From cocaine smuggling for Colombian drug cartels to criminal betting syndicates in Asia, Russian mobsters have extended their tentacles across the far corners of the globe, backed up by formidable resources at home.
The scandal surrounding Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, the alleged Russian crime boss accused of fixing results at the Salt Lake City Olympics with French and Russian judges, has shone a spotlight on the international reach of Russia’s mafia.
A Western law enforcement official who is investigating Russian organised crime says no criminal structure in the world has wielded such political influence and wealth as in Russia, giving it the muscle to expand activities ambitiously.
”You talk about Al Capone who had the Mayor of Cicero, Illnois in his pocket and other political connections. But he was the biggest we ever had. He never took over General Motors, he never took over US Steel, He was never in Congress,” he told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
”Some of these guys are billionaires, they control natural resources such as aluminium and oil,” the official added. In Soviet times, crime bosses, known as ”vory v zakone” (thieves-in-law), made fortunes from black-marketeering but kept a low profile for fear of being thrown into gulag camps.
But with the chaos surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union, organised crime flourished with the weak state powerless to resist, seizing control of the fragile banking sector and collaborating with the Soviet nomenklatura (bureaucrats) to pillage state assets.
According to interior ministry figures in the late 1990s, the Russian mafia controlled 40% of private business and 60% of state-owned companies.
In 1989 the Russian mobsters also began to move across to Europe, America and Israel, using as a stepping stone the Russian emigre communities in New York’s Brighton Beach district, in Israel and European capitals.
Israel has been a favourite target, with billions of dollars believed to have been laundered there by Russian criminals, many of whom claim to be Jewish to get an Israeli passport.
Unlike the Colombian cartels or the Italian Mafia, Russian crime groups are not centralised hierarchical structures but instead work in small groups, with hundreds of gangs around the world that have thousands of members.
Their strength, according to Russian mafia expert Mark Galeotti, lies in their willingness to strike up temporary alliances with just about anyone else.
”No one else cooperates like them, they make deals with everyone. You have even seen Russian mafia cooperating in supporting al-Qaida in getting weapons to Chechen rebels fighting Russians,” he said.
”These are internationalists, absolutely amoral criminal gangs,” added Galeotti, Director of the Organised Russian and Eurasian Crime Research Unit at Britain’s Keele University and a writer on the Russian mafia for Jane’s Intelligence Review.
Uninterested in taking over territory, Russian gangsters usually try to work with existing criminal structures. In the United States, Russian mobsters for example paid protection money to the Italian mafia when they got involved in fuel tax scams, said the Western investigator.
US law enforcement agencies got extremely worried when the Russians struck a partnership with the Colombian drugs cartels at the end of the 1990s, arranging cocaine shipments to Europe and providing weapons to Latin American mafias.
In an act of extraordinary daring, one Russian gang in 1997 tried to sell a Soviet-era submarine to the Colombians to help them smuggle cocaine into the United States.
Russian groups, operating out of Miami, New York and Puerto Rico, also opened bank accounts and front companies across the Caribbean to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in drug sales and other criminal activities.
The Russian crime groups’ other advantage is that they are extremely flexible about their area of activities, although their strength lies in drugs, weapons and raw commodities.
Recently they have been arranging for foreign toxic waste to be dumped in Russia, according to Galeotti.
Often, Russian criminals simply are paid to provide transport for other people’s goods.
Drugs from Afghanistan, the world’s main supplier of heroin, are shipped through Russia for sale in Western European markets and Russians are involved in human trafficking of Asian refugees who come through Russia into Europe.
But in the Far East, they have tried ambitiously to get involved in criminalised gambling syndicates. They tried and were rebuffed in Macau but were more successful in the Philippines and Indonesia.
”They have no problem in thinking on a big scale. They will move to whatever is profitable,” commented Galeotti. – Sapa-AFP