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Welcome to the new Russian Organized Crime site. We follow all the recent news on subjects involved in Russian Organized Crime in the United States.

The US's organized criminal threat no longer comes from the La Cosa Nostra. Transnational groups, primarily Russian Organized Crime, have risen to the top. These groups have the ability to import and export crime to every corner of the world with ease. As governments realize that these Transnational groups pose a larger threat to their safety than terrorism, the focus, along with the spending will be redirected. Hopefully the nations of the world will realize this before they become completely entrenched.

27 October 2010

Russian mafia boss killed in Sochi

A Russian mafia boss was shot dead on Tuesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Real estate owner Eduard “Karas” Kakosyan, 31, was gunned down near a gas station in the centre of town a month after another mafia chief and friend was shot and wounded, Interfax reported.
Authorities are searching for two men in connection with the shooting, a police spokesman told AFP.
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“The young men left the scene of the crime on a motorcycle,” the spokesman said.
According to Russian media, Kakosyan’s death appears to be the latest in a series of shootings targeting mafia bosses jostling for a share of the Olympic construction windfall.
Kakosyan was close to one of Russia’s top mafia bosses, Aslan Ussoyan, who was shot and wounded in central Moscow in September, Interfax reported.
Ussoyan had clashed with other mafia groups over the division of a commercial empire linked to the construction of buildings for the 2014 games, the Kommersant daily reported.
That empire was allegedly controlled by Zakhar Kalashov, considered the “godfather” of the Russian-Georgian mafia. Kalashov was arrested in Spain and sentenced in June to seven and a half years in prison for money laundering.
Score settling in the grab for Olympic investments also accounted for the murder of yet another Sochi organised crime boss, Alik Sochinsky, who was killed last year in Moscow, according to Russian media.
The future Olympic town has been transformed into a vast construction site, as workers begin erecting more than 100 structures, including a main stadium and an ice-skating ring.

Source: AFP

26 October 2010

Russian mafia in Warsaw gets new boss


Pieter A. alias Petya, has become the new boss of Russian mafia in Warsaw, claims the Central Investigation Bureau.
Petya is a Russian gangster thought to be cooperating with the infamous Solntsevskaya Bratva gang – known as ‘the Brotherhood’ – one of the most powerful organized crime organizations in Russia.
Thw Russians are thought to have moved into the capital after Warsaw organized crime groups – centred in the Pruszkow, Wolomin, Marki, Zoliborz and Mokotow districts – were broken up by the police.
Gangsters who remained at large joined Petya or pay him for permission to operate in Warsaw.
Former FBI Special Agent Bob Levinson once called the Russian mafia “the most dangerous people on earth.”
The group is thought to be involved in drug trafficking, arms trafficking, extortion, robbery, execution of debts.
source: thenews.pl

31 August 2010

Russian mafia taking over French Riviera

Mafia kingpins from the former Soviet Union have moved into the French Riviera and are taking over with ?quasi-military? precision.
Their grip on the region is now so tight that Riviera detectives expect an eastern connection to almost every crime.
“Everything from burglary and money laundering to vice is controlled by the Mob from former Communist countries,” said one police officer, who was involved in the arrest of 69 members of a Georgian syndicate in March.
Although most of the arrests of members have been in Spain, the gang’s nerve centre, many of the bosses now have luxury villas on France’s Mediterranean coast, and foot soldiers work for them, flying out for set period before returning home with their profits.
“They’re into everything, from the Russian prostitute rings in resorts like Cannes and St Tropez to gassing tourists in their villa and stealing everything they’ve got,” said the police officer.
“Bosses are now based here permanently, with foot soldiers working for them, often flying in for set periods before returning home with their profits in cash. The numbers really are unprecedented at the moment.”
Alain Bauer, a French criminologist, said: “This is one of the best structured criminal organisations in Europe, with a quasi-military operation”.
Another investigator, from the judicial police in Nice, told Le Figaro newspaper that he had recently been involved in the arrests of two eastern Mafia chiefs.
“One of them is involved in a vast money laundering operation in Spain and waiting to be extradited”, said the officer. “The other is suspected of masterminding the assassination of another rogue Georgian, and he organised a very violent settling of accounts, worthy of an action film, in a flat in Nice.”
Laurent Laubry, a representative of the police union Alliance, said that many of the gang members were heavily armed ex-soldiers from Soviet regions such as Chechnya.
He said that one of his colleagues was beaten up by four Chechens as he went to buy a packet of cigarettes last week.
“The undercover officer received a rain of blows to the face and was left for dead between two cars,” said Mr Laubry, who described the “ultra-violent methods of these people, who have no morals, no rules, and who are often heavily armed and beefy.”
As well as the arrival of the Russian Mafia, the traditional Italian one is also said to be alive and well in France.
In June, Giuseppe Falsone, a leading Sicilian Godfather, was arrested in Marseilles after a decade on the run. He was believed to have had plastic surgery and was using false identification while continuing to coordinate criminal activity, said local police.
source: telegraph.co.uk

