The Russian Mafia

Since 1992, the Russian word Mafyia has been officially

used in the Russian Federation’s documents to refer above

all to organized crime, structured through stable groups that

repeatedly perpetrate severe crimes and offences. In

particular, this word refers to the interests of the world

"below" - the invisible universe of organized crime - with

the world "above", namely institutions, ruling classes,

politicians and companies.

 Both the real Mafia, namely the Sicilian one, and the

Russian one were born around mid-19 th century.

The Sicilian Mafia became the "parallel State" in a region

where the Unitary State did not exist or counted for

nothing. A case in point is the Baron of Sant’Agata, the

feudal lord of Calatafimi, who ordered his mobsters to “side

with the winners”, when he realized that Garibaldi’s troops,

the so-called “Garibaldini” were winning in the plain.

 The Sicilian "organization", which had long-standing

roots - probably Arab and in any case independent of the

Kingdom centred on Naples and the Campania region -

discovered its political role precisely with Garibaldi-led

Expedition of the Thousand that landed in Sicily, after

which it became the primary mediator between the small

group of "Piedmontese" soldiers and the great mass of

peasants. It immediately agreed with the feudal lords, who

helped it considering that it was winning.

The Mafia itself was both the improper bank of the wealthy

feudal lords and the only form of effective social control,

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solely in favour of the Sicilian feudal elites - and hence also

of the Unitary Kingdom.

 As happened also in Naples, when Garibaldi appointed

Liborio Romano - who was also the Head of Camorra - as

Chief of Police. An inevitably very effective policeman.

Conversely, in Russia organized crime was initially used -

in politics - by various revolutionary groups to fight the

Tsar.

  Later, there was the magic moment of an important

"friend of the people", namely Nicholai Ishutin.

 He was the first to establish a group of professional

revolutionaries, in 1864, simply called "the Organization".

However, with a view to better achieving the

revolutionary, anarchist and violent aims of his

Organizacjia, Ishutin created another new structure. It was

called the "Hell" and had to engage in all possible illegal

activities, together with the already active criminals:

murder, theft and blackmail. All this had to happen while

the "Organization" was running its lawful social and

organizational activities.

 Hence, for the first time politics became the cover for a

criminal organization. Goodness knows how many

imitators Comrade Ishutin had.

It was the beginning of a very strong bond - also at

theoretical level, through many excerpts from Lenin's texts

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that exalted Russian revolutionary populism - between

organized crime and the Bolshevik Communist Party.

 In fact, on June 26, 1907, a bank stagecoach of the State

Bank of the Russian Empire was attacked and robbed in

Tiflis, Georgia. It was a robbery fully organized by top-

level Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Stalin.

There was also the strong support of local criminals led by

Ter-Petrosian (“Kamo”), the Head of the Georgian mob and

also Stalin’s early associate.

The relationship between organized crime and Bolshevism

- particularly with reference to the "agrarian reform" of

1930-1932 - remained central.

  The Soviet power absolutely needed its extra legem left

hand to harshly bring peasants into line and to militarily

organize the conquest of factories, as well as to control or

physically eliminate the entrepreneurs or bureaucrats of the

old Tsarist regime.

Everything changed with Stalin, who, together with the

stabilization of the Bolshevik regime, made possible also

the verticalization and creation of a unitary command

hierarchy in the vast world of Russian crime - and in the

Party.

 Hence the Organizatsja was founded, i.e. a strongly

verticistic Panrussian structure - as indeed the Bolshevik

Party was.

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The “Organization” - full of symbols and particular rites,

like the many para-Masonic organizations of the

revolutionary Napoleonic network in Italy, which imitated

the secret society of Carbonari (the so-called Carboneria)

or, precisely, Freemasonry, albeit with entirely new

mechanisms and symbols - was sung heroically by one of

the poets, former "Thief-in-Law" (the generic term used by

Stalin to designate all the members of the Organization),

but much loved by Stalin, namely Mikhail Djomin, who

exalted the achievements of the Vorovskoi Mir, the

Thieves’ World, that had only one code of conduct and

revenge throughout the USSR.

 Hence the Party established the first organizational

structure of the "Thieves-in-Law", who much operated

during the Stalinist regime: the Mir "brigades" were led by

a "reserve group" that generated and selected an additional

covert group that had to be permanently related to the

Soviet political, economic and financial power.

In fact, the "Vory v Zakone", the Thieves-in-Law, had

relations on an equal footing with the Party and State

leaders. They dealt with the various "brigades" and

managed the odshak, the cash pool, through an ad hoc

Committee.

