Even by Moscow’s increasingly violent standards, the shoot-out was shockingly brazen and bloody. But to some Muscovites, Kvintirshvili’s funeral was more of an affront. The mafia godfather was buried in the exclusive Vagankovskoye Cemetery, right next to the revered singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky. “The Italian mafia are peasants compared to ours,” said Yuri Shchekochikhin, one of Moscow’s leading crime reporters. “They have no fear anymore.”
Moscow, one of the world’s safest cities in the days of the Soviet police state, is now being lashed by a summer crime wave. Its murder rate has increased by more than 50 percent so far this year (chart), and if Russian criminals are less productive than their Western counterparts in other categories, such as auto theft, it may only reflect the fact that there’s less to steal in Russia.
In the power void left by the collapse of Soviet rule, criminal gangs are proliferating wildly. Western gangsters generally play by rules of a sort–rarely killing policemen, for example. Russian gangs are notorious for their brutality and cunning and for their anything-goes attitude. The police cannot match them, either in funds or in firepower; the government is paralyzed by political disputes and its own heritage of official corruption. The crime wave further undermines the state by reinforcing the feeling of many Russians that their quality of life has deteriorated sharply since President Boris Yeltsin began his reforms.
It also frightens many of the foreign residents and visitors upon whom Russia depends for investment, development and tourist revenue. Crimes against foreigners have increased 44 percent this year, and some of them have been spectacularly daring. A British businessman was stabbed to death in his $200-a-night room at the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel. A Swedish businessman was shot dead by three thieves who burst into his apartment and escaped with jewelry and cash.
The crooks don’t seem to care who gets caught in their cross-fire. “This is not Al Capone’s Chicago, where it was just gangs against gangs. In Moscow, it’s gangs against ordinary citizens,” says Jeffrey Zeiger, a restaurateur from Trenton, N.J., whose Russian partner was murdered on July 30. Some foreigners have hired protection. Harry Bodaan, director of Moscow’s International Press Club and former chief executive of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., says he gave crime little thought until three men broke into his apartment last February and robbed him at gunpoint. Now Bodaan takes a bodyguard with him almost everywhere he goes. “This is not like Washington,” he says. “In D.C., crime is confined to a few areas, and the killings are not gangland style. Here, you can walk out of an exclusive hotel and be shot.”
Russian gangs are beginning to make their mark outside the country. In Prague, they are principals in the prostitution business. In New York, Russian emigres, acting with a combination of startling brutality and business acumen, are moving up so fast in organized crime that the FBI recently opened an office in Moscow to keep track of them. “The Russian criminals are networking and developing much faster than any group I’ve seen in the United States,” Jim Moody, FBI chief for organized crime, said at a Moscow news conference. “They’re often highly educated, and now that they can get to the U.S. more easily, they’ve bit the ground running.”
Back home in Russia, some of the gangsters are branching out into new fields, including legitimate business. “Those who have money and brains open their own enterprises,” says Gennady Chebotaryov, first deputy director of the Interior Ministry’s organized-crime division. “Those who don’t have brains continue to extort.”
In the late 1980s, Moscow’s underground economy was largely carved up into ethnic spheres of influence–Chechens controlling black-market car sales, for example, and Azerbaijanis dominating the flower-and-fruit street markets. Now, as economic reform advances, everything seems vulnerable to the raw power of the burgeoning gangs. A group known as the Solntsevo gang dominates the car trade, while another called the Dolgoprudnoye group controls most of the auto-repair field. Many of the new mafia figures are young and arrogant. Investigators recently cracked a gang that controlled the cargo business at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. “They were extorting money from people bringing cargo in or sending it,” says Chebotaryov. “They were only 25 to 30 years old.”
Racketeering still provides most gang profits, but police say the biggest growth business for Russian crooks may be finance. Gangs have earned about $500 million in the past several months, officials estimate, from false checks and other fake financial transactions. Some have opened their own banks to launder money; others have muscled their way into legitimate banks. Across Russia, balky bank managers have been killed. Last month, Boris Yakubovich, a 21-year-old branch manager for St. Petersburg’s Incombank, was beaten to death by straight punches to the nose and forehead. A member of the city’s Malyshev gang told NEWSWEEK that Yakubovich had refused to “give a loan to someone.” The gangster added: “It was his own fault.”
This summer, Moscow’s criminals are flaunting their success. One of their favorite hangouts is Cherry’s Casino on Novy Arbat street. The gangsters carouse in a room full of blackjack, roulette and craps tables. Young thugs sport silk ties and flashy double-breasted suits with padded shoulders; older mafiosi wear opennecked shirts and stubbly beards. Guns are checked at the door, and jewelry is on ostentatious display. At one table sits a burly, violet-suited man with gnarled knuckles. Another has a deep scar on his cheek. Few of the gangsters are high rollers; most have only a few hundred dollars in chips before them. One man, wearing a diamond ring on one hand and a gauze bandage on the other, wins $200 at blackjack, tosses a $10 tip to the dealer and gets up to leave. “We’ve made enough,” he tells his female companion. The richer pickings are outside, on the anxious streets of Moscow.
Big American cities such as New York and L.A. suffer more violent crime, but Moscow is catching up. The growth in the crime rate this year is explosive.
1992 1993 % change (FIRST SIX MONTHS) Murder 432 697 +61.3% Car theft 2,873 4,697 +63.5% Burglary 3,403 4,903 +44.1% SOURCE: RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS
