The World's Most Evil Gangs (24 page)

‘Sergei had been held hostage – and they killed their hostage,’ said Bill Browder, who in July 2013 was convicted in his absence of tax fraud and sentenced to nine years in a prison colony. At the same Moscow ‘show trial’, Sergei Magnitsky was also posthumously convicted of fraud – bizarrely one of the very
crimes he claimed to have uncovered among the higher echelon of Interior Ministry officials.

‘The verdict will go down in history as one of the most shameful moments for Russia since the days of Joseph Stalin,’ said Browder, who warned that Russia had turned into a ‘criminal state’. He added: ‘The Mafiya and the Russian government security services are now one and the same. Any place where there are lots of Russians will attract the security services to carry out their dirty business outside of Russia.’

The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 was the most high-profile example of this collaboration. A former officer of the KGB and its successor the FSB, he fled from court prosecution in Russia and was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom. According to his wife and father, he subsequently worked for MI6 and MI5. In 2006 Litvinenko, then aged 43, met former KGB agents for tea in a London hotel. He suddenly fell ill and died within three weeks from poisoning by radioactive polonium-210. From his deathbed, he accused Kremlin-led assassins.

Murders such as those of Litvinenko in London and Magnitsky in Moscow caused an international outcry that led to a campaign, fiercely opposed by President Putin, to ban 60 officials accused of complicity from entering the European Union and the United States. Browder believes it is justified. He said: ‘Imagine Russian criminals with all their powers and connections. Then imagine they also have access to the police and all the powers of the state to carry out their criminal enterprises – that’s how powerful these people are. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the entire government apparatus in Russia is not there to provide leadership and services for the population. It functions only for top officials to steal as much money as they can.’

B
usiness has been booming in Europe, even through its years of desperate financial crises, but it is not the kind of trade that’s welcome – for when times are hard, crime is king. The boom in organised Mob rackets was already underway as borders came down with the European Union’s new Eastern members, the consequent increase in legitimate imports being matched by a flood of illegal drugs, counterfeit luxury good, fake euros and traffic in humans. A report from the EU’s law enforcement and criminal intelligence agency Europol revealed that while the global economy suffered its roughest ride from 2008 onwards, organised crime actually profited from the downturn. The report pointed out that
cash-strapped
consumers tended to choose counterfeit products. The jobless were prey to gangmasters and pimps; the dispossessed turned to drugs. And relaxed customs controls
and low-cost airlines made the trafficking of goods and humans easier.

It is clear from the Europol’s analysis that, just as the
once-independent
nations of Europe can no longer be studied in isolation when it comes to legitimate trade, so the illegal trade of the region’s major crime gangs must be seen as a transnational problem for the forces of law and order. This chapter will attempt to define some of the present flashpoints and the fears for the future as gang culture spreads across the continent. Europol’s so-called Organised Crime Threat Assessment breaks up Europe’s gangs into various ‘hubs’.

The North-West Hub, with Holland and neighbouring Belgium at its core, is described as ‘the most important geographical crime centre’. Gangs from these countries, plus Britain and Ireland, are operating there in competition with Eastern European groups, as well as gangs originating from Turkey, Pakistan, China, Vietnam, Colombia and Africa. In many cases, says Europol, such gangs are comprised of the children of first-generation immigrants now living in the EU. The North-West Hub also has strong links with the Middle East, specially Dubai, a key financial centre and logistics base for gangsters. There, they make contacts, deals, launder money and coordinate shipments.

The Southern Hub is dominated by Italian organised crime groups, using the port of Naples for cocaine and cannabis trafficking, along with illegal immigration, euro forgery and fake goods. According to Europol’s files: ‘Both Camorra (Naples) and Apulian (Puglia) crime groups have established extensive links with Chinese groups to distribute counterfeit products such as software, CDs, movies and luxury goods’. More dangerous is the explosion in synthetic drugs, such as amphetamines and
methamphetamine, and fake pharmaceutical products made in China, Hong Kong, India, Thailand and Turkey.

The North-East Hub is the home of Baltic and Russian gangs, with the twin crime centres of Lithuania and St Petersburg. The ‘open door’ to smuggling of drugs and humans into Europe is Kaliningrad, a tiny territory of Russia that sits in the middle of EU territory. Dubbed ‘the Corridor of Crime’, Kaliningrad is best known for AIDS epidemics, drug plagues, pollution, bleak tower blocks – and 20,000 crimes a year among a population of 400,000.

The South-East Hub uses the gangster-ridden Balkan states as a corridor from the Black Sea and Romania to the Mediterranean ports in Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro. The Balkan regions suffer from ‘the presence of pre-established transnational organised crime networks,’ says Europol, adding: ‘Smuggling via the Balkans has proved to be a low-risk route into the EU.’

