Rat kingdom.
As soon as, back in ancient times, man began to create the new habitat he needed, after him, representatives of the animal world began to populate the emerging niche. Of course, they were drawn to human habitation not by simple curiosity, but by the opportunity to use new, richer sources of food than those available in the wild. Gradually, some species that began to live next to humans completely disappeared in the wild, so at the moment it is even difficult to imagine what niche their wild ancestors occupied. Thus, the well-known city pigeon, the so-called sizar, still has a wild relative, the forest pigeon, still living in the forests. True, city and forest birds are slightly different from each other. City pigeons, which feed mainly on human handouts or rummage through garbage containers, are more well-fed than their forest counterparts, who are distinguished by more slender physiques. But for example, such a well-known city bird as the gray sparrow seems to have completely disappeared in the wild. Maybe I don’t know everything about sparrows, but where their wild ancestor lived, or lives, I currently don’t know anything. Birds are those representatives of the wild that began to live next to humans, which we constantly see, and there is another category of organisms that lead a secretive, often nocturnal lifestyle, so they rarely catch our eye. It is this kind of life, hidden from human eyes, that I wanted to talk about in this article. First of all, I would like to recall an incident that occurred during a hike in the Mari forests. Boris Mashkov and I were then heading towards Lake Orier, where we were going to spend the weekend. Since it was quite a long walk to the desired place, about fourteen kilometers, we decided to take a break and at the same time have a snack. Having chosen a suitable place, we settled down not far from the road, in a vast clearing overgrown with white moss, which was drier than its green counterpart. While eating, Boris asked me, Kolka, as I know, you can’t stand red cockroaches. Yes, I answered, at the sight of these creatures, I instinctively shudder, and goosebumps begin to run down my back. “Look into the depths of the moss,” Boris suggested. Looking at the ground, I was stunned, because below, a whole army of red creatures was scurrying here and there. Instinctively jumping to my feet and shrugging my shoulders in disgust, I continued eating while standing. Although these forest cockroaches, in color and size, are almost no different from those that live in the city, their body is thinner, apparently due to the smaller amount of food available to them in the wild. How do they survive, I wondered in amazement, because people have learned to successfully freeze out their urban relatives by exposing furniture to the cold and opening windows in winter. One can only assume that in winter they hibernate, burying themselves, for example, in the forest floor. But let us now return to the main topic of conversation, which I wanted to talk about in this article. We will, of course, be talking about the gray rat, which has been secretly living next to humans since ancient times. According to experts, there are even more of these creatures living next to humans on earth than there are people themselves. Not only do they eat and spoil a lot of food produced by people, but they are also carriers of very terrible deadly diseases that threaten all of humanity. Over the many millennia spent close to people, gray rats have become so 1. adapted to such a life that it has become almost impossible to exterminate them. Rats are not affected by the strongest poisons, to which they quickly adapt, without being tempted by the poisoned bait. Various traps and snares are also not very effective against rapidly reproducing rodents. The vitality of rats is simply amazing, because they continue to feel normal, even in conditions of increased radiation, where all living things quickly die. Another useful feature for rats noticed by people allows these animals to flourish on the ground. We are, of course, talking about their ability to sense danger in advance, which allows the animals to successfully avoid damage from various disasters. Even in ancient times, people noticed that long before the disaster itself, when, for example, sailors are in the dark, rats begin to leave a sinking or burning ship, sensing in advance the approaching death of the ship. And the minds of these animals, as researchers have determined, are quite highly developed, which allows rats to successfully avoid all sorts of traps invented by people. One of the cases when, during my service in the army, a rat bit the bridge of our cook’s nose, who stopped taking meat from the dining room for them, I have already described earlier, so below only cases of collision with these animals that I have not yet written about will be given. Since I had to spend almost my entire adult life in a wooden barracks, close contacts with gray rats were inevitable, which is what I wanted to talk about. The first time I saw these gray creatures up close was in early childhood, when I had just started walking. I remember a case when, from a narrow gap between the floorboards, where it was difficult to put even a finger, into our living room, one after another, for about half an hour, four little rats crawled out, which my father was watching quietly sitting near a hole in the floor, and then he silenced it with a blow from a felt boot clutched in his hands. As