Gangs

by Ross Kemp

  In a bedroom of the small breeze-block house he shared with his mother, Kevin showed me his arsenal of weapons. Kevin and an American gangster friend who was also there kept their firearms scrupulously clean, not just to maintain them in working order but to remove any fingerprints. The friend didn’t want to be named but was willing to show me the terrible injuries to his stomach, backside and a leg that he had suffered when a rival gangster shot him at close range with hollow-point bullets. His leg looked like the branch of a tree that has been split down the middle with an axe and then miraculously grown back together; a lot of his backside was shot away and he had been obliged to excrete into a colostomy bag for more than a year through a second, bullet-created navel.

  Kevin and the rest of the gang coat their hands with wood glue before going out on the streets with their guns. The glue forms a kind of second skin which the gangsters believe stops them leaving fingerprints or DNA traces. Speaking of weapons, Kevin suddenly reached down under the bed, pulled out a beautiful antique Martini-Henry rifle that dated back to the Boer War and urged me to buy it. I declined the offer. He told me that even when the police caught him with a firearm, all he had to do was pay them a bribe of 100–150 rand (about ten pounds) and they would let him go.

  Before going back to the city, I met Paul Manuel, a South African Police Service (SAPS) inspector trying to steer some of the local boys away from a life of crime by setting up and running a boxing club. Having as a police officer dealt directly with Kevin, Manuel left me in no doubt that he was one of the worst gangsters at large on the Cape Flats. He implied that under the old regime people like Kevin would have been dealt with in a much more direct way. When I asked Manuel what was so bad about Kevin in particular, he told me a very upsetting story. ‘All over the Cape Flats are these taverns – drinking dens, very dangerous places to be around – filled with drunk drugged-up armed gangsters looking for their next opportunity.’ Manuel said a lot of the gangsters who haunt these places deliberately set out to get young local girls hooked on tik. Once hooked, these ‘tik ghosts’ slip out of the house when their parents are asleep and go looking for the drug. Gangsters like Kevin are willing to supply the crystal meth in return for sex – and gang-rape the girls if they don’t get it.

  Leaving South Africa, I felt a mix of sadness and hope. From what I had known about the Number gang before actually meeting any of them, I hadn’t been expecting a country picnic, but the reality was much worse than I could have imagined. South Africa is a beautiful country with so much going for it. Many of the most disadvantaged people are trying to turn things to the good. But after thirteen years of ANC rule, crime is as bad as it ever was and gang violence both inside and outside the country’s prisons is rife. The gap between rich and poor is still vast; one elite has simply taken over from another. But while people like Chris Malgas and Paul Manuel exist, the Rainbow Nation may yet find its crock of gold.

  6. Moscow

  Made a showcase city under Tsarist and communist rule, Moscow is big, bright and beautiful to look at. Both Lenin and Stalin understood the value of building on the grand scale. The state architecture is massive and imposing, while the boulevards are broad enough to take a victorious army. Even the Metro – especially the Metro – is magnificent, putting London’s grimy, inefficient and expensive Underground to shame. With one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and a new business elite grown rich since the fall of the Soviet regime, the city’s clubs, bars and watering holes make it one of the world’s best party towns. This is a city of broad views and handsome prospects, but it is also home to some very unpleasant gangs. Despite the many attractions on offer, I was there to find out about one of them.

  The main reasons for looking at the Moscow neo-Nazis was that I wanted to investigate a gang based purely on ideology, in this case an extreme racist Nazi ideology. The first place I looked was on the Internet. In seconds the search engine came back with a long list of extreme right-wing Russian websites, many of them including the number 18. The first letter of the alphabet is A and the eighth, H. You guessed it – Adolf Hitler. To many people with extreme right-wing views these otherwise innocent letters hold almost mystical significance. A lot of gangs and websites also use 88, the numbers for the initial letters of the Nazi salute ‘Heil Hitler’.