 Through the odshak, said Committee mainly paid salaries

to the Organization soldiers, but above all invested its

proceeds in the so-called "white" economy.

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 Without the criminal organizations and their autonomous

finance, there would have been neither the Soviet

normalization after Stalin’s purges, nor the money for

Leninist industrialization and the funds - extremely needed

for the USSR - targeted to foreign trade and the related

sales of raw materials from 1930 onwards.

 This also applied to the Sicilian Mafia, a true organization

between two worlds, the American and the Italian ones,

which invested in real estate in Sicily when there was no

capital, in the aftermath of the Second World War, or

refinanced capitalism in Northern Italy after the political

and union storm in the late 1960s and 1970s.

 Without Mafia’s capital and without the protection

provided by some entrepreneurs to the most important

fugitives in Milan, there would have been no economic

recovery after the disaster of 1968.

 Reverting to the Bolsheviks, Stalin accepted the presence

of the "Thieves-in-Law" in their main sectors of activity, in

exchange for their careful persecution of his personal and

Soviet regime’s political adversaries.

 Years later, even de Gaulle did so when proposing to the

Corsican underworld - one of the most ferocious in Europe

- to fight the OAS and eliminate it, in exchange for some

State favours and the transfer of many gangsters of the

Brise de Mer - as the Corsican Mafia was called - to

Marseille.

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 Hence there is no modern power that could do without its

particular "Thieves-in-Law". A case in point was China, in

the phase of the "Four Modernizations" and the subsequent

Tiananmen Square movement, or the United States itself,

which dealt primarily with its various Mafias, especially in

periods of severe financial crisis.

 In the 1950s, shortly before Stalin’s death, inter alia, a

very close relationship was established between the

"Organization" and the Soviet power leaders.

 It was exactly the underground economy - fully in the

hands of the "Thieves-in-Law" - which, in Brezhnev’s time,

became the meeting point between Mafia and Communists.

 The Organizatsjia already had excellent relations with the

parallel "capitalist" organizations - relations which were

established upon the creation of the Russian structure in the

meeting held in Lviv in 1950 - and it became essential to

find the goods which were never found on the Russian

market, including weapons and illicit capital flows.

 Corruption became the real axis of bureaucracy and of the

Party itself, while there was a spreading of poverty that

closely resembled the poverty of Ukrainian and Crimean

peasants during the so-called "agrarian reform" of 1930-

1931.

 Later, always in agreement with the Bolshevik leadership,

Mafyia organized - in every factory or office - "clandestine

units", not falling within the scope of the collectivist

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system, which created an underground market that, from

1980 to 1991, was even worth 35-38% of the Soviet GDP.

 The proceeds from that semi-clandestine trade were shared

between the Party, the "Organization" and the law

enforcement agencies. No one could escape that

mechanism.

 Again in the 1980s, precisely due to the social and political

pervasiveness of the "Thieves-in-Law", the Organizatsjia

was structured into units for each commodity sector,

especially with units specialized in oil, minerals, wood,

precious stones and even caviar.

 At that stage, however, many Soviet Party and State

leaders were officially accepted in the Organizatsjia, thus

becoming the necessary link between the "Thieves-in-Law"

and the institutions.

 Furthermore, with Gorbachev's reforms, Mafyia was no

longer only an important part of the economic system, but

became the economic system in its entirety.

The elimination of the old political apparatus and fast

privatizations enabled the old leaders of the various

"clandestine units" to quickly collect the initial capital to

buy everything going from companies onto the now

apparently liberalized market.

 Sometimes Mafia’s intimidation was also needed, when the

old employees did not want to assign - for a few roubles -

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their shares that the law allowed to be allotted between

workers and managers of the old State-owned factories.

 In 1992 Yeltsin himself admitted that over two thirds of the

Russian production and commercial structure were in the

hands of the "Organization".

 However, in memory of the old ties with similar

organizations abroad, only Mafyia did start the first joint-

venture contracts with Western companies and 72% of that

opening onto the world market was only the work of the

Organizatsija.

 That was exactly what Judge Falcone would have dealt

with in Russia with his Russian colleague Stepankov, if he

had not been killed with his wife and three agents of his

escort in a bomb attack.

 The joint venture worked as follows: firstly, foreign

capitalists put their money into the companies of the

"Organization" and later - without realising it and only with

the hard ways - they were in the hands of the old "Thieves-

in-Law".