I grew a little older, and one day I found myself under the floor of the room, I was surprised at what I saw there. It turned out that the flooring was about half a meter above the ground, so in order for the pups to crawl into the room, they had to climb upside down on the floorboards. The next incident occurred on a sunny summer day, when grown-up guys, having caught an adult rat in a trap in the sheds near the barracks, decided to teach it a lesson, for which they doused it with kerosene and set it on fire. They carried out this action far from wooden buildings, apparently hoping that the burning rat they released from the trap, still full of strength, would not be able to hide, burning right there on the spot. But something happened that they didn’t seem to expect to see. As soon as they freed the rat's tail clamped in the trap, the burning torch rushed with a squeal straight to the barns and disappeared into one of them. Discouraged by what they saw, the guys began to wait to see whether the rat would set fire to the wooden building in which it had disappeared. Luckily for them, the burning rat apparently immediately climbed into the hole, so the barn did not catch fire. Our family, in this chain of buildings, had two barns located next to each other. One was built over the cellar hatch, and there was nothing more interesting in it, and in the second there lived chickens and it was filled to the top with various rubbish. When entering through the door, on the right it was filled with a woodpile of firewood up to the roof, and on the left there were roosts for chickens. At a height of two meters from the floor, above the perches there was a canopy filled with hay, to which a wooden ladder was attached. The wooden troughs in which my parents put food for the birds stood in the middle of the barn. As soon as you entered this barn, closed the door behind you, climbed onto the steps of the stairs leading to the hayloft, almost immediately, several hefty rats crawled out from under the woodpile, and, not paying attention to the man sitting on the stairs, they began to eat the food prepared for the chickens . The rats were not afraid of human voices, and even if objects were thrown at them, they did not pay attention to it. The only thing that made them immediately hide under the firewood was the daylight coming into the room from the street through the open door. Sometimes I deliberately climbed into the barn and, sitting on the stairs, tried to hit the rats with a slingshot, but I never managed to shoot this nimble animal. Everyone knows that gray rats are territorial animals that do not tolerate strangers around them, so where these creatures live, there are definitely no their smaller brothers mice, which they themselves destroy. One day an instructive story happened in our barracks. One of the neighbors bought a hamster at the poultry market, which he decided to keep at home. Immediately, as soon as the hamster appeared in his room, at night the rats, apparently sensing the irritating smell, began to gnaw the walls, trying to get to the animal sitting in the cage and preventing the neighbor from sleeping. After suffering like this for several nights, he was forced to take the hamster back to the market and sell it. There were many of these gray robbers not only in the barracks and adjacent sheds, but also in the film factory near the village, where rats were attracted by gelatin, which was used in large quantities for the production of photosensitive emulsion. I myself had to see several times, and hear even more, how rats crunching and eating this bone glue. Their favorite habitat was huge piles of garbage and waste lying near the workshops, and if they managed to find a rat sitting there inside and try to disturb it with a stick, then it would hiss furiously and sparkle with beady eyes, always trying to defend its right to be here . It is not clear what the rats ate in the tape shop, but there were especially many of these creatures in the huge pile of rejected tape. When you had to go to this workshop to buy several rolls of film cheaply from the workers, from afar you could see huge rats, comparable in size to a cat, wandering around the building. True, when a person approached, they slowly climbed under a pile of tangled tape, constantly thrown by a fan from the workshop onto the street. I didn’t see this myself, but knowledgeable people said that at the gelatin plant next to the film factory, in the village of Levchenko, where gelatin was extracted from animal bones, there were even more huge rats. There was once even a case of a rat attacking a person. The man walked along the road laid along the fence of the film factory to the village of Levchenko. Opposite the entrance of the gelatin factory, the road turned to the right and crossed the railway line running parallel to it. It was here at the railway crossing that he saw a huge rat sitting on his path. Deciding to kick the insolent gray creature, he raised his leg, but before he could hit the rat, it jumped high and grabbed his lower lip with its teeth. Instinctively grabbing the animal with his hands, he and the rat ran to the medical unit of the gelatin plant to be freed from the animal that had grabbed his lip. My father also told a story about how he once tried to crush a gaping rat with his boot, but it was able to dodge and bite right through his boot. He also said well that I was wearing thick woolen socks on my feet, so the rat did not reach my body.
