rule – and pays off his closest allies – with various prestige projects, this too creates all kinds of new opportunities, large and small. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics was a particularly infamous honeypot, and one which may have contributed to Aslan Usoyan’s assassination in 2013. The whole project cost an estimated $55 billion, making it the most expensive winter Games on record.23 In part, this reflects the challenges of mounting winter games in a subtropical venue, but it is also a product of staggering levels of waste and theft. According to the international NGO Transparency International, corruption added fully 50 per cent to the construction costs, suggesting perhaps $15 billion was up for grabs.24 Usoyan was the first of the major players to identify the potential profits to be made following the 2007 decision to award the games to Sochi, which was one of his power bases. He moved quickly into the local construction and hospitality industries, although in fairness it appears to have been corrupt officials and business people who stole the greatest sums. Nonetheless, Usoyan’s local preponderance (he ‘was like a governor here, but from the criminal world . . . It’s like a second government’25) was resented sufficiently that his network suffered a regular toll of local agents and lieutenants murdered by his rivals. In 2009, local vor Alik ‘Sochinsky’ Minalyan was killed in Moscow, possibly while visiting Usoyan.26 In 2010, two of Usoyan’s men were gunned down in Sochi itself, with one – property speculator Eduard Kokosyan (‘Karas’) – killed.27 Of course, the real money was made by the oligarchs granted the major contracts worth billions, but even through subcontracted work such as providing labour-ganged workers (often virtually trafficked from Central Asia and forcibly returned once the job was done), the major criminal players could also benefit from the actual construction.
The government’s decision in 2009 to ban all organised gambling and instead develop four (later six) Las Vegas-style casino tourism hubs is also having an inevitable impact on the underworld.28 Of course, in reality this is proving every bit as effective as prohibition in the United States and Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, driving habitual gamblers into underground, unregulated games and casinos run by organised crime. Beyond competition over these games, the new mega-sites, all at border locations meant also to cater for overseas markets, offer inviting new business prospects for the criminals. The planned sites are at Vladivostok (for the Pacific market), Kaliningrad (for Europe), Azov City in the south-western Rostov region (for the Middle East) and a remote spot in the Altai region in southern Siberia (for central and western Asia), to which were later added Yalta, in Crimea, and Sochi. Priority was given to Vladivostok’s Ussuri Bay Resort, which opened in 2015, and gangs (and corrupt local officials) inevitably sought to snap up strategic real estate and construction companies and secure padded contracts for businesses under their control.29 The potential profit from these new ventures is again a powerful force attracting opportunists and distorting the status quo.
The khaker: the virtual vor
Everyone knows that Russians are good at maths. Our software writers are the best in the world, that’s why our hackers are the best in the world.
Lt. Gen. Boris Miroshnikov,
MVD Department K (cybercrimes), 200530
Elsewhere in the Russian underworld, one of the more striking transformations has been happening in virtual rather than real space. The country has long been a rich source of licit computer programmers and hackers alike, for a variety of reasons. In the 1990s, when hacking was in its infancy, a combination of a tradition of advanced mathematical training, primitive hardware (which encouraged programmers to learn raw code rather than relying on software) and a lack of decent legal opportunities all contributed to the rise of the khaker. Today there are far more jobs available, at home and abroad, not least in such world-class Russian companies as the Kaspersky Labs computer security corporation. However, as a legacy of those early years, there is still a strong hacker culture – both ‘white hats’, devoted to the pleasure of the art, and more destructive ‘black hats’ – and also a strong appreciation of the criminal opportunities.
