by Gordon Kerr
His first target was the leader of a rival criminal outfit whom he killed in Tyumen in July 1990, just six weeks after escaping from prison. Having proved he was capable of killing, and having earned some money, he and some others from Kurgan travelled to Moscow where there were numerous opportunities for an ambitious contract killer. There, he earned the nickname ‘Aleksandr the Great’ due to his ability to shoot in the Macedonian way – with both hands.
His first hit in the capital was Russian criminal Viktor Nikiforov, and six months later he shot dead Russian gang boss Valeri Dlugatsj in a crowded disco. This hit was all the more impressive because Dlugatsj was surrounded, at the time, by heavily armed bodyguards. Vladislav Vinner, who replaced Dlugatsj, did not last long. Solonik killed him in 1994.
Around that time, Solonik was attempting to extort money from a Russian gangster who was refusing to play ball. When the man placed a phone call and put the phone on speaker, Solonik realised he was listening to the voice of Otari Kvantrishvili. Kvantrishvili was a sportsman, philanthropist, businessman and politician – loved and admired by many for his support of war veterans, orphans and elderly athletes. He was also, as everyone was aware, one of the most powerful criminal bosses in Russia. Solonik would not be getting his money.
Some weeks later, however, as Kvantrishvili emerged from the Krasnopresnenskie bathhouse, surrounded by bodyguards, he was shot dead by a sniper using a rifle with telescopic sights. The shooter had taken aim from the attic of the building that housed Kindergarten No. 392, from which there was a clear line of fire to the car park of the baths, 200 yards away. Alexey Kuzmin led the group which included other members of the murderous Orekhovo– Medvedkovo Criminal Group, one of whom was Solonik.
By this time, Solonik had attained legendary status in the Russian underworld as well as amongst Russian law enforcement officers. Naturally, they were keen to send him back to the Gulag and when he was arrested, along with an associate, in a bar, it looked as if it was all over for him. They escorted him to the police station on Moscow’s Petrovsky market place, but foolishly failed to search him properly, unaccountably ignoring the fact that he was carrying a raincoat over his arm. The raincoat hid a gun. In the police station mayhem broke out when he produced the gun and, firing indiscriminately, shot dead four policemen. Fleeing from the building, out into Moscow’s Petrovsky market place, he shot dead another two officers. He climbed over a fence and headed for some railway lines, but was hit by a police bullet in the kidney before being cornered. After holding out for a while, he realised the situation was futile and surrendered.
The police were impressed with Solonik’s accuracy with a gun. At one point as he was running away, he had turned and fired three times at an officer hiding behind a pole. Each bullet hit exactly the same spot on the pole.
This time he was sent to the notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison in northern Moscow from which no one had ever escaped . . . until Solonik arrived there, that is. Initially he spent his time, after the operation to remove the bullet from his kidney, learning foreign languages and studying literature. Eight months after his arrest, however, in July 1995, he did what he always did when they locked him up. He escaped.
A prison guard provided him with climbing equipment and a pistol and the two men climbed onto the prison roof before lowering themselves to the ground and fleeing in a waiting BMW.
Solonik again seemed to vanish into thin air. There were sightings in Spain, Italy and Cyprus, but he had in fact travelled to Greece on a fake passport that he had obtained from the Greek consulate in Moscow. There, he set himself up, assembling a team of some 50 men and dealing in drugs and contract killings.
His legend had grown in his absence, especially when he made it on to Russia’s ten ‘Most Wanted’ list. But it all came to a violent end in February 1997 when a phone call to Greek police reported the discovery of a body about 20 kilometres outside Athens. Next day, the Greek newspapers carried reports of a Russian mob boss being found dead. He had been strangled with a cord and wrapped with plastic bags. Although there was nothing on the body to identify him, it was soon confirmed that the body was Aleksandr Solonik. A few months later, a suitcase was found containing the dismembered body of Solonik’s girlfriend, Russian model Svetlana Kotova, near the villa the two had shared. When they had raided this villa as well as his other properties, police had discovered an arsenal of weapons and had learned that Solonik was about to carry out a hit in Italy.
Rumours suggested that he had been killed by a Moscow gang and before too long, five men, believed to be members of the Orekhovskaya criminal organisation, were charged with the two murders. Amongst those charged was another infamous Russian contract killer, Aleksandr Pustovalov, also known as ‘Sasha the Soldier’.
However, there are those who believe Aleksandr Solonik is still out there, plying his murderous trade. After all, they were unable to completely identify the body – the prints on file for Solonik were fake. Furthermore, no one knew exactly what he looked like any more as he had had plastic surgery to change his appearance.
Even death may not have been able to hold Aleksandr Solonik for very long.
Part Seven: Killer Gangs
Thuggee
Arguments still rage about the Thuggee. Did they really exist or were they just a scare story dreamed up by the British colonial powers? Were they a religious cult or sect, or just a bunch of murderous robbers dressing up their acts with religious respectability? Did they come into being back in the mists of time, or were they a response to the British East India Company’s annexation of the subcontinent?