16 June 2010

Police arrest six in Spain in Russian-mafia linked operation


Police in Spain said Wednesday they had arrested overnight six people suspected of money laundering and criminal conspiracy in an operation media reports said was linked to the Russian mafia.
"This operation has resulted so far in six arrests," a spokeswoman for the regional police in the northeastern region of Catalonia told AFP.
The six are suspected of conspiracy, forgery and money laundering, she said but refused to confirm if the arrests were related or not to the activities of the Russian mafia.
According to the online edition of daily newspaper El Pais, the six people arrested are prominent members of the Russian mafia. They were arrested in several cities in Catalonia, including Barcelona and Tarragona, it added.
The arrests were coordinated by the anti-corruption prosecutors in Barcelona and Madrid.
In March 69 people, including 24 in Spain, were arrested in several European countries in an operation against the Russian mafia.
source: expatica.com

27 May 2010

Convictions in Kidnap-for-Ransom Trial


Vagan Adzhemyan, a former Armenian wrestling champion, and Galvin Gibson have been convicted for the kidnap-for-ransom of Sandro Karmryan in Los Angeles, CA.
Adzhemyan admitted kidnapping Sandro Karmryan in July 2009, beating him, shocking him with a stun gun, holding him captive at various locations across Southern California and demanding a $1 million ransom from his family. Adzhemyan argued his actions were necessary because Karmryan was plotting to have him killed because he knew about an alleged loan scam. Karmryan had paid a Russian mafia boss $27,000 to kill him after a complicated financial deal between the men went sour, his attorney Harland Braun said. * * * Braun said his client kidnapped Karmryan because he wanted to get proof that Karmryan had paid someone to kill him. Many of the interrogations that took place were captured on cell phone or audio recordings, and Braun said Karmryan admitted more than 100 times to paying a killer. Prosecutors said the confession was forced.  * * * U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Nguyen barred Braun from presenting evidence to explain why Adzhemyan committed the crime because she found it irrelevant to his guilt or innocence.


source: associated press

15 March 2010

Police arrest 69 suspected members of Georgian-run Mafia



Police across Europe arrested 69 suspected members of a Georgian-run mafia, including 24 in Spain, which was leading the investigation, a National Court spokeswoman told CNN Monday.
Other arrests were in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, whose prosecutors worked with their Spanish counterparts on the case. There were also a few arrests in France and Italy, said the spokeswoman, who by custom is not identified.
The suspects, wanted for drug trafficking, extortion and money laundering, and in a few cases for murder plots, were thought to have operated at a level close to the street, controlling local mafia networks, she said -- they are not thought to be high-style mafia kingpins living in mansions and surrounded by luxuries.
Some Spanish media reported the suspects were linked to a Russian mafia, but the court spokeswoman said investigators had told her it was Georgian-run.
In Spain, the national police worked with regional police in Catalonia and the Basque region to make the arrests, mainly in the Barcelona and Valencia areas, she said.
There has long been speculation that mafias were involved in money laundering through Spain's housing and real estate bubble along the Mediterranean coast, where second homes were built for vacationers from Spain and northern Europe.
Tens of thousands of these homes remain unsold or unfinished in the economic downturn.
Numerous local Spanish politicians have been arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes or kickbacks to permit rampant construction that far exceeded demand.
source: cnn

02 March 2010

'Russian Mafia' Abroad Now 300,000 Strong, Journal Says

But it would be a mistake to focus only on Poland or Eastern European countries like Romania and Hungary, where the Russian criminal presence is large. Over the last decade, the Russian mafia has reached around the world, including Australia ,where it has been involved in electronic crime, Singapore, London and various countries in the Western hemisphere.