Used materials.
1. Photo from the Internet.
1.Pop, Onion and Misha-Roof.
April 7, 2000, a week and a half after Putin was elected for the first term, at the airport. John Kennedy's plane from Russia boarded in New York. A regular flight, the kind that flies every day. Passengers, tired from the long flight, flocked to passport control.
Among those who arrived was a tall man, former Greco-Roman wrestler Boris Ivanyuzhenkov. He is also Putin's first minister of sports in 1999-2000. The minister flew to the United States on a regular (red) passport for some negotiations with NHL legionnaires.
Boris Ivanyuzhenkov.
However, getting to America for the minister of the Greco-Roman style was not easy. At passport control, three men in civilian clothes approached him. They checked his documents and informed him that his visa had been cancelled. And he himself must immediately leave the territory of the United States. Without explaning the reason.
It was a long 10 hours in the local “monkey barn” while the Russian Embassy and the Foreign Ministry were negotiating with the US authorities so that the Russian minister would still be allowed into America. Finally, they persuaded him: he was allowed in for a few days, with some kind of temporary certificate, but he had to appear at the immigration office to make a final decision.
And such a decision was made: on April 13, 2000, the Russian Minister of Sports (current) was finally deported from the United States. You could say: knee in the butt. Surprisingly, such a seemingly egregious fact caused almost no reaction in Russia. Television did not shout about him, Putin and the government press service remained silent, an article was published in Komsomolskaya Pravda, and even then without any special details. For some reason, the Russian authorities really did not want to draw attention to this case.
In June 2000, Minister Ivanyuzhenkov was quietly fired and replaced by his first deputy, Pavel Rozhkov. True, it was not some kind of disgrace. In subsequent years, Ivanyuzhenkov was president of the Russian Boxing Federation, met with Putin on the Presidential Sports Council, received orders, and even served as a deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in the State Duma in 2011-2016.
But what happened to Mr. Minister, fighter and communist then, in America, in April 2000? Nothing special, friends. The fact is that Boris Viktorovich Ivanyuzhenkov is actually the criminal authority of the Podolsk organized crime group nicknamed “Rotan”. Rotan is a fish of the goby family.
The Podolsk organized crime group is one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Russia, both under Yeltsin and under Putin. It is in no way inferior to either the famous Solntsevo organized crime group (Mikhas, Mogilevich, Usmanov), or the Tambov-Malyshev gang from St. Petersburg (Traber, Vasiliev, Gena Petrov, etc.), with whom Putin did business back in Sobchak’s mayor’s office.
The famous criminal figure Leonid Roitman (Lenya Long), who spent the entire 1990s in a team of killers traveling between New York, Kiev and Moscow, once noted that all organized crime in the former USSR was actually confined to four large organized crime groups , and Podolsk people are also present in this “Big Four”.
The Podolsk organized crime group was founded in the late 1980s. three bandits: Luchok, Rotan and Pop. Luchok (Sergei Lalakin) has been the permanent leader of the Podolsk group for almost 30 years. In Soviet times, he studied with Rotan in the same vocational school, worked at a vegetable base (hence the nickname).
Later photo: Onion (center) and the boxers he sponsors.
The office of an organized crime group leader in our time. This is not a vegetable base for you.
Luchok is the only crime boss in Russia who made a documentary film about himself. It’s called: . “Sergey Lalakin. Be kind" (2016). An hour and a half of stories about what a righteous Luchok is, a philanthropist and a patriot of Russia.
All this is interspersed with philosophical reflections of the criminal authority on various topics. For example, that monuments to Ivan the Terrible should be erected in every major city in the country. The Tsar, to whom no monuments were erected even in Tsarist Russia, turns out to be a great inspiration for Luchko.