What is for sure is that in India there was a network of secret fraternities of professional assassins, supported by zamindars (landowners), Indian princes, law-enforcement officials, merchants, and even ordinary people. They strangled and then robbed travellers – although never the English – from at least the 17th century onwards, but arguably from as far back as the 13th. Through the efforts of a remarkable man called William Sleeman, who approached his task with almost messianic zeal, the British colonial authorities managed to eradicate the Thuggee during the 19th century. All that remains of them is the word ‘thug’, appropriated by the English language as a description for a violent person.
The Thuggee were well organised, subtle and sophisticated in their methods. Disregarding religious divides – gangs were made up of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus – they would travel around India in groups ranging from 10 to 200 men, befriending unsuspecting wealthy travellers, winning their trust and even travelling with them, sometimes for hundreds of miles, before killing them. These professional killers had a respectable air about them and were very mindful of family, social and religious obligations. The very aspects of their personalities that made them so plausible as con-artists – social and rhetorical skills – ensured that they were treated with great respect by their equals.
For the British colonial authorities the most frightening thing about the Thuggee was its invisibility, its skill in the art of hiding itself and its victims, and the difficulty of getting people to accept that it contravened the law. There was no blood, no weapon and the murders were mostly carried out a long way from the victim’s home. Great care was exercised in the disposal of the bodies. Corpses were buried immediately after the strangling, with heavy rocks piled on top of them to prevent animals from getting to them and exposing the remains. Landowners, police and rulers tended to ignore the killings, either because they were superstitious or because they, themselves, stood to benefit from the deaths. The peasants simply turned a blind eye to the bodies that would regularly turn up in wells or in their fields.
Each group had its own function – some pretended to serve as guardians or protectors of travellers; others would flatter and compliment their victims, winning their trust that way. They were patient in the extreme, only killing their victims when the time and place were such that they could do it unobserved and then efficiently dispose of the body.
The killing was done
, sometimes by two or three men trained in the art of strangulation since childhood, according to ancient and rigidly prescribed forms and rituals. It was carried out only after a number of complex omens had been observed, and afterwards sacred rites were performed in the goddess Kali’s honour and a proportion of Thuggee spoils would always be set aside for Kali. Thuggee strangled their victims most often using a yellow silk scarf, or rumal, a symbol of Kali, the Hindu god they worshipped and whom they called Bhowanee. But not all followers of Kali were Thuggee. Indeed, there were many who did not hold with the religious views of the cult, but who still worshipped Kali. Their method of dispatch led them to be known also as Phansigars, literally noose-operators, although it is reported that various other methods, such as swords and poison, were also used. After the killing, they would rob their victims before disposing of the bodies in inaccessible places – often throwing them down wells or burying them in remote spots. The locations they selected for their murders were special places, known as bhils, that they often knew well. The killings would take place, more often than not, in darkness and, while two or three men carried them out, the remainder of the group would make music and dance to cover the noise and pretend that nothing untoward was happening.
Thuggee spoke their own dialect or cant known as Ramasee, and a series of secret signs enabled them to recognise each other as they travelled the country. Old and infirm members of the cult still associated with it, even though they were no longer able to take part in the stranglings. They would prepare food and cook meals or they sometimes served as lookouts or spies.
The Thuggee first appear in literature in around 1356, in the History of Firoz Shah written by historian Ziaud din Barni. It recounts the story of the rule of the Muslim leader of the North Indian Tughlaq Dynasty: ‘In the reign of that sultan, some Thugs were taken in Delhi, and a man belonging to that fraternity was the means of about 1,000 being captured. But not one of these did the sultan have killed. He gave orders for them to be put into boats and to be conveyed into the lower country, to the neighbourhood of Lakhnauti, where they were to be set free. The Thugs would thus have to dwell about Lakhnauti and would not trouble the neighbourhood of Delhi any more.’
But some writers trace the origins of the Thuggee cult back even further, to the Arab, Afghan and Mughal conquests of India that took place several centuries before Firoz Sha’s rule; there have even been suggestions that their existence can be traced as far back as the Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC.
According to the Thuggee, their sect had an ancient and divine origin. They believed that when the three Hindu gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, became Creator, Preserver and Destroyer, respectively, there was an initial balance between creation and destruction. However, Brahma, the Creator, was too successful and the earth became overcrowded. At this point, Shiva asked his consorts, Devi, Bhawani and Kali for help in decreasing the population. Bhawani created a band of ferocious men and ordered them to go out and destroy. She assured them that they would be immune from all earthly retribution and had only one purpose on earth – to kill. They need not worry about disposal of the bodies, as she would take care of that.
So, this band of Thugs began their task, killing many people, the bodies being disposed of by Bhawani. However, one band of men wanted to see the god and waited, hidden, near the bodies of some of their victims for her to appear. She spotted them waiting and became angry, telling them that from now on she would withdraw her help and they would have to dispose of the bodies themselves. Furthermore, their protection from earthly retribution was removed. If they were caught in the act of killing or somehow implicated, she would not protect them and they would have to face earthly justice. Consequently, Thuggee had to take great care in their choice of location for the murders and the disposal of the bodies afterwards.