This region provides the ultimate proof that crime recognises no national boundaries. For instance, Romania is the easternmost country within the EU. More than 1,500 miles to the west is the United Kingdom. In 2013 alarming statistics were revealed about Britain’s prison population – showing an increase of almost 40 per cent in little over a year in the number of Romanian criminals in British jails, from 454 to 624. As the total of UK-born inmates fell, the ranks of Eastern European prisoners soared amid a crime wave by migrants exploiting EU freedom of movement rules. The figures raised fears about the impact on Britain with the looming 2014 removal of border controls on crime-ridden Romania and neighbouring Bulgaria.

A warning that Britain’s problems were about to multiply came in even more alarming reports from Germany, where the
influx of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants has already caused a crime wave. There has been a six-fold increase in migration since the two countries joined the EU in 2007. The Association of German Cities warned of ‘social unrest’ and spoke of ‘peace being extremely endangered’. One crime hotspot is the north-western city of Duisburg, where newcomers, crammed into crumbling apartments and without work to feed their families, have formed lawless gangs. Duisburg’s mayor, Soeren Link, sparked nationwide
soul-searching
when he announced in 2013 that his city could no longer cope and that the cost to the town of dealing with the problem was around £15 million a year. His warning was supported by a report from the city’s police blaming Romanian family gangs for an explosion in crime, particularly
pick-pocketing
, prostitution and muggings. As an example of the fear gripping German citizens, Mayor Link said one 65-year-old woman had bought a 200,000-volt stun gun for her protection.

Being the richest country in Europe, Germany has long attracted economic migrants, who have formed their own communities and spawned their own gangs, initially for protection but ultimately for their own self-serving ends. In fact, Germany has turned not only into a multi-cultural society but a multi-criminal one. And there’s a pattern to this criminality – the Turks traditionally run the drugs trade, the Poles and Romanians dominate the car-theft sector, the Italians organise money laundering and the Yugoslavs specialise in vice. Hans-Ludwig Zachert, former head of the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Germany’s federal police agency, has described the foreign gangs rather sweepingly, as ‘Public Enemy Number One’.

Turks are the largest ethnic minority in Germany, with an
estimated three million living there. During the 1980s and 90s, and particularly after reunification, cities were blighted by racist violence targeting the newcomers. The Kreuzberg district of Berlin was the scene of turf wars between skinheads and
neo-Nazis
and the most feared Turkish gang, the ‘36 Boys’, named after the old postal code of their area. One neo-Nazi gang, dubbed the ‘Zwickau Cell’ after the hometown of its leading members, were blamed for a nationwide spree of racially motivated murders. The group was thought responsible for the deaths of eight Turkish and one Greek immigrant between 2000 and 2006, as well as a German policewoman in 2007.

Another infamous murder spree was caused by feuding between Italian Mafia factions. The Calabria-based ’Ndrangheta were responsible for seven murders in Duisburg in 2007. A gun attack left six victims, one aged only 16, dead in two cars outside a restaurant where they had been celebrating an eighteenth birthday. Since then, there have been more than 25 prosecution cases against Italian organised crime Syndicates operating in Germany. The Italian Mafia, who focus mainly on the drug trade and money laundering, are particularly strong in Bavaria. The state’s police chiefs have urged greater resources and international cooperation to clamp down on the creeping threat posed by the cash-rich Italian Mafia.

One aspect of Germany’s crime wave has caused cops to kick-start a war on the nation’s violent biker gangs. The motorised thugs had been fighting an escalating battle against police – and each other – with increasing numbers ending up behind bars. After a 2012 report by federal prosecutors revealed that one in every ten crimes was linked to a motorcycle gang, urgent laws were passed to stem the menace. Some chapters of
biker thugs have been outlawed, making it illegal even to show their club ‘colours’. Others have had their assets confiscated.

The first German chapter of the Hells Angels was founded in the 1970s in Hamburg around the infamous red-light districts of St Pauli and Sternschanze. But, as in North America, Australia and elsewhere, the growing gangs of German Hells Angels became locked in a bloody war over territory with the rival gangs of ‘Bandidos’. Berlin and Frankfurt have been the centres of most biker crime, with many outbreaks of violence in the capital, where Hells Angels chapters claim to be defending the city against Bandidos trying to muscle in. The turf war sees gang fights and murders on the streets. In 2009 a Berlin Bandidos leader was stabbed and shot to death in the eastern Hohenschönhausen district. Two months later in Duisburg’s red-light district, a Bandidos was executed with a single bullet to the head. A shocking case that same year involved associates of the Flensburg Hells Angels, who were accused of having extorted €380,000 from a businessman – who felt under so much pressure that he went berserk, stabbed his wife and seven-year-old daughter to death and set fire to his home.