VIENNA — After avoiding any use of the term “Russian mafia” in the last few years, law enforcement personnel in Europe and elsewhere are now speaking about it again, noting that it includes “up to 300,000 people” and dominates the criminal world in many countries around the world, according to a Moscow investigative journalist.
In Monday's Versiya, Ruslan Gorevoy says law enforcement personnel in many countries — including Spain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, France, Mexico “and even the United States” — have been surprised by how “confidently” criminal groups consisting of people from the former Soviet Union now dominate their national criminal worlds.
Russian Mafia
Indeed, the Versiya report continues, the Russian groups, which include “up to 300,000 of our compatriots,” have succeeded in pushing aside local groups and establishing their own “spheres of influence” to the point that they no longer need to “clarify relations with the help of arms.”

Gorevoy describes some of the most notorious cases involving Russian organized criminal groups abroad before using interviews with Russian officials to suggest some more general conclusions. He recalls the discovery that drug traffickers were using submarines to move their product from South America to Mexico.

These submarines, he points out, “were purchased as scrap metal” from a Ukrainian firm that was involved in decommissioning Soviet diesel subs, then repapered in the Romania city of Konstanza before sailing across the Atlantic. While they were ultimately discovered, it is impossible to say how many tons of drugs they carried or even what the situation is today.

The U.S. Navy, he notes, has taken great pride in reporting its interdiction efforts in this regard, but knowing the abilities of Russian criminal groups, Gorvey continues, “it is possible” that such vessels may still be playing a role. The tone of his article suggests that he personally would not bet against these groups.

In Spain, he explains, Russian criminal groups control 90 percent of the drugs and illegal arms flows and were involved in the murder of Paddy Doyle, a leading Irish criminal who was operating there. His death and the ensuing trial led to the publication of numerous articles about Russian organized crime.

Russian officials have been dismissive of much of that coverage. Pavel Krasheninnikov, the head of the Duma’s legal affairs committee, told Gorevoy that “certain groups may have an ethnic character [there], but this still does not provide the foundation for claims about the presence of a specific national mafia of this or that country.”

Poland, Gorevoy continues, was “the first country of Europe into which organized crime from Russia began to penetrate,” pushing out — together with criminals from Ukraine and Belarus — Romanian and Albanian criminal organizations that had dominated the situation there before the Russians arrived.

The Polish police have not been able to “liquidate” Russian organized crime, and “according to certain data, at the present time” there are as many as 20,000 Russian criminals operating in that country, making it, in numerical terms at least, “the largest Russian criminal diaspora in the world.”


Interpol, the international police agency, does not maintain the kind of files that allow for an even approximate assessment of the number of Russian criminals operating abroad. But last year, the National Prosecutor of Italy concluded that there are “up to 300,000” criminals from Russia operating in other countries.

One of the largest or at least most profitable activities of Russian criminals abroad, the Italians said, is money laundering, with the Russian mafia “laundering” funds in the United States, Marianas and Guam. In addition, they added, Russian criminals are charging Mexican drug lords 30 percent for laundering drug profits from sales in the United States.

In Italy itself, prosecutors reported, “representatives of the Russian mafia in 2008 formed an alliance with local [criminal groups, including the Cosa Nostra]” and took under joint control “practically 100 percent of the agricultural enterprises of Italy and at the same time practically all shippers, both international and domestic.”

The German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung reports, citing sources official and otherwise, that there are approximately 160,000 Russian criminals in Europe, compared to 70,000 of Italian origin, 40,000 of American background and 37,000 from Asian countries. The Russians have corrupted at least some officials in order to cover their tracks, the paper said

The Munich paper’s Rudolph Himelli said that “Russian mafiosi are better organized and permit themselves to commit the boldest crimes, remaining in practice unpunished,” crimes that are “of a completely different order of magnitude than those committed by Turkish immigrants or criminals from countries in Eastern Europe,” including illegal arms sales to Libya and Iraq.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the flamboyant head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and vice speaker of the Duma, says that none of this information justifies any suggestion that there is a Russian mafia operating abroad let alone implying that Moscow is somehow responsible for it.

“Yes,” Zhirinovsky acknowledges, “people from the republics of the former USSR really occupy an important position in the international criminal community, and in recent years this position can even be called a dominant one. But here is one ‘but’: Many of these people already have been living abroad for a long time” and have exchanged Russian passports for foreign ones.

Consequently, he continues, they are now “more the representatives of Western and not our culture.” Indeed, the LDPR leader insists, “the fact that these people left Russia may testify only that our law enforcement organs do not allow them to make their way” in their homeland, while the police in other countries are not as successful.

That argument may convince some Russians or provide a justification to some in the West who would like to ignore this issue, but Gorevoy’s article suggests that Zhirinovsky’s claims will not be persuasive to justice officials in Europe or elsewhere who on a daily basis have to combat a larger and more active Russian mafia.

source: moscowtimes.com