Naturally, some things were not included in the film. Not a word about 30 years of experience in racketeering and banditry, nor about the fact that the “patriot” Luchok bought himself, his wife and two sons a residence permit in Estonia (through business emigration). And also the arms and drug trade, the Laundromat financial scheme (withdrawal of $20 billion from Russia in 2011-2013), which was organized by Luchok together with the FSB, SVR and Putin’s relatives. All these little things were left behind the scenes.
Luchka's right hand is Borya Rotan. This is the one who was the minister. Master of sports in wrestling, in the 90s - a notable racketeer near Moscow, personally participated in shootouts, murders, dismemberment of corpses after showdowns. We will talk in more detail about Rotan’s exploits in the 90s below.
Rotan when he was a minister (1999):
And while he was a State Duma deputy (2014)
Authority Sergey Popov (Pop) is the third founder of the Podolsk organized crime group. In 1990, still under the USSR, he was arrested for racketeering and spent 2.5 years in prison. I sat in the same cell with Lukyanov, a well-known ally of Gorbachev, who was sent there in connection with the State Emergency Committee case. Moreover, they made friends there (a Podolsk racketeer and a former member of the CPSU Central Committee) and then maintained relations in the wild.
After leaving prison, Popov became the “commercial director” of the Podolsk organized crime group, representing its interests in various business projects. In addition, Pop became the head of relations with the Izmailovo organized crime group, with which the Podolsk people have had a strategic alliance for many years. Sometimes they even talk about a single Podolsk-Izmailovo organized crime group.
Deripaska, yes. He is. They knew each other for many years, and in 2003, Deripaska even made Popov his daughter’s godfather. What connects them? - General criminal history. Judging by the materials of the trials between Deripaska and his former partner Mikhail Cherny, which took place in 2006-2012. in London and Tel Aviv, the aluminum king of Russia Deripaska received his plants thanks to the forceful support of the Podolsk and Izmailovo organized crime groups.
They were the ones who cleared everyone there. Ordinary guys from Podolsk, luchki and rotans, helped Deripaska become a public figure. Not for free, of course. But some later still felt that he had not settled accounts with the gang - in particular, multimillionaire Mikhail Chernoy (he is also the authority of the Izmailovo organized crime group “Misha-Krysha”). Popov, by the way, took the side of Misha-Krysha in this litigation, which is why he and Deripaska also quarreled.
Have you ever wondered, friends, why oligarch Deripaska is not allowed into America, like Rotan? And for many years already, no matter how hard he tries. In March 2017, at the Arctic Forum in Arkhangelsk, Putin expressed bewilderment at why Deripaska was so offended. Let him, they say, go to the US Congress, speak there personally, and explain to the boys. Maybe he can persuade him to lift the sanctions.
This is right. Let the three of us go at once - together with Luchko and Pop. Who goes to the turnout alone? And let them capture Rotan. I think the performance of the Podolsk lads in the US Congress will be remembered for a long time. Even Putin will no longer be allowed in after this.
Beijing, 2014. Putin and Deripaska at the APEC meeting. They are encouraging investors to invest in Russia. Putin from the Tambov-Malyshevskaya gang, Deripaska from the Podolsk-Izmailovskaya gang.
Sergei Efros is a close friend of Popov. The Efros gang from San Francisco is the Podolsk gang’s partners in America. Even 20 years ago, the Efros gang was mentioned at hearings in the US Senate on the Russian mafia on May 15, 1996. The FBI included it in the list of the most active emigrant gangs in the United States at that time.
What did the Efros brigade do in California? - The same as the gang from Brighton Beach in New York: murders for hire, racketeering, drugs, scams with gasoline as a junior partner with the Italians (Cosa Nostra).
It is not difficult to see that the Podolsk organized crime group has long outgrown the scale of Podolsk. This is a global organization, and taking into account its alliance with the Izmailovo organized crime group, together they are generally the largest criminal group in Russia. Moreover, it became such even before Putin, already in the 1990s. It is no coincidence that the first minister and crime boss in the history of Russia was from Podolsk.