In early 2010 a Bandidos was stabbed in Kiel shortly after shots had been fired at the house of the local Hells Angels leader. Soon afterwards in Bonn, a Hells Angels shot dead a police officer of the SEK (Spezialeinsatzkommando) during a house search. The gunman was acquitted of murder charges by claiming he acted in self-defence because of previous Bandidos murder threats. In May 2010 the warring gangs declared an armistice but investigators doubted their commitment. They were right. The Bandidos lured in hundreds of new young recruits, mainly from immigrant families in former East
Germany, and poured back on to the streets. But the Hell’s Angels went on the defensive and violence again erupted, particularly in the east, Berlin and the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. The attacks have since escalated from knife assaults to shootings to bombings. As feuding spread to Cologne in 2012, provincial authorities followed Frankfurt’s action in shutting down the local chapter of the Hells Angels, confiscating all its property and banning public display of its regalia. The North Rhine-Westphalian home secretary said: ‘Hells Angels intentionally ignore the basic values of our society. They close themselves off, set up their own rules and practice vigilante justice.’

Race plays a significant part in the gang wars. In a mass defection, 76 members of the Berlin Bandidos switched gangs to join their previously sworn enemies, the Hells Angels – seen as a ‘nationalistic’ revolt against their Turkish immigrant leadership. The Hells Angels issued what amounted to a declaration of war, vowing: ‘No other gang will be tolerated in Berlin.’ But in May 2012 police raided the city’s chapter and ordered it disbanded. That failed to stem the violence. Within days, gang leader André Sommer was shot in the street and left in a coma. Two Bandidos bosses were shot in revenge.

Later that year, police retaliated in force, sending 1,000 officers in mass raids across northern Germany. They were relying on information from a Hells Angels supergrass whom they arrested for blackmail, pimping and human trafficking. He told prosecutors of torture sessions and executions. As a result, police in Kiel began digging up a warehouse in a vain search for a body said to be buried in the concrete foundations.

Two-wheeled gangsterism is peculiarly virulent in Germany but the problem is fast spreading across the rest of Europe –
partly due to overseas biker gangs arriving on the Continent to fight for control of drugs, weapons and human trafficking. In January 2013 Europol reported that the arrival of notorious gangs, including Comancheros and Rebels from Australia, Rock Machine from Canada and Mongols and Vagos from the US has exacerbated tensions with established clubs. Europol said the number of biker gang chapters across the continent had increased dramatically to more than 700, with the greatest growth in north-east and south-east Europe. It warned of a repeat of the Nordic biker wars of the 1990s that left at least 11 dead and dozens injured during a three-year battle between Hells Angels and Bandidos in Scandinavia that involved the use of car bombs and machine guns.

Just as biker violence is often an ‘imported’ problem across northern Europe, so gang rivalry in the south is also split along racial lines. In Spain, home-grown gangs regularly clash with rivals of Latin American origin, particularly in the poorer Madrid suburbs. The overall number of immigrants soared from 1.8 per cent of the Spanish population to more than 10 per cent in the two decades from 1990, the largest groups being Ecuadorians and Colombians. The result is that Hispanic street gangs in the capital have tripled their membership, say police, who accuse them of being behind violent street attacks, kidnappings and killings. The largest and most powerful groups, the Latin Kings and Latin Queens, claim to control certain suburban streets that they have renamed ‘Inca Land’ or ‘Aztec Kingdom’. They identify themselves by ancient mystical symbols, such as the five-point crown, but wear modern
rap-style
clothes and gold bead necklaces.

The Latin Kings were originally formed by immigrants to the United States and introduced into Spain only in 2000.
Their founder, young Ecuadorian Eric Javier Vara Velastegui, known as ‘King Wolverine’, retained control of his gang from prison after being sentenced to 40 years by a Madrid court for rape, violent assault and kidnapping. The Latin Kings’ big rivals are the Netas, founded in the prisons of Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Don’t Play, from the Dominican Republic. Recently a new and violent group has emerged in Catalonia. Known as the Mara Salvatrucha (‘Salvadorian Gang’), it was formed by Central American migrants to Los Angeles in the Eighties. Worryingly for the Spanish, its ominous motto is: ‘Rape, Control, Kill’.

Out of the Spanish cities and onto the highways, two other types of gang are more mobile menaces. Bikers are a growing problem, according to the national Policia, who in 2009 raided Hells Angels MC chapters in Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga, where members were charged with drugs and weapons trafficking and extortion. A search of 30 properties yielded military-style weapons and ammunition, bulletproof vests, a kilo of cocaine, neo-Nazi literature and €200,000 in cash. The other problem out on the Autopistas is blatant highway robbery. Crime gangs target hire cars and foreign vehicles, tricking their victims with loud noises, apparent accidents, supposed vehicle problems or pleas for help before stealing bags and valuables. A hotspot for the gangs is the AP7 highway running south down the Mediterranean coast from the French border. GB-registered cars are regularly targeted and the British Embassy in Madrid warned: ‘Motorists may be driving along the motorway and not notice there’s a car close up behind. Someone in the other car throws a stone, creating a loud bang. The British drivers pull over to see what has happened and the gang causes a distraction to steal from them or simply mug them. It’s a growing problem.’