That's a beginning. The USSR we knew and loathed imploded in 1991. In the years that followed the country became what I call a kleptocracy. It's political and economic institutions were infiltrated by organized crime. To get a handle on what happened, you need to understand that it was Russia's criminals, as opposed to it's politicians, who dismantled the communist superstructure of the former Soviet Union. And make no mistake about it, the Russian criminals were Neanderthals. In the early stages of disintegration, when almost everything was up for grabs, the Italian mafia came sniffing around to see if they could get a piece of the action. You will have a better handle on the Russian Mafia when you know that the Italians took one look around and went home; the Russians were simply to ruthless for them. The period is referred to as the great mob wars. There was something in the neighborhood of thirty thousand murders in 1993 alone. Another thirty thousand people simply disappeared. THE SMARTER GANGSTERS bought into legitimate businesses. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs once estimated that half of all private businesses or state owned companies, and almost half of the banks in the country, had links to organized crime. The threads that linked these accounts were untraceable-- God knows our people tried, So for that matter did your CIA. Samats impenetrable labyrinth of banks stretches from France to Germany to Monaco to Liechtenstein to Switzerland to the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, not to mention Vanuatu in the South Pacific, the Isle of Man, the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Prague, Western Samoa, All of them suspected of being involved. He eventually opened bank accounts in North America...There were shells within shells within shells. Some of which consist of nothing more than a single room and a computer on some remote island, are the easiest way to move large amounts of money. One billion in one hundred dollar bills weighs something like eleven tons. And it was said that the Oligrakh's banker never committed anything to paper; the entire structure of his uncles off shore holdings was in his head.
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
ellievsbear