It is generally accepted that Putin is a representative of the St. Petersburg mafia, a product of gangster St. Petersburg. But not only him. And gangster Moscow too. Since 1996, Putin worked in Moscow in the Yeltsin administration, and since 1998 he was director of the FSB. And the FSB has been protecting the Podolsk-Izmailovsk organized crime group for many years at the highest level. All these mafia connections have not gone away - Putin inherited them and switched them over to himself.
It is not surprising that later, under President Putin, the Podolsk and Izmailovo organized crime groups became even stronger than they were under Yeltsin. The dashing 90s are baby talk compared to what Luchok and his team did after 2000.
Suffice it to say that at some point (2010-2014) in Podolsk there was, apparently, the world’s largest money laundering center: through the local Promsberbank and other banks of the Podolsk organized crime group, under various schemes it was transferred abroad about 50 billion dollars. Moreover, this money largely comes from Putin and his friends (Olympics, contracts with Russian Railways, etc.). In a word, the guys “rose from their knees.”
2. Combat path.
The Podolsk organized crime group appeared in the late 1980s. in the Moscow region as an ordinary gang of racketeer athletes. We started like everyone else. The authority Luchok twisted the caps (protected the thimbles), Rotan and Pop shook the businessmen. The authority Methodius (Mikhail Kalugin) took the dull ones to an abandoned factory, where he held explanatory conversations. It’s a pity, he himself died in 1998, right during interrogation in the Podolsk RUBOP (he tried to strangle an investigator and received 4 bullets at point-blank range).
The Luchka brigade quickly ousted other gangs from Podolsk and began expanding into other areas of the Moscow region and even into other regions. Since 1993, a “branch” opened in Volgograd, for which the authority Anatoly Nikishin (Tolya-Shkaf), a former USSR champion in judo, was responsible. In Volgograd, the Podolsk people acted as harshly as possible, the number of murders was in the dozens, but they staked out their place in this region.
True, later Luchok and Shkaf quarreled. And then, in 1997, Shkaf was also shot in his jeep near the Tsaritsyno hotel in Moscow. Due to loss of trust. This was in May 1997. And already in June 1997, a landmine was waiting for Luchka on the road not far from his dacha. But he was lucky, it started to rain, and the contacts closed ahead of time. Banditry is a dangerous business, needless to say.
However, the Luchka gang lived not only on racketeering and murder. They grabbed at everything that brought money. It was the time of financial pyramids: swindlers cheated suckers, collecting money in all possible ways. In 1992-93, the Podolsk people pulled off a “sugar scam”, also known as the “Zhesavi” scheme. A company with that name collected more than $20 million from 140 private firms and state-owned enterprises for future supplies of imported sugar. They collected and disappeared. Much to the joy of Luchka and his team.
An even larger scam of the Podolsk organized crime group was “Vlastelina” in 1992-94. — this time about 16 thousand individuals were affected. The guys did not disdain stealing from the budget. In 1995, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia investigated a criminal case against Luchok for embezzling funds for the construction of housing for military personnel.
The budget allocated money for a house in Smolensk for officers of a tank unit that was withdrawn from Germany. But the contract was given to the Podolsk organized crime group and the money disappeared. According to the investigation, Luchok immediately spent part of the stolen money on expensive cars, buying three Cherokee jeeps for himself and his gang. On October 10, 1995, he was arrested for embezzlement and fraud. But unexpectedly, some patrons stood up for him, after 10 days Luchok was released under subscription, and then the matter was completely hushed up.
Once in his youth, Luchok served conscript service in the Airborne Forces. Now he is a prominent figure in the Union of Russian Paratroopers. Below is an obsequious birthday greeting to Luchka from this organization:
There is something about “deserved authority” among all generations of paratroopers, that Luchok is at its most fruitful stage, “when rich experience is harmoniously combined with wisdom and knowledge of life”. Rich experience, yes. A letter from the families of tank officers whom Luchok robbed in the 1990s would also be nice to post on the website of the Union of Paratroopers. Or is a paratrooper not a tankman's comrade?