 Nevertheless, it was from 1990 to 1992 that the Russian

Mafia structure penetrated the West with vast illegal funds

managed together with the local Mafias.

 Not surprisingly, a few days after the Capaci bombing,

Giovanni Falcone was to fly to Russia to talk with the

Russian Prosecutor General, Valentin Stepankov, who was

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investigating into the CPSU funds that had disappeared in

the West.

 The intermediary of the operation could only be the

"Organization" that knew the Sicilian Mafia very well, at

least since the aforementioned meeting held in Lviv in

1950.

 A huge amount of money went from the CPSU to the

"sister" parties and probably the issue regarded also the

failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991.

 Each CPSU faction had its autonomous funds - often huge

ones - given to "sister" parties but, above all, to their most

similar internal wings. Here a significant role was played

by the covert bank accounts held in Zurich, together with

the Wednesday air transfers to the local Narodny Bank, as

well as the money transfers that took place during the visits

of the CPSU executives to the various local "comrades".

 Nevertheless, the cash flows - managed only by the

Organization - were regarded by the CPSU’s "old guard"

mainly as a source of personal survival and a basis for

future political action at national level. Everyone, ranged

face to face upon the field of the new CPSU factions,

thought to said cash flows.

 Coincidentally, it was exactly in those years and months

that the Sicilian Mafia expanded - for its drug business - to

the Caucasus and Anatolian Turkey, on the border with the

new Russian Federation.

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 At that time - as currently - the Russian Mafyia had

preferential relations with the Sicilian Mafia, the

Neapolitan Camorra, the Chinese triads and the Turkish

Mafia.

 Also the relations with Latin American and Arab criminal

organizations have been mediated by Sicilians or

Calabrians (in South America), Turks (in Central Asia and

India) and Chinese (in Maghreb and Africa).

 Currently the Organization’s yearly turnover is still 2,000

billion roubles approximately, with weapons - including

nuclear ones - which were provided by the Mafyia sections

within the Soviet and later Russian Armed Forces.

 As even Luciano Violante - the former President of an

important anti-Mafia Parliamentary Committee -

maintained, both the CPSU and the KGB have long had

excellent relations with the Sicilian Mafia. The Russian

Mafyia itself is now the world centre where money

laundering strategies, as well as the division of territories at

international level and the new strategies of relations with

the various ruling classes, are managed.

 Violante used to say that the CPSU and the KGB had put

in place the most recent Russian Mafia, with which they

were gradually confused.

 Hence the new post-Soviet oligarchy - selected after Mafia

wars that, between 1990 and 1995, exacted a toll of 30,000

victims - has now merged with the ruling class.

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As Solzhenitsyn used to say, currently in Russia a

maximum of 150 people rules. Putin deals with the

"Organization", but he is certainly not linked to it.

 Furthermore, according to the most reliable Russian

sources, currently the "Thieves-in-Law" network is

composed of about 50,000 people, including managers and

mere "soldiers".

 Nevertheless, their network of intimidation and capital

makes them essential in carrying out any kind of "white"

operation. They are the bank of the new Russia, considering

that all the official banks are part of the "Organization".

 In the Russian media jargon, the Russian Mafia bosses

who have reinvented themselves in the legal business are

called avtoritet ("authorities").

 The Russian Mafyia also operate abroad, throughout

Europe, but does not operate directly in the territory of the

various countries. If anything, it seeks relations with the

State and bureaucracy, through the national criminal

networks, without by-passing them.

 Currently the Russian money laundering hub is still

France, while recently the "Organization" has been

spreading quickly within the German economic, banking

and commercial fabric.

 In Italy, it operates mainly in Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany

and, obviously, Rome.

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 According to the Italian police sources, the capital flows of

the Russian "Organization" in Italy are equal to 38.5 billion

a year, while the flow of Russian money laundering is still

focused on France, albeit with some operations made in

Spain and Portugal. A diversification already underway,

which could also affect Italy.

 The first channel has always been Latvia, used by Russian

mobsters to enter the Euro area directly.

 With a view to penetrating Latvia, the Russian

"Organization" created dummy companies based in

London.

 Later a Russian company lent money to the company based

in London - a company with main headquarters often

located in Moldova.

 The Russian company did not repay the debt - hence a

corrupt judge in Moldova forced the Russian company to

transfer capital to a Moldavian account.

 Hence the money entered Latvia in a perfectly legal way

and later the Euro area and Western economies.

 The network has already endangered 753 Western banks –

and money laundering is still one of the primary business

activities of the Russian "Organization".

Giancarlo Elia Valori