The secrecy and security of their organisation, coupled with the fact that killing for gain was a religious duty to the Thuggee, made it, to Indian minds at any rate, an entirely honourable occupation. Being a Thuggee was recognised as a proper profession and some even paid taxes on their ill-gotten gains.
Being a Thuggee was mostly a hereditary right, passed from father to son and from generation to generation, and leaders – known as jamaadaar – were certainly hereditary. Sometimes, Thuggee were the children of victims who had been taken and trained in the ways of the cult. Other Thuggee were men whose fathers had not been members, but who embraced the Thuggee creed in order to escape a poverty-stricken existence. Women in a household in which Thuggee lived, were entirely ignorant of their husbands’ or sons’ profession and this was encouraged by the fact that when not killing, Thuggee were often engaged in normal, peaceable occupations and were pillars of their local society.
It is very difficult to arrive at an estimate of exactly how many perished at the hand of the Thuggee. The Guinness Book of Records claims approximately 2,000,000 deaths, but British historian Dr Mike Dash provides a more conservative estimate of 50,000, although he bases his figure on an assumption they only started killing about 130 years before they were rendered extinct.
Thuggee gang leader Behram is calculated to be the world’s most prolific killer. He is said to have been involved in some 931 killings between 1790 and 1830, although he seems to have been inconsistent in statements he made at the time about how many could actually be attributed to him. In one manuscript he says that he had ‘been present at’ more than 930 carried out by his particular gang. In other sources he claims to have personally strangled about 125 people. Behram turned King’s Evidence, informing on his associates, and never stood trial, and as a result his claims have not been tested in a court of law.
The end of the murderous road arrived for the Thuggee in the 1830s with the appointment of a remarkable civil servant, Captain William H. Sleeman. In 1809 Sleeman had joined the Bengal army and served in the Nepal War from 1814 to 1816. Then in 1820 he became assistant to the Governor-General's agent in the Saugor and Nerbudda territories. Previously, the lack of evidence, bodies and witnesses had made it almost impossible to prosecute the Thuggee and, if captured, Thuggee never confessed. However, the unexpected confession of one cult-member, a man called Feringheea, provided vital information on the cult’s modus operandi. Following that, Sleeman launched an extensive campaign. Using profiling, confessions and local intelligence, he created detailed Thuggee family trees containing details of each man’s crimes, his place of origin, his place in the caste hierarchy, and all personal and professional antecedents. Sleeman also mapped out all the bhils – places of slaughter and burial – in central India. Every thug could then be located on a gigantic grid, and information and operations were centralised. One Thuggee, Ameer Ali, writing in Confessions of a Thug, shows just how debilitating this was for the cult members: ‘The man unfolded a roll of paper written in Persian, and read a catalogue of crime, of murders, every one of which I knew to be true; a faithful record it was of my past life, with but few omissions.’ At the same time, Sleeman compiled a dictionary of Ramasee, the secret language of the Thuggee. There was no escape.
The police set up a Thuggee and Dacoity Department to deal with the problem, and appointed Sleeman as its superintendent. It remained in existence until 1904 when the Central Criminal Intelligence Department took its place, even though the Thuggee cult was extinct by the 1870s. Captured Thuggee were encouraged to inform on their groups and were offered protection if they did so. As a result, thousands of Thuggee were arrested and executed, imprisoned or exiled.
Although the Thuggee cult was no more, the concept of criminal tribes and criminal castes still remains in existence in India today.
Egan’s Rats
From 1890 until 1924 the Irish-American street gang, Egan’s Rats, was amongst the most powerful organised crime operations in St Louis. Although its members and its leadership were mainly Irish– American, it also included in its ranks a number of Italian–Americans and Jewish mobsters, immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Like many youngsters in the Patch, Tom Egan began running with a local gang, a bunch of thugs known as the Ashley Street Gang who picked pockets, burgled properties and carried out armed robberies. Soon, Egan had graduated to leadership of the gang whose activities, by this time, included breaking up strikes and other union activities including political fixing. He was friends with another hard man, Thomas ‘Snake’ Kinney, who also happened to be a Democratic Party politician. On election-day, the Ashley Street boys would hang around the polling booths intimidating voters to vote Democrat. It worked for Kinney who became a delegate to the Missouri House of Delegates and later served in the Missouri State Senate.
By 1904 the Rats were the pre-eminent gang in St Louis, now a thriving metropolis and the fourth largest city in the United States. Their activities now encompassed bootlegging and labour rackets as well as murder. They would kill anyone for money, regardless of the consequences. On one infamous occasion, in 1909, they killed a man on trial in the city courthouse for murdering several Rats.
By 1912 Egan’s Rats numbered 300 or 400 men, and with the death of Tom Kinney from tuberculosis that year, they began to move into new rackets, especially bootlegging. The union activity would become less profitable and Egan correctly surmised that alcohol prohibition would be introduced some time in the near future and, with that in mind, set up a sophisticated booze-smuggling network. He did not live long enough, however, to see the fruits of his labour, dying of kidney disease the same year as his vision became reality with the passing of the Volstead Act – the Act that introduced Prohibition – on 28 October 1919.