According to industry analyses, in 2011 Russia accounted for about 35 per cent of global cybercrime revenue, or between $2.5 and $3.7 billion.31 This is wildly out of proportion with the country’s share of the global information technology market, which at the time was around 1 per cent. Even though China and the USA are still in the lead, it is striking just how many key players and operations in global cybercrime are Russian. As of 2017, the five FBI ‘most wanted’ cybercriminals are four Russians (one a Latvian Russian) and a cell of Iranian hackers.32 An operation which stole around $1 billion from some 100 financial institutions around the world in 2015 using the so-called Anunak malware (malicious software) was tracked back to Russia. In addition, the man who has been dubbed ‘King of Spam’ (although cited only as a mere number 7 on Spamhaus’s alleged ‘Top Ten Worst’ list) is a Russian, Pyotr Levashov, arrested in Spain in April 2017.33
Furthermore, just as Russian gangs have become service providers in other criminal sectors, many computer criminals around the world have taken advantage of programs and tools created in Russia and sold by Russians, or else the secure servers provided by such enterprises as the infamous Russian Business Network (RBN). This was a source of services including secure ‘bullet-proof hosting’ for everyone from hackers to paedophiles, as well as spamming and identity theft. Described by the internet security company VeriSign as ‘the baddest of the bad . . . a for-hire service catering to large-scale criminal operations’,34 RBN was at one time reportedly linked to around 60 per cent of all cybercrime.35 It grew out of computer crime operations in St Petersburg in the late 1990s, although it only formally registered as an internet site in 2006. It seemed impenetrable to government efforts to hack into or locate it. Persistent rumours suggested it had a powerful krysha thanks both to its willingness to help Russia’s intelligence services conduct some operations, not least a massive attack on Estonia’s information infrastructure in 2007, and the fact that ‘Flyman’, its organiser, was related to a powerful St Petersburg politician.36 Later in 2007, though, it seemingly disappeared but may well have simply migrated to servers in other jurisdictions and be operating under new names.37
At home, the hackers generally appear not to be part of the existing criminal networks. Instead, much like professional assassins, forgers or money launderers, they are specialists for hire, engaged for a particular operation. More often, they form their own virtual groups and networks, increasingly cross-border and multi-ethnic ones, to commit crimes either for themselves or for hire to other gangs. They were, for example, reportedly the technical experts who cracked police databases for the Japanese yakuza in the 1990s,38 transferred stolen money abroad for Australian gangsters in the 2000s,39 and obtained credit card details for the Italians in the 2010s.40
War or peace?
There will be no new criminal revolution in Russia . . . We can state: the epoch of criminal wars is in the past.
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, 200941
I have never met a police officer with a good word to say for Rashid Nurgaliyev, a former KGB veteran who spent nine years heading the Ministry of Internal Affairs (until 2012), during which time, according to one of his erstwhile subordinates, he ‘saw his job as being to keep the country quiet, nothing more’.42 Certainly one cannot regard him as being especially percipient, as the result of all the new challenges and opportunites discussed above is that the Russian underworld and the wider Russian-focused crime diaspora are both undergoing a new round of transformations. It may not mean war, but it certainly will mean some kind of revolution.
However great the strains on the Russian underworld, there are many within it who want to maintain the status quo and avoid any wider conflicts. Even Rovshan Dzhaniyev was really looking for a place at the top table more than the demolition of the whole structure. All the country’s criminal kingpins appreciate that a nationwide turf war would not only put them, their organisations and their fortunes in jeopardy from their rivals, but would likely also force the government to crack down with greater rigour and vigour. In the words of Lieutenant General Igor Zinoviev, head of MUR, Moscow’s criminal intelligence division, ‘you have to consider yet another fact. All the leaders of the criminal world of the 1990s are already elderly people. Most of them have long gone legitimate – heading some fund or being part of the management of some commercial structure . . . A return of the ’90s is unprofitable for everyone.’43
Furthermore, the authorities themselves seem to be eager to head off any major conflict. Shortly after Aslan Usoyan’s murder, for example, the police took the unusual step of raiding a meeting of Tariel Oniani’s senior lieutenants, who had gathered to ponder its implications.44 They were all detained overnight before being released, a warning that the police knew who they were and where they could be found. Nonetheless, this will for the foreseeable future remain a tense and dangerous situation and it is hard to predict the outcome.45 Even the criminals are uncertain, hoping for peace, but fearing war:
Representatives of the criminal world are of the same opinion: the bloody skirmishes will not return, there are other methods to solving problems: fraud, corruption, blackmail. Yesterday’s thugs have matured and become serious people who do honest business. But, apparently, not all problems are solved without the use of weapons, and in some cases the surest method is that ‘no person means no problem’.46
Several main factors are likely to determine the trajectory of the Russian underworld in the next few years: whether the majority Slavic gangs remain united and out of the conflicts within the ‘highlander’ community; whether the Chechens, who have a strength and reputation disproportionate to their numbers, are dragged into them; the personal agendas of key figures; and the intentions and interests of the state. Four main potential scenarios emerge. The first is of peace through superior firepower, whereby a wider conflict and any substantive reordering of the underworld is avoided as the Slavic gangs and the Chechens remain relatively united and able credibly to threaten retaliation against parties deemed to be troublemakers, probably with the tacit and maybe even the active approval of the state.
If the coalition supporting the status quo is forced instead to accede to a limited underworld reshuffle, the result could be apocalypse postponed. By buying off some insurgent elements and eliminating or facing down others, they would hope to bleed off enough pressure to avert a wider conflict without the need for comprehensive changes. However, partial reorganisation is in many ways harder to manage than a flat opposition to any change, and the chances are that this would trigger at the very least local conflicts.
It is possible, though, that the conflict could continue to smoulder or even escalate, but remain confined to the ‘highlanders’. In many ways, this is the present default outcome. The result could be a single, unified ‘highlander’ organisation, but more probably they would be fragmented and weakened, allowing the Slavs and perhaps also Chechens to take over many of their operations outside their regional strongholds.
The last likely outcome is that, even if none of the principal actors want this, some incident sparks the present combustible mix of generational, ethnic, economic and personal rivalries. Although such a broader mob conflict would not last the best part of a decade, as during the 1990s, a major and bloody redefinition of the underworld balance of power would lead to greater violence on the streets and also have wider political implications. Elements of the local and security elites linked to organised crime would be dragged into the fray. More to the point, the Kremlin could not sit back and see the days of bespredel, disorder, return.
It is, of course, impossible to predict which scenario will prevail. These pressures have so far not only been worsening relations between gangs, but also undermining their internal cohesion. In 2008, for example, two Tambovskaya members were assassinated outside St Petersburg. Both were part of the group controlled by the gangster known as ‘Basil Khimichev’ (‘Basil the Chemist’), who in turn owed allegiance to ‘Khokol’ (a slang term for a Ukrainian), a senior Tambovskaya figure now living in exile.47 The killings seem to have been related to a struggle within the Tambovskaya itself over the growing drug-trafficking business. Likewise, the arrest in 2016 of ‘Shakhro the Younger’ (see chapter 11) raised questions about the partition of his criminal empire that were at least temporarily shelved when, in February 2017, he sent a message to his gang starting with the unambiguous words ‘I’m not dead yet’ and warning against any such moves.48 Although the authorities went through a pro forma inquiry as to how his message could have been smuggled out of the high-security Lefortovo prison, several informed observers of the scene have told me that they permitted it, precisely to try and prevent any cannibalisation of his network, which would almost certainly have led to violence.
Vladimir Putin’s state-building project entailed a tacit understanding with the criminals, who avoided any large-scale crackdown by acknowledging the primacy of the regime and abandoning the indiscriminate street violence of the 1990s. The balance of power shifted back to the political elites, much as in Soviet times. The state is once again the biggest gang in town, and local and national political/administrative figures are stronger than their criminal counterparts. However, it is not an especially unified ‘gang’ and as Putin’s grip on the elite appears to weaken, especially as speculation grows about a possible succession after the 2018 presidential elections, there are dangers. While the movers and shakers of central government have little reason to fear or need the criminals – even if they do often move within common social circles – at a local level, the opportunities for deeper cooperation nationally between political and criminal are much more evident and the relationship not quite so one sided. One by-product of this is that even if the national government does ever get serious about fighting corruption and organised crime, this may be resisted and side-lined on the ground by the gangsters’ allies, clients and patrons. Besides which, any conflict will undermine a central element of President Putin’s legitimating mythology: that he was the one man who could finally restore order to Russia.