The World's Most Evil Gangs (23 page)

Leslie Van Houten succeeded in gaining two retrials because her lawyer, Robert Hughes, had disappeared during her initial trial. His remains were later found in the mountains, and members of the Manson cult were suspected of his murder. Van Houten failed to win her freedom and was again sentenced to life imprisonment.

The years that rolled by following the court cases failed to dull public fascination with the abhorrent slayings, particularly the sadistic butchery of pregnant Sharon Tate. It became clear that Manson’s gang had been ordered to kill completely different victims and that Sharon and her friends had simply
been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact that record company boss Terry Melcher had once sneered at Manson’s attempts to get a recording contract with him appeared to have sealed the fate of a group of totally unconnected people. There was also media speculation that the murdered Voytek Frykowski and Jay Sebring were known drug dealers and that Manson had wanted to take over their business.

The unanswered question remained, however, as to how one deranged man could mesmerise seemingly ‘normal’ young people to the extent that they could enact mindless massacres. Linda Kasabian, who, fearing for her own and her daughter’s lives, escaped Manson’s clutches and testified against him in court, winning herself immunity from prosecutors, once said: ‘I can never accept that I was not punished for my part in this tragedy.’ And in an attempt to explain how a mother could temporarily turn murderess, she recalled the night she was acting as lookout while her friends brutally murdered Sharon Tate and four others. ‘I felt like I was dead,’ she said. ‘There was no emotion, no feeling. It just didn’t register.’

The horrific story of the Manson gang’s vile crime has resurfaced at regular intervals. In 1994 a ‘Free Susan Atkins Campaign’ was launched, her supporters proclaiming that the one-time church choir singer was now rehabilitated. However, after hearing evidence from Sharon Tate’s sister, Patti, her appeal was refused and Atkins died of cancer behind bars in 2009. Patti, who was only 11 years old when Sharon was murdered, said: ‘Every year up until her death, my mother would attend parole hearings of the murderers and she had to come face to face with them. That used to make her mad because one of these people knew Sharon and they were totally indifferent to what they had done. They just destroyed their
blood-soaked clothes, washed their hands with a neighbour’s watering can and walked down the street to kill more people.’

One Manson ‘family’ member was released, however. Steve Grogan had been in prison since being convicted with Manson and another follower, Bruce Davis, of the murders of musician Gary Hinman and of Donald Shea around the time of the Tate massacre. Grogan was freed in 1985 after leading police to Shea’s body. Bruce Davis was still fighting for his release in 2013 after spending 40 years behind bars protesting that he had only been a bystander at the two slayings. When Manson prosecutor Stephen Kay heard of the parole application, he warned of the dangers of allowing a member of the cult back on the streets, saying: ‘Would you want to wake up and find Bruce Davis next door? I think not.’

There is, of course, no chance of Manson ever being released. The crazed killer admits he would strike again if he was ever given his freedom. He ranted: ‘I was pretty upset for a long time. I was really mad at a lot of people. I’m still willing to get out and kill a whole bunch of people. That’s one reason I’m not too fast on getting out. Because if I got out, I’d feel obliged to get even.’

In 1987 Manson was controversially allowed to give a television interview from jail. Dressed in prison uniform of blue smock shirt and trousers, he was then still easily identifiable, his hair and beard still black, wild and long, his ravings disturbing: ‘I can do anything I like to you people because that is what you did to me,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should have killed four or five hundred people that I might have felt better; then I would have felt I had offered society something.’

In June 2011 prison authorities issued a new photograph of Manson. It could have been the image of any old lag: a 76-
year-old 
grey-haired and bearded grandfather whose greater part of life had been spent in jail. But there was one distinguishing mark on the staring face that recalled the reality of whose cold, eerie eyes were staring out of the picture. The swastika was still clearly seen on his forehead – the chilling reminder of a gang leader whose ‘family’ were responsible for one of America’s most horrific acts of slaughter.

A
s Communism came to an end in the Soviet Union, freedom-loving citizens rejoiced – but so too did a sinister breed of super-crooks. And as the old regime dissolved, summit meetings took place across the nation to carve up big business in the newly promised free-market economy. It was then that the Russian Mafiya was born and is now among the world’s largest and most powerful criminal groupings. Never has organised crime become such a pervasive force so swiftly, and seldom has the violence been as extreme as in Russia.

When the Soviet Union imploded at the end of the 1980s, the resulting vacuum allowed the Mobs to quickly seize immense power. With the old state structure discredited and the government unable to enforce the law, the grasping gangsters grabbed easy pickings from money laundering, racketeering, extortion, arms smuggling, art theft, cyber-crime,
human trafficking, prostitution, drug trafficking, arson, fraud, counterfeiting and simple larceny.

However, the biggest prizes were gained out of those businesses in the muddled process of changing from collectives to private ownership. The Mafiya penetrated almost every sector of the economy, from banking to energy to mining to heavy industry. Their net has now stretched worldwide. Of the estimated 6,000 separate Mafiya groups, more than 200 are said to have a global reach, having expanded to 50 countries and with a membership of up to 300,000. Combined they are labelled Russkaya Mafiya but singularly they are known as ‘Bratva’ (brotherhood), ‘Bragada’ (brigade) or ‘Vorovskoy mir’ (world of thieves).

Despite the Mafiya’s massive growth, the Russian authorities appear to be in denial. In December 2009 the head of the Russian National Central Bureau of Interpol, Timur Lakhonin, asserted: ‘Certainly, there is crime involving our former compatriots abroad – but there is no data suggesting that an organised structure of criminal groups comprising former Russians exists abroad.’ A more realistic appraisal was given in response by prominent French criminologist Alain Bauer, who described the Mafiya as ‘one of the best structured criminal organisations in Europe, with a quasi-military operation’.

So how did they become so powerful? The seeds of the present-day Russian Mafiya were sown in the gulags – the remote, brutal prison camps where dictator Joseph Stalin, attempting to wipe out the so-called ‘world of thieves’, had deported those he had not executed. They became a prison elite and, when after Stalin’s death 8 million inmates were released from the gulags, they returned to the cities of Soviet state as the toughest warlords in the underworld.

Criminal activity flourished, a black market boomed and corruption began to spread throughout the government. When in the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev loosened restrictions on private business, the Soviet Union was already beginning to collapse. More gangs emerged, exploiting the unstable governments of the former Republics, and at its highest point even controlling as much as two-thirds of the Russian economy.

One of the West’s leading experts on the Mafiya is Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University, who specialises in Russian criminal organisations. In his books on the subject, Dr Galeotti lists five types of Mafiya grouping. At the lower end of the chain are gangsters dealing in traditional criminal enterprises such as prostitution, protection and robbery. The second category is that of specialists like money-launderers. Higher up the ladder are the white-collar criminals, whom the Professor describes as pseudo-businessmen, often forming conglomerates controlling an array of seemingly legitimate businesses. At the top of the Russkaya Mafiya hierarchy are the deal-makers and commissioners of crime, the equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia’s ‘Cupola’ or the US Mafia’s ‘Commission’.

Operating in parallel with this hierarchical structure are the corrupt sections of the police and the military. The latter sell high-quality protection and weapons. It has been alleged that members of the army’s 16th Spestnaz Brigade have moonlighted as hitmen for the Mafiya. An entire working submarine was once sold to a Colombian drugs cartel. Corruption within the police is also endemic. In 1994 about 500 rogue police officers were arrested on corruption charges when it was discovered that Moscow’s Tenth District precinct were operating a vice ring, using police cars to take prostitutes to clients who rang the police station with their orders!

Nationally, the largest gang in Russia is reckoned to be the Solntsevskaya, named after the Moscow suburb of Solntsevo. With about 5,000 members, it specialises in drugs, gun running and extortion. An American hotelier, Paul Tatum, complained to police in 1995 that Solntsevskaya heavies had threatened his life. He was shot dead the following year. The Solntsevskaya has overtaken the country’s former major player, the Dolgoprudnenskaya, which rose to prominence in Moscow’s Dolgoprudny suburb in the late eighties and quickly spread nationwide. Its main field of operations is prostitution and sleazy clubland. Smaller players are the Orekhovskaya gang, founded by former KGB agents, and Moscow’s Ostankino and Lubertsy clans. St Petersburg is dominated by the Tambov Syndicate.

Oddly, in the same way that the US Mafia is dominated by Sicilians and Neapolitans, so the Russian Mafiya has Chechens and Georgians playing a disproportionately large role. The biggest Chechen crime gang is the Obshina, whose riches have come from kidnapping and bank robbery but who have also elbowed their way into the lucrative East European cigarette smuggling racket. Most of these gangs’ members identify themselves by a complex system of tattoos that can give detailed information about the wearer and their gang allegiances.

Thanks to these thuggish foot soldiers, extortion has become a way of life in Russia. Few victims dare speak out but one Canadian entrepreneur, Doug Steele, told journalists how owning a Moscow nightclub had cost him $1 million in
pay-offs
not only to Mafyia bullies but to police and city officials. He spoke out after foiling a kidnap attempt, saying: ‘You have to grease the palm or you won’t be in business. If it was not for the Mafyia there would not be an economy. They are a major
driving force behind what goes on here.’ The Russian government appears to agree. In a leaked report, the security services estimated that criminal organisations control, either directly or indirectly, 60 per cent of state companies, 40 per cent of private business and 80 per cent of banks. Which might explain why, in a five-year period, almost 100 Russian bankers were murdered.

A former manager of Moscow’s Prombank revealed how blatantly the local crime lords try to extort money from the banking system. He said: ‘They no longer come and ask for fixed sums of money. They demand something that allows them to gain control of your entire business. I told them I would not cooperate.’ The Mafyia do not normally take ‘no’ for an answer; the manager subsequently survived a grenade attack.

Any institution with access to large amounts of money can expect a visit from the Mafiya. Even the Afghan Veterans’ Association, which has a welfare role similar to the British Legion, has been used to launder dirty money. Its head was murdered in 1994. After it split into two groups, the chief of one branch survived an assassination attempt the following year. In 1996 the leader of the other faction, his wife and 11 others were killed when a bomb exploded in a cemetery during a funeral.

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.