The World's Most Evil Gangs
Page 25
Russia sees around 10,000 fatal shootings a year, more than 500 of which are contract killings. One of the most sensational was the murder of one of the country’s most powerful Mob bosses, shot dead by a sniper in broad daylight in central Moscow in January 2013. Aslan ‘Grandpa’ Usoyan, a Kurdish 75-year-old, had survived at least two previous attempts on his life. Usoyan, who had built a vast crime empire stretching across the former Soviet Union, had been at war with rival Mafiya gangs, particularly in Sochi, home to highly lucrative construction projects as the resort prepared to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.
In Soviet times, the KGB would have kept a lid on such turf wars but its successor, the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) is under-funded and demoralised. The national police have an elite Berkut (Eagle) force and conduct much-publicised commando-style raids, yet appear to catch only lesser gangsters. Professor Mark Galeotti commented: ‘We are going to see more blood on the streets. The Russian underworld is a much more volatile place than it was five years ago, particularly because of the influx of Afghan heroin and the opportunities created by the Sochi Winter Olympics.’
A US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks in 2010 described Russia as ‘a virtual mafia state’. But it has long since ceased to limit its activities to its own borders. Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI, said that in the mid-1990s the Mafiya was the organisation that posed the greatest threat to US national security.
The ease with which Russian mobsters operate abroad was highlighted when Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the country’s most brutal criminals, arrived in the United States in 1992, having just served a prison sentence of ten years. He was allowed in on a business visa, claiming that he wanted to set himself up in the film industry. But it was said that Mafiya compatriots had sent him to the US because he was killing too many people back in his homeland. Within a year, from his Brooklyn headquarters, he had built up an international operation that included narcotics, money laundering and prostitution and had made ties with the American Mafia and Colombian drug cartels. Ivankov was arrested by the FBI in 1995 and charged with the extortion of about £2 million. In 2004 he was deported back to Moscow, where five years later he was shot dead by a mystery assassin.
Another visiting Russian, Ludwig ‘Tarzan’ Fainberg, was arrested in Miami in 1997 and charged with global arms dealing while acting as an intermediary between a Colombian cocaine cartel and the corrupt Russian military. Extraordinarily, Fainberg had helped the cartel get six Russian military helicopters in 1993 and the following year had arranged the purchase of a Soviet-era submarine for cocaine smuggling to the US. But federal agents had been keeping watch on the Russian and the cartel’s agent, Cuban-born Juan Almeida. When arrested and threatened with life imprisonment, Fainberg testified against Almeida in exchange for a shorter sentence of 33 months.
Elsewhere, the Russians have been unwelcome guests in crime ‘hotspots’ around the globe. In 2010 a EU report complained that the French Riviera and Spanish Costas were being blighted by Russian organised crime, the latter branded as a virtual ‘Mafiya state’. In Israel, the large influx of Russian Jews has caused the formation of new Mafiya branches and a resultant crime wave that has caused calls for strengthened police action by the Israeli government.
The Mafiya operate in Britain, sometimes with dramatically bloody results but more often in a softly-softly fashion. ‘It exists but it’s invisible,’ was how one security expert described it in 2012. London is the chosen home for many rich Russians seeking a haven from their homeland, where they have little faith in the rule of law. They feel safer in the capital they have affectionately dubbed ‘Londongrad’. According to Andrei Soldatov, a leading crime author, the Mafiya is well established, with clandestine Syndicates heavily involved in money laundering in the City of London. They are also engaged in electronic fraud, commercial espionage and trafficking in people and drugs. Sadly, warns Soldatov, Britain has been ill-prepared for the threat from these Russian gangsters.
A leaden hint at the growth of a new hidden underworld encroaching on London came in March 2012 with an attempted hit on a former Russian banker. A lone gunman shot German Gorbuntsov, 45, five times with a pistol as he entered an apartment block in the Canary Wharf financial district. Gorbuntsov, who used to own four banks, had been days away from giving evidence to an investigation into the assassination attempt on a former business associate. Left for dead, his life was saved by medics, who treated him at an unnamed hospital guarded round the clock by a Metropolitan Police team.