Well, since Luchka received an order, then so did Rotan. Only for him is the Order of Honor.
According to the description, the Order of Honor in Russia is given for “high achievements” in activities that “have made it possible to significantly improve the living conditions of people, for services in training highly qualified personnel, educating the younger generation, maintaining law and order.”
That's for sure. The activities of the Podolsk organized crime group have significantly improved the living conditions of individual people, but there is nothing to say about maintaining the rule of law (although, perhaps, they mean the THIEVES' LAW?).
3. “He's a good guy. We made him a minister."
When Rotan was appointed minister in 1999, a number of newspapers (Top Secret, Kommersant) published materials from his operational case, which was conducted in the RUBOP for a long time. After all, there was still some freedom of the press in Russia at that time.
The contents of this dossier are impressive. For example, in 1989, Rotan was in the Serpukhov pre-trial detention center for gang rape, but got away with it. And in 1992, Luchka had a conflict with the Psycho gang (Moscow region authority Sergei Fedyaev). August 26, 1992 Rotan and his lads drove up to the spit in the village. Aleksandrovka near Podolsk and Psycho were killed. The corpse was taken out by car, dismembered (the head was cut off), doused with gasoline, burned and thrown in the forest near the Lesnye Polyany rest house. This is me laying out the biography of the minister, if so.
But Psycho was not alone at the showdown. His comrades managed to escape and take out the wounded. The Psycho driver, nicknamed “Bubble,” lasted another 5 days in intensive care and managed to tell the cops who shot at them. And three Rotans and two more bandits shot, all masters of sports in wrestling.
November 6, 2012, Kremlin. Meeting of the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for the development of physical culture and sports. Now Rotan will take the floor and tell how he dismembered corpses near Podolsk in the 90s (just kidding). And then Putin will give him another Order of Honor. Or maybe a Hero.
A little more from Rotan’s operational file. In 1994, a conflict arose between the Podolsk people and the Ingush over the technical center in Varshavka, one of the largest car service centers in Moscow. Rotan and the boys resolved the issue. On February 14, 1994, on the Podolsk Domodedovo highway near the village of Pokrov, a car with Ingush bandits was shot. Four killed, two wounded. One of the Ingush later identified Rotan. This shooting thundered throughout the entire region, but the case died down here too.
However, starting around 1995, a new stage began in the life of Bori Rotan. He stops participating in shootouts, dismembering corpses and killing Ingush on the highways. They are starting to move him into the public sphere. He suddenly becomes a philanthropist, sponsor, and head of the Vityaz boxing club in Podolsk. In 1997 he was elected as a deputy from Podolsk to the Moscow Regional Duma. Well, in a couple of years we will enter the wider world.
Moscow Kremlin. Yeltsin's Decree No. 812 of June 24, 1999. Appoint Boris Ivanyuzhenkov, a 33-year-old wrestler from Podolsk, as Minister of Sports of the Russian Federation.
A month and a half after this Decree, Yeltsin will appoint Putin as his successor, and Borya Rotan will work in his government for almost a year. And I would have continued to work if it weren’t for that puncture at the airport in America.
Who helped Rotan become a minister? After all, it’s not every day and not in every country that outright criminals, who recently dismembered corpses in the forests and were in jail for gang rape, end up in the government? Officially, Rotan himself always said in his interviews that Karelin, the Olympic champion in wrestling, whom he met in his youth at sports competitions, helped him.
Karelin seems to be on the right here:
However, Rotan was not only motivated by Karelin. There were more serious people. On September 1, 1999, the newspaper “Top Secret” published an article about Ivanyuzhenkov with a review of his biography. The author was Larisa Kislinskaya, a famous crime journalist. Soon after this, in October 1999, she interviewed the authority of Taiwanchik (Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov), which was published in the newspaper with abbreviations. What was not included, Kislinskaya told only 14 years later, in May 2013:
“...I remembered Alik’s other words. When we said goodbye[in 1999] , he said: “You shouldn’t have written badly about Boris Ivanyuzhenkov, he’s a good guy. We made him a minister."