  Lots of websites showed skinhead thugs who had obviously been trained to attack people they didn’t like. One gang stood out from the rest in my trawl. It called itself the National Socialist Union (NSO). In Moscow our translator Elena called the contact telephone number. A male voice on the other end said the gang would be happy to let us film them. Having spent a couple of days wandering about chatting to people, I had already begun to suspect that like Moscow’s sex workers, its racist gangs operated more openly than they do in the UK.

  The National Socialist Union invited us to meet them at a downtown Moscow gym run by gang leader Dimitri Rumyansev. A shabby, ill-equipped upstairs room in a monolithic former Soviet-era office block, the gym provides free training in ‘street fighting’ to anyone who signs up to its neo-Nazi world view. There was something not quite finished about Rumyansev: the pebbly grey eyes looked as if they had been pressed into the pasty face as an afterthought. At the same time his expression suggested that here was a man who would not just follow orders, he would give them too.

  Placing one hand on his hip in classic Nazi functionary style, he threw me a Nazi salute, as if he fancied himself the new Heinrich Himmler. In his early forties, Rumyansev, who seemed to have had a charisma bypass operation, claimed nevertheless to be in charge of the gang’s ideology and propaganda. No sooner had we started talking than he hinted of dark deeds to come: ‘We train the people who are going to take part in momentous events in the future. We train our people for combat.’ Skinheads, he told me, are especially welcome.

  Where good leaders inspire by example and lead from the front, Rumyansev stood back and watched the training. Much more media savvy than most gangsters I had met, Rumyansev made it clear that as far as he was concerned any publicity was good publicity, as long as he controlled exactly what his followers said on camera. Tongue wedged firmly in cheek I asked him, ‘What would you do if any Muslims applied to join the gang?’

  After thinking this over for a few seconds he said seriously, ‘This has not happened yet.’ So it wasn’t just the charisma that was missing. Rumyansev summed up the gang’s ideology: ‘We understand that street violence alone does not solve the problem of the immigrants. Direct violence must go hand in hand with a political revolution. Then we can stop any more of these people coming in, and get rid of the ones who are already in Russia. When a person understands that, he leaves the skinheads and comes to us.’ Even leaving aside the fact he had not specified exactly what he meant by ‘get rid of’, I found Rumyansev’s frankness alarming.

  The actual combat training we could see taking place came down to a series of short sharp lessons in how to beat up innocent citizens. At the time of our visit it was being supervised by Sergei Malyuta, a stocky hard-packed exparatrooper who had never heard the words soap or deodorant. This was a pity, as he fancied himself as something of a ladies’ man. All I can say is, if I were a lady – or for that matter a wildebeest – I’d want to stay at least half a mile upwind.

  The people in the gym consisted for the most part of former Russian army soldiers providing the training, almost all of whom had fought in Chechnya, and Muscovites in their teens and early twenties. The trainee group was mostly made up of guys who would not have been picked by either side in a playground football match. What surprised me was the mix of social classes punching and kicking the bags. The stereotype neo-Nazi is a poor, white, disaffected working-class youth, but here was Sasha, a good-looking twenty-year-old economics student from a wealthy Moscow family, doing her best to give the punchbags a pounding. Sasha looked as if her own ethnic origins might lie in one of the ‘stans’ – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan or Uzbekistan. Slim and fit in a khaki cropp
ed top and shorts that immediately made our cameraman Andy Thomson dub her Lara Croft, Sasha was also articulate, charming and rather pretty. Maybe that had helped her circumvent NSO rules, but it was a bit of a mystery why she would want to.

  Sitting her down among the graffiti, mess and mud for an interview on a comfy improvised bench of collapsed concrete pillars outside, it became clear that Sasha had not just been drawn in by the chance of hunky men, some excitement and learning a few unarmed combat moves. Introduced to the gang by her elder brother, she truly believed in the NSO cause. ‘The situation in Russia is unstable,’ she told me with a shy and slightly nervy smile. ‘This is why survival skills will be very important… I think a civil war may break out between the people who realize the country is in a critical situation’ – she waved a slender arm to indicate her fellow neo-Nazis – ‘and the people who don’t care.’ Her notion of the enemy seemed vague, to say the least, but she had definitely swallowed the party line.

  The ex-soldiers told me how they had all lost friends fighting the Chechens. They had learned their hatred of anyone who was not ‘pure white Russian’ – especially Muslims – in the process. One of the scary things about the gang was that while a few of its members were from deprived backgrounds, most held down reasonably well-paid day jobs and trained to be neo-Nazis in their spare time. It was kind of like Dad’s Army for fascists, only with teenage recruits and a whole lot more serious.

  Most of Moscow’s immigrants come from one of the former Soviet republics. The right-wing gangs call them blacks, or, not to be coy about it, the Russian equivalent of niggers. During the days when their countries formed part of the Soviet Union, these mainly economic refugees had seen the occupying Russians as a separate, much richer and more socially successful class. Even Red Army soldiers had roubles to splash around. Not surprisingly, once the internal travel restrictions that existed under communism were lifted, many of the poor people in these former colonies set off in search of a better life – and where better to try than the capital of the empire that had ruled them for so long? After all, they had been forced to learn Russian in school, pay lip-service to communist ideology, watch Russian television and take regular doses of Russian culture. The incomers you see walking Moscow’s streets are mostly Tajiks, Kazakhs and Armenians fleeing ethnic or political persecution in their home countries or trying to achieve a better standard of living.

  To see if I was hard enough and deserved greater access to its inner mysteries, the NSO took me to a never-completed hospital on the grim northern outskirts of the city. As we pitched up outside to begin my ‘urban training’, the first thing I noticed was a gang of Tajiks resurfacing the road opposite. This struck me as something of an irony: many of the right-wing gangs make it clear on their websites how happy they are to attack and even kill immigrants, but then who is going to do all the hard low-paid work? At this moment Sasha arrived in a brand new Volkswagen Beetle which must have cost five times the combined annual wages of the road menders and needed their skills to save its suspension from the local crop of potholes. I was in danger of irony overload.

  A six-storey, crumbling concrete shell that had originally been white but was now slowly turning mud grey, the hospital had been commissioned, half built and then left to rot. This happens a lot in today’s shiny new capitalist Moscow. The object of the exercise is to channel money to the contractors, especially the concrete suppliers. Of course, everyone in the loop, often as not including local government officials, gets a nice fat bung. These ghost projects are also sometimes used to launder criminally acquired money.

  The whole building leaked like the rose of a watering can. Here and there the gangs who used it for training had sprayed ‘white power’ Celtic cross symbols on the walls. Months later I would realize that they were just like those used by similar neo-Nazi gangs on the other side of the world, in Orange County, California. Melted snow had run down the supporting pillars and walls and collected in the basement, turning most of it into a freezing, stagnant lake. The concrete had been poor quality in the first place; now it was eroding like a lump of ageing Swiss cheese the whole place was a death trap. The gaping holes in the floors were big enough even for me to fall through. Thick wire reinforcing rods stuck up all over the place, and parts of the outside walls were missing, leaving long, sheer drops to the ground below. As I fought my way through the head-high Japanese knotweed that was rapidly turning the area into a wilderness, I realized that the NSO guys with me took this deadly seriously. For a start they were all wearing camouflage gear. I’d never really imagined myself running around a building site with a bunch of neo-Nazis, but suddenly it felt as if it mattered.

  The first exercise, Rumyansev explained, was ‘fitness training’, in the form of a five-kilometre assault course. This entailed several circuits of a route that wound up, down, inside and around the hospital. But Rumyansev was not going to do the course personally – maybe he had a letter from his mum. Sizing the place up, I realized the lack of any interior electric lighting meant we would be plunging from bright daylight into pitch darkness and back out again – that ought to make running round a total ruin more interesting.

  Sergei Malyuta had warned me this would be the hardest day of my life, but I don’t mind a bit of exercise now and again, and in a funny way I was quite looking forward to the challenge. I stripped off and climbed into a set of army trousers, laced my boots tight and politely declined the backpack containing ten bricks that the younger male gang members, in good macho style, now strapped across their shoulders. These boys were half my age. I didn’t feel the need to prove myself and it looked like it was going to be hard enough.

  We ran through scrub, rubble and brambles around the hospital’s perimeter for what felt like hours in the blazing July heat before turning into the gloomy shell. Having looked on the whole thing so far as merely painful, I changed my mind when we had to jump into the chest-deep freezing water in the dank basement. After the sweaty heat outside, the shock was enough to stop the heart. But there was no time to die; we had to wade on, doing our best not to come a cropper on the invisible wire rods beneath the black water, climb out the other side and keep up with our appointed leader, Artiem, a rat-faced, wiry youth who fancied himself as a hard guy. I disliked the man on sight, and he made it obvious the feeling was mutual.

  My swift recce of the hospital’s interior now proved accurate: the sudden alternation of darkness and dazzling sunlight gave the eyes almost no time to adjust to hazards. We were running hard across the fourth floor, dodging in and out of the crumbling pillars, me just about keeping up with the Nazi youth directly ahead and in an odd way not completely hating it. Spotting pools of water gleaming in the gloom up ahead I thought, That’s fine, I can see that. Either splash through or go round, but keep going. Don’t fall behind.

  Wooden pallets covered some of the bigger and more dangerous holes. Good job, I thought, puffing along at full tilt. Looking down, I noticed my boots had picked up a thick caking of mud. Maybe this was slowing me down. Given my heart rate, it was worth finding out. A pallet in front of me had been laid over what looked like a large puddle. I was starting to feel more than a little knackered – definitely a good idea to scrape off the mud. I stopped dead. Placing my right boot on the edge of the pallet, I put my weight on it and drew the sole back to scrape it clean.

  The pallet did not span a puddle of water; it was covering a huge hole in the rotten concrete. As I leaned forward, the whole thing gave way under my weight and the wooden platform, with me on it, started falling through the floor. Feeling myself dropping into empty space the adrenalin kicked in. With a convulsive jerk I threw myself backwards. Landing on my backside about a metre away, I sat there for a few seconds staring at the yawning gap where the floor had just been and thinking two things: one, I was lucky to be alive; two, it would have been pretty dumb to die in an unfinished hospital. Still, to this day, I have no idea how I pulled off the back flip.

  Our cameraman, Andy Thomson,
who had not surprisingly been having trouble keeping up what with all the extra weight on his shoulder, lurched up next to me. He hadn’t filmed it, but he’d seen my brush with unscheduled free fall. Andy looked down through the gap at the dark ground four storeys below strewn with pieces of smashed pallet. ‘That’s the closest you’ve come so far to killing yourself, Ross.’ This got series producer Clive Tulloh thinking. The next gig was supposed to be abseiling down the hospital walls, but for me this was now vetoed on safety grounds.

  Naturally the gang, especially Artiem, decided I was therefore a useless, spineless foreigner who had bottled it, so when we came to the third part of the day’s training, billed as the ‘duel’, I was keen to prove him wrong. As Artiem explained, this was in preparation for the coming neo-Nazi revolution. ‘Then,’ he said earnestly, ‘we will have to take arms and prove that we are men.’ I asked who it was he thought the gang would be fighting. ‘The most likely enemies are the army who Dimitri described as weak – and the Muslims,’ he said, ‘the people who come to occupy our land but want to impose their own beliefs on us. There are many enemies.’ I tried not to laugh at the notion of Artiem leading any kind of revolution against the Russian state, but he caught me smiling and scowled his displeasure. Like most people who hold such views, the NSO gangsters were in deadly earnest.

  The live firing exercise turned out to be a series of classic two-person duels, fought with powerful gas-powered pistols that shot small solid steel ball bearings. To make sure we understood how dangerous these were, Rumyansev and Artiem got me to fire at plastic bottles filled with water set up on the hospital roof. Sure enough, even from a distance of several metres the ball bearings went through the bottles of water and straight out the other side. They weren’t going to kill you, but you sure as hell wouldn’t want one to hit you in the eye. I handed the pistol back. I had fired air guns before as a kid, but these were in a different class.