Another expatriate who fled west was flamboyant Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, who arrived in Britain in 2008. He was one of the oligarchs who made a fortune from the privatisation of state-owned industries during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin but fell from favour when Vladimir Putin succeeded him. Patarkatsishvili was found dead at his Surrey mansion from a suspected heart attack in 2008 at the age of 52. He had earlier claimed that a four-man hit squad had been sent to London ‘to do something against me’.
Patarkatsishvili was behind many of Russia’s most successful privatised companies, including the oil group Sibneft, of which he was a founding partner along with Boris Berezovsky, another exiled oligarch. Berezovsky had fled to Britain in 2006 after surviving assassination attempts in Moscow, including a bomb blast that decapitated his chauffeur. He told a journalist: ‘I do not feel safe – here have been three attempts to kill me here in London. There are elements who want rid of me.’ In March 2013 the 67-year-old tycoon was found dead in the bathroom of his Berkshire mansion. He was said to have hanged himself but at his inquest, which opened and was adjourned four months later, police told the Berkshire coroner they were unable to ‘completely eliminate’ the possibility that he had been murdered.
Yet another Russian expatriate who died in suspicious circumstances was Alexander Perepilichny, whose body was found close to his Surrey mansion in 2012. The 44-year-old had been helping Swiss prosecutors in a money-laundering case involving Russian officials and had also provided evidence over the 2009 death in custody of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who had exposed corruption in government circles.
Perepilichny had fled to Britain three years earlier with his young wife and children after falling out with members of a criminal network thought to include corrupt members of the Russian police, tax office, judiciary and government. At the time of his death, he was providing information to William Browder, once a big investor in Russia, who fell foul of the same gang. The financier fled to Britain under threats from the criminals, who aimed to hijack his Hermitage Fund investment firm and milk it of $230 million. Browder’s lawyer, 44-year-old Sergei Magnitsky, bravely remained in Russia when his client fled the country. Thrown into prison and held for a year without charge, he was repeatedly tortured to make him withdraw his testimony against the gang, which included members of the Interior Ministry’s own police force. Finally, his jailers beat him to death in November 2009.
‘Sergei had been held hostage – and they killed their hostage,’ said Bill Browder, who in July 2013 was convicted in his absence of tax fraud and sentenced to nine years in a prison colony. At the same Moscow ‘show trial’, Sergei Magnitsky was also posthumously convicted of fraud – bizarrely one of the very crimes he claimed to have uncovered among the higher echelon of Interior Ministry officials.
‘The verdict will go down in history as one of the most shameful moments for Russia since the days of Joseph Stalin,’ said Browder, who warned that Russia had turned into a ‘criminal state’. He added: ‘The Mafiya and the Russian government security services are now one and the same. Any place where there are lots of Russians will attract the security services to carry out their dirty business outside of Russia.’
The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 was the most high-profile example of this collaboration. A former officer of the KGB and its successor the FSB, he fled from court prosecution in Russia and was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom. According to his wife and father, he
subsequently worked for MI6 and MI5. In 2006 Litvinenko, then aged 43, met former KGB agents for tea in a London hotel. He suddenly fell ill and died within three weeks from poisoning by radioactive polonium-210. From his deathbed, he accused Kremlin-led assassins.
Murders such as those of Litvinenko in London and Magnitsky in Moscow caused an international outcry that led to a campaign, fiercely opposed by President Putin, to ban 60 officials accused of complicity from entering the European Union and the United States. Browder believes it is justified. He said: ‘Imagine Russian criminals with all their powers and connections. Then imagine they also have access to the police and all the powers of the state to carry out their criminal enterprises – that’s how powerful these people are. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the entire government apparatus in Russia is not there to provide leadership and services for the population. It functions only for top officials to steal as much money as they can.’
CHAPTER 26
EUROPE IN CRISIS? NO, IT’S A BOOM TIME FOR CRIME!
Business has been booming in Europe, even through its years of desperate financial crises, but it is not the kind of trade that’s welcome – for when times are hard, crime is king. The boom in organised Mob rackets was already underway as borders came down with the European Union’s new Eastern members, the consequent increase in legitimate imports being matched by a flood of illegal drugs, counterfeit luxury good, fake euros and traffic in humans. A report from the EU’s law enforcement and criminal intelligence agency Europol revealed that while the global economy suffered its roughest ride from 2008 onwards, organised crime actually profited from the downturn. The report pointed out that cash-strapped consumers tended to choose counterfeit products. The jobless were prey to gangmasters and pimps; the dispossessed turned to drugs. And relaxed customs controls and low-cost airlines made the trafficking of goods and humans easier.
It is clear from the Europol’s analysis that, just as the once-independent nations of Europe can no longer be studied in isolation when it comes to legitimate trade, so the illegal trade of the region’s major crime gangs must be seen as a transnational problem for the forces of law and order. This chapter will attempt to define some of the present flashpoints and the fears for the future as gang culture spreads across the continent. Europol’s so-called Organised Crime Threat Assessment breaks up Europe’s gangs into various ‘hubs’.
The North-West Hub, with Holland and neighbouring Belgium at its core, is described as ‘the most important geographical crime centre’. Gangs from these countries, plus Britain and Ireland, are operating there in competition with Eastern European groups, as well as gangs originating from Turkey, Pakistan, China, Vietnam, Colombia and Africa. In many cases, says Europol, such gangs are comprised of the children of first-generation immigrants now living in the EU. The North-West Hub also has strong links with the Middle East, specially Dubai, a key financial centre and logistics base for gangsters. There, they make contacts, deals, launder money and coordinate shipments.
The Southern Hub is dominated by Italian organised crime groups, using the port of Naples for cocaine and cannabis trafficking, along with illegal immigration, euro forgery and fake goods. According to Europol’s files: ‘Both Camorra (Naples) and Apulian (Puglia) crime groups have established extensive links with Chinese groups to distribute counterfeit products such as software, CDs, movies and luxury goods’. More dangerous is the explosion in synthetic drugs, such as amphetamines and methamphetamine, and fake pharmaceutical products made in China, Hong Kong, India, Thailand and Turkey.
The North-East Hub is the home of Baltic and Russian gangs, with the twin crime centres of Lithuania and St Petersburg. The ‘open door’ to smuggling of drugs and humans into Europe is Kaliningrad, a tiny territory of Russia that sits in the middle of EU territory. Dubbed ‘the Corridor of Crime’, Kaliningrad is best known for AIDS epidemics, drug plagues, pollution, bleak tower blocks – and 20,000 crimes a year among a population of 400,000.
The South-East Hub uses the gangster-ridden Balkan states as a corridor from the Black Sea and Romania to the Mediterranean ports in Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro. The Balkan regions suffer from ‘the presence of pre-established transnational organised crime networks,’ says Europol, adding: ‘Smuggling via the Balkans has proved to be a low-risk route into the EU.’
This region provides the ultimate proof that crime recognises no national boundaries. For instance, Romania is the easternmost country within the EU. More than 1,500 miles to the west is the United Kingdom. In 2013 alarming statistics were revealed about Britain’s prison population – showing an increase of almost 40 per cent in little over a year in the number of Romanian criminals in British jails, from 454 to 624. As the total of UK-born inmates fell, the ranks of Eastern European prisoners soared amid a crime wave by migrants exploiting EU freedom of movement rules. The figures raised fears about the impact on Britain with the looming 2014 removal of border controls on crime-ridden Romania and neighbouring Bulgaria.
A warning that Britain’s problems were about to multiply came in even more alarming reports from Germany, where the influx of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants has already caused a crime wave. There has been a six-fold increase in migration since the two countries joined the EU in 2007. The Association of German Cities warned of ‘social unrest’ and spoke of ‘peace being extremely endangered’. One crime hotspot is the north-western city of Duisburg, where newcomers, crammed into crumbling apartments and without work to feed their families, have formed lawless gangs. Duisburg’s mayor, Soeren Link, sparked nationwide soul-searching when he announced in 2013 that his city could no longer cope and that the cost to the town of dealing with the problem was around £15 million a year. His warning was supported by a report from the city’s police blaming Romanian family gangs for an explosion in crime, particularly pick-pocketing, prostitution and muggings. As an example of the fear gripping German citizens, Mayor Link said one 65-year-old woman had bought a 200,000-volt stun gun for her protection.
Being the richest country in Europe, Germany has long attracted economic migrants, who have formed their own communities and spawned their own gangs, initially for protection but ultimately for their own self-serving ends. In fact, Germany has turned not only into a multi-cultural society but a multi-criminal one. And there’s a pattern to this criminality – the Turks traditionally run the drugs trade, the Poles and Romanians dominate the car-theft sector, the Italians organise money laundering and the Yugoslavs specialise in vice. Hans-Ludwig Zachert, former head of the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Germany’s federal police agency, has described the foreign gangs rather sweepingly, as ‘Public Enemy Number One’.
Turks are the largest ethnic minority in Germany, with an estimated three million living there. During the 1980s and 90s, and particularly after reunification, cities were blighted by racist violence targeting the newcomers. The Kreuzberg district of Berlin was the scene of turf wars between skinheads and neo-Nazis and the most feared Turkish gang, the ‘36 Boys’, named after the old postal code of their area. One neo-Nazi gang, dubbed the ‘Zwickau Cell’ after the hometown of its leading members, were blamed for a nationwide spree of racially motivated murders. The group was thought responsible for the deaths of eight Turkish and one Greek immigrant between 2000 and 2006, as well as a German policewoman in 2007.
Another infamous murder spree was caused by feuding between Italian Mafia factions. The Calabria-based ’Ndrangheta were responsible for seven murders in Duisburg in 2007. A gun attack left six victims, one aged only 16, dead in two cars outside a restaurant where they had been celebrating an eighteenth birthday. Since then, there have been more than 25 prosecution cases against Italian organised crime Syndicates operating in Germany. The Italian Mafia, who focus mainly on the drug trade and money laundering, are particularly strong in Bavaria. The state’s police chiefs have urged greater resources and international cooperation to clamp down on the creeping threat posed by the cash-rich Italian Mafia.
The first German chapter of the Hells Angels was founded in the 1970s in Hamburg around the infamous red-light districts of St Pauli and Sternschanze. But, as in North America, Australia and elsewhere, the growing gangs of German Hells Angels became locked in a bloody war over territory with the rival gangs of ‘Bandidos’. Berlin and Frankfurt have been the centres of most biker crime, with many outbreaks of violence in the capital, where Hells Angels chapters claim to be defending the city against Bandidos trying to muscle in. The turf war sees gang fights and murders on the streets. In 2009 a Berlin Bandidos leader was stabbed and shot to death in the eastern Hohenschönhausen district. Two months later in Duisburg’s red-light district, a Bandidos was executed with a single bullet to the head. A shocking case that same year involved associates of the Flensburg Hells Angels, who were accused of having extorted €380,000 from a businessman – who felt under so much pressure that he went berserk, stabbed his wife and seven-year-old daughter to death and set fire to his home.
In early 2010 a Bandidos was stabbed in Kiel shortly after shots had been fired at the house of the local Hells Angels leader. Soon afterwards in Bonn, a Hells Angels shot dead a police officer of the SEK (Spezialeinsatzkommando) during a house search. The gunman was acquitted of murder charges by claiming he acted in self-defence because of previous Bandidos murder threats. In May 2010 the warring gangs declared an armistice but investigators doubted their commitment. They were right. The Bandidos lured in hundreds of new young recruits, mainly from immigrant families in former East Germany, and poured back on to the streets. But the Hell’s Angels went on the defensive and violence again erupted, particularly in the east, Berlin and the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. The attacks have since escalated from knife assaults to shootings to bombings. As feuding spread to Cologne in 2012, provincial authorities followed Frankfurt’s action in shutting down the local chapter of the Hells Angels, confiscating all its property and banning public display of its regalia. The North Rhine-Westphalian home secretary said: ‘Hells Angels intentionally ignore the basic values of our society. They close themselves off, set up their own rules and practice vigilante justice.’