Sochi, 1980 Alik Taiwanchik is on vacation. At that time he had not yet appointed ministers in Russia. He made money by playing cards. He acquired wide connections, then became one of the founders of the Izmailovo organized crime group in Moscow (friendly to Podolsk).
By the way, Taiwanchik is now a member of the Russian Writers' Union (!), a big fan of Putin and Medvedev, which he does not hide.
In general, Taiwanchik is a Uighur by origin from Uzbekistan. “Heavy people”, “no one wants to work”, they cannot live without Putin and Medvedev - this is about you, dear Russians. I think it’s worth listening to the opinion of this authoritative person, a Uighur from the Izmailovo organized crime group. After all, he has a lot of experience, all his life in the criminal environment. Well, with short breaks for meetings of the Writers' Union.
4. Podolsk-Izmailovskaya organized crime group.
The Izmailovskys then stood higher in the criminal hierarchy. Unlike the Luchka brigade, their leadership included not only young people from gyms and gyms, but also old Soviet mafiosi shop workers from Tashkent, the Cherny brothers, their fellow countryman Taiwanchik.
The leader of the Izmailovo organized crime group was former paratrooper Anton Malevsky (Anton Izmailovsky, Antokha), a participant in the war in Afghanistan. A colorful character with a scar across his entire face and a half-cut off ear.
Zigzags of genetics: Anton Izmailovsky came from an intelligent Moscow family, his father Viktor Vladimirovich Steinberg was a prominent seismologist, deputy. Director of the Institute of Earth Physics. The son took his mother’s surname (Olga Malevskaya), and after serving in the Airborne Forces he became a bandit.
The old mafia brothers Cherny and Taiwanchik, as well as comrades from Lubyanka and Yasenevo (SVR) noticed the guy and gave him a start in life. In the 90s, the Izmailovskys handled billions: they worked with the Russian mafia in America, with customs benefits from the National Sports Fund and the Patriarchate (these benefits were pierced by bandits in the Kremlin and were used to import alcohol and cigarettes).
In Central Asia, the Izmailovskys worked with Salim (Salim Abduvaliev), who supplied Afghan heroin to Russia. In Africa, the Izmailovskys, together with the SVR, sold weapons to Angola in circumvention of the UN embargo and carried out fraud with its debts to Russia. The representative of the Izmailovo organized crime group in Africa was emigrant businessman Arkady Gaydamak (an old KGB agent); the debt scams were helped by officials of the Ministry of Finance Andrei Vavilov and Mikhail Kasyanov (the latter was then Putin’s prime minister in 2000-2004).
But the most important business of the Izmailovo organized crime group was, of course, raiding. Here the Izmailovskys bypassed everyone: they seized factories and entire industries in batches. A whole business empire quickly emerged. This entire enterprise was managed by specially trained people - rich businessmen: Deripaska, Iskander Makhmudov, Jalol Khaidarov, Vladimir Lisin and others.
They did not have the usual relationship between a businessman and the roof: when the business is your own, and you simply pay the agreed tribute to the bandits. There was a partnership there. First, they captured the factory together (usually over corpses), then they milked it together. Many of the current oligarchs in Putin’s Russia, including the aluminum king Deripaska, the copper king Iskander Makhmudov, come from the Izmailovo organized crime group.
The incredible rise of the Izmailovskys in the 1990s led to the fact that their leader Anton Malevsky, who was barely 30 at the time, became an authority on an all-Russian scale. A Jap-level figure.
For Luchko, from the Moscow region, and his brigade, the alliance with the Izmailovo organized crime group was a way out to a new level - to big business and to the top of international organized crime. The alliance was concluded largely thanks to the Podolsk authority Popov, who was not only Luchko’s comrade-in-arms, but at the same time a close friend of Anton Malevsky.
What interest was there in the Izmailovo organized crime group in the 90s, with its money and connections, in joining the Podolsk alliance? — To strengthen the “power block.” In total, there were more than 2,000 people in the two organized crime groups. For comparison, the entire Cosa Nostra (Italian mafia in the USA), all 5 families in total amