Dinner with Puchik Print E-mail
Written by Seva Gunitskiy   


Two years ago, a university research project took me to a dimly-lit restaurant in the heart of St. Petersburg. I was still a child when I last saw the city, when communist slogans were still scrawled on its giant granite buildings. Today the slogans have been replaced by billboards and store signs. Government cafes have been supplanted by kafeshki—trendy coffee shops full of fashionable youths wielding their cell phones. Private enterprise has thrived since Communism’s fall—the streets glow with neon lights, and bootleg Western CDs are sold on nearly every corner for two dollars apiece.

Still, decades of Soviet neglect had left their mark. Once a glorious Tsarist capital, the city was now dilapidated. Raskolnikov could easily have had his lair in many of the paint-chipped, ice-encrusted houses. At least such was the state of affairs for the general population. The men at the restaurant lived on a different plane of existence. Each one was the embodiment of a "New Russian"—the self-indulgent, morally flexible class of nouveau riche that sprung up after perestroika. Theirs was a separate world of swank casinos, private jets, and unlimited bar tabs.

The men all had vaguely entrepreneurial backgrounds. One called himself a business manager, another was a DJ. The only one of them I knew well owned a casino. I knew that this friend dealt regularly with organized crime figures. So I wasn’t surprised when he told me that Ruslan Kolyak, a major figure in the Tambovskaya criminal syndicate—and a man known on the street as "Puchik"—would be joining us that night. Then my friend leaned over and whispered something else behind a cupped hand: Many of the biznesmenni at the table were Jewish.

Until a few years before, the men at our table could have been considered criminals. And with their nebulous job titles and dubious sources of income, some authorities might still have labeled them as such. Yet, like all New Russians, they would have been eager to prove themselves legitimate, however much they disregarded ethical concerns in their pursuit of ever greater wealth.

These Jews were no gangsters. They no longer had to be. Once prominent in the black markets that were the criminal side effect of Soviet policy, the Jewish racketeer was evolving into the Jewish businessman. Taking advantage of their head-start in private "enterprise," Jewish criminals had marauded through the chaotic post-communist landscape, accumulating massive wealth. Now, as the state and its economy grew ever more legitimate, wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs were slowly emerging from their shadowy past.

The guests were already drinking vigorously. In Russia, it is a sign of disrespect to refuse a drink. I did my best to keep up with the biznesmenni through round after round, and tried to follow their conversation. Puchik had still not arrived.

For decades, Jewish criminals were a fixture in the Soviet underground economy. State-sponsored anti-Semitism assured that Jews were denied the normal paths of mobility afforded to ambitious Soviet citizens. They faced strict quotas in top universities and a glass ceiling in the Party hierarchy. And while some persevered in legitimate academic jobs, the crooked ladder of mobility offered by the black market proved too irresistible for many. In the early 1960’s, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev began applying the death penalty to the biggest black market operators, the majority of his victims were Jews.

As Soviet shortages became more acute under the premiership of Leonid Brezhnev, black markets expanded and Jewish criminals became ever more immersed in racketeering. This prominence caused increasing revulsion for Jews among government officials and the public, resulting in even fewer legitimate economic opportunities and growing incentives to resort to crime.

In America, the Jewish lobby campaigned vigorously for Soviet Jewry, urging the U.S. government to champion their cause. Their efforts prompted Congress to withdraw most favored nation trade status from the Soviet Union until it changed its policy on Jewish refugees. In 1972, Brezhnev bowed to U.S. trade pressure, allowing hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews to emigrate. Along with the many legitimate refugees, there came gangsters.

Brighton Beach—a dirty urban hamlet tucked into a distant corner of Brooklyn—borders the Atlantic Ocean on one side and a vast urban housing project on the other. Russian-Jewish immigrants, who make up most of its population, have transformed it into a microcosm of old Russia, complete with surly babushkas, Cyrillic store signs, and cheap pirogi sold on street corners. "Little Odessa," as it is otherwise known, has proven fertile ground for homegrown criminals.

The first godfather of Little Odessa, an avuncular-looking man named Evsei Agron, was a simple racketeer who enforced contracts with a cattle prod. But his successors quickly became increasingly sophisticated, entering into alliances with the Italian mob and engineering multi-million-dollar schemes to defraud the government of gasoline-tax revenues. In New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, and everywhere that Russian-Jewish immigrants settled in large enclaves, loose criminal networks began to operate.

Ludwig Fainberg, Joseph Sigalov, Boris Goldberg, Emile Puzyretsky, the Zilber brothers—the who’s who of immigrant criminals reads like a cast list from Fiddler on the Roof. Their Jewish origins did not escape many observers, but was generally downplayed in the media for fears of being labeled anti-Semitic. As Robert Friedman wrote in the book Red Mafiya, "…because the Russian mob was mostly Jewish, it was a political hot potato, especially in the New York area, where the vast majority of refugees were being resettled by Jewish welfare agencies."

While Russian-Jewish criminals established themselves on America’s shores, the Soviet Union was collapsing. With the state bankrupted by a desperate effort to keep pace with America in the arms race, the people had grown reliant on illegal markets for their goods and services. When the communist regime fell and the union dissolved, economic chaos ensued.

In the Hobbesian state of anarchy that followed the collapse of communism, criminal organizations thrived. The legalization of private enterprise, coupled with the end of state control, brought tremendous opportunities for enrichment, and equally great opportunities for settling disputes through fraud and violence. Russia entered the period of Bespredel—an era marked by assassinations, extortion, and strong-arm struggles for control of assets and businesses.

Since many Jews had already become entrenched in the Soviet underground, the transition to post-Soviet crime was an easy one. With no laws or business regulations in effect, the entire market had now gone black. Jews of dubious background, already expert in cutthroat competition (sometimes literally), took advantage of the new opportunities and made huge fortunes. Of the ten richest oligarchs—multi-billionaire tycoons who took control of major industries such as electricity grids and the media—to emerge after the fall of communism, seven were Jewish.

Graduates of Russian crime organizations – such as Semion Mogilevich of the Tambovskaya group – made their way to Israel in the mass exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union. There, they moved aggressively into money laundering, protection, traffic in women, prostitution, forgery, and fraud. According to Haaretz, 13 crime rings run by immigrants from the former Soviet Union now operate in Israel. Israeli police claim all these rings are connected to a figure known only as "Vor Vazkuna"—the "legal thief"—but have refused to reveal any more details.

In Russia during the time of Bespredel, "legal thief" would have been an appropriate title for most businessmen. Capitalist raiders like the men at my table operated in ways that in other countries would have got them thrown in jail. They avoided paying taxes and preferred to settle disputes informally, using criminal groups as arbiters instead of judges. But since state power had essentially disintegrated, the law had almost no meaning.

As various business owners emphasized throughout my stay, until the late 1990’s it was virtually impossible to run a business and remain completely legitimate (in the Western sense of the word)—the laws were often contradictory, the taxes exceeded the profits, and only brute force could put an end to a business disagreement. In this topsy-turvy environment, criminal power filled the vacuum left by the state. The mob became the de facto form of economic regulation. And so Jews leapt to the forefront of capitalism at a time when it was inextricably entwined with organized crime.

That those connections should eventually start to unravel was inevitable. In 1994, the leader of the Tambovskaya organization – a man known as Kumarin – barely escaped an assassination attempt, losing his right arm in the process. The organization was the largest and most powerful criminal group in St. Petersburg. At one point it even supplied over 60 percent of the city’s oil. But after the attempted hit, Kumarin walked away. He declared his retirement and renounced all ties to organized crime.

The process of legitimization had begun. On January 1st, 2000, former KGB official Vladimir Putin became Russia’s new president and moved quickly to restore government authority. Since his election the state has increasingly flexed its muscle. Oligarchs who represented threats to the Kremlin’s power have been arrested or forced to flee. And Putin’s aggressive law and order campaign seems to be curbing the power of the crime lords.

For criminals, the incentives to move from shadowy rackets to legitimate business are growing. Alexander Gorshkov and Eugene Vishenkov, two Russian journalists who have covered organized crime extensively, told me that many of the more prominent businessmen, especially Jewish ones, had publicly tried to distance themselves from their criminal past. Men like those at my table were becoming professionals, learning the intricacies of a market economy, and establishing ties with government officials. They were increasingly moving into the legitimate sphere, where risks are lower and profits higher.

"In the past five years, us bandits have tried to become legitimate," a Jewish mafia member named "Andrei" told me. I had managed to meet with him through my friend’s gambling connections. We sat in the back room of his club, next to a wall of TV screens so he could keep an eye on its patrons. Andrei chain-smoked and spoke in a quiet, unhurried manner, refusing to delve into specifics. He insisted that I not use his real name.

Small-time crime and extortion no longer pays, he told me, when you can run your own business and establish good relations with government officials. During the period of rapid criminal expansion following the end of Communism, gangs had "entered into larger financial structures, taking control of banks, casinos, and businesses," he said. But now the biggest businesses were already well on their way to becoming wholly legitimate structures, and middle-level businesses were following in their wake. Law enforcement authorities had become more stringent and more difficult to bribe, especially after Putin’s promise to install a "dictatorship of the law" in the country.

Compared to the entrepreneurs at the restaurant, a gangster like Andrei—who carried a gun and collected protection payments—was like something from a lower geological stratum. I asked him how the trend of legitimacy might affect people like him, who were part of the criminal Old Guard. Andrei was pessimistic about "traditional" organized crime, as he called it, making any more inroads into the new economy. He predicted that in the next few decades Russian organized crime would gradually move back to "traditional illicit markets—drugs, prostitution, and weapon sales."

As a result of these trends, Gorshkov told me, mobsters now had to be more sophisticated. And those who were unable or unwilling to adapt were either jailed, killed, or annexed by more successful groups as hired "muscle." Crime is not just "banal racketeering, knocking over a kiosk owner for some rubles," said Gorshkov. Criminal groups must provide real protection services and property enforcement, or else the business owner would begin shopping around for other protection agents. A Jewish businessman who might once have been a racketeer now found he could establish business relationships with mobsters without becoming involved in crime himself.

But as befits a figure emerging from the shadows, the definition of the Jewish biznesman was ambiguous, the line between legitimate and seemingly legitimate blurred. "There are no longer guys running around in gold chains and sport suits," said one of the men at the dinner table, evoking the stereotype of a Bespredel-era mobster with his shaved head and Kalashnikov rifle. "Today’s criminal wears an Armani suit instead of a leather jacket, and his best friend is his accountant, not his bodyguard." To him, the racketeer had simply become slicker, more professional. Behind a veneer of legitimacy, he still plied his criminal trade, only in more subtle form.

Perhaps no New Russian exemplifies this ambiguity more fully than Mikhail Mirilashvili. By all appearances, Mirilashvili was the exemplary legitimate Russian-Jewish businessman. Head of a massive gambling empire and St. Petersburg’s largest casino owner, the dapper and charming entrepreneur was also the regional leader of the Russian Jewish Congress. But on August 1st, 2003, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the kidnapping of two men. His victims were later found dead on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Mirilashvili was suspected of ordering them killed as payback for kidnapping his father. The Russian Jewish Congress and leaders of various St. Petersburg Jewish charities supported by Mirilashvili issued public appeals for his release.

Yet, as I could see that night in the restaurant, the dominant trend among Jewish businessmen was toward full legitimacy. Even so, my fellow guests had not yet shed all their dubious associations. At around one o’clock in the morning, as we sat at the table drinking crystal-clear vodka from containers the size of beer pitchers, Puchik finally made his entrance.

Puchik was a brigadir in the Tambovskaya, which meant he oversaw a crew of soldiers and answered to the group’s highest authorities. In Puchik’s field, a prominent status inevitably attracts enemies, and in keeping with the zeitgeist of Bespredel, he was no stranger to violent attempts on his life. This modern-day Rasputin had been shot in the head, sprayed with a machine gun, and poisoned twice. His jaw was deformed from an old bullet wound, and more bullets remained lodged in his body. The latest attempt on his life had taken place only two weeks before. He had been saved from a drive-by shooting when a friend, exiting a sauna, threw a towel on the windshield of his assassin’s car.

My friend and I joined Puchik at a separate table. He handed Puchik a wad of dollars and asked if an interview might be possible. Without making eye contact with me, Puchik said that an interview was completely out of the question, as he was leaving town for unspecified reasons. He took the money, which looked like a year’s wage for an ordinary Russian, and calmly started sorting it on the table.

"Look what I’ve been reduced to," he said, motioning toward the two serious-looking bodyguards who had accompanied him into the restaurant and now stood by the doorway, peering suspiciously at incoming patrons. Before leaving, he gave me his business card which described him, rather laconically, as "a consultant." In August 2003, Puchik was shot to death by two masked gunmen as he sat in a restaurant eating a meal.

The Russian writer Andrey Bely once wrote that the streets of St. Petersburg have a tendency of turning people into shadows. As we walked out of the restaurant, dawn was nearing, and the shadows around me seemed to be dissipating. As we approached the cab stand, one of the men from the table, in a drunken stupor, gave me his parting thought. "Look, real crime is for idiots," he said. "The real beauty is to be invisible without being intangible. That’s what our people do." He stumbled into his car and drove off, a reformed criminal avoiding the sunset.
Comments
Add NewSearch
Write comment
Name:
Email:
 
Website:
Title:
Security Image
Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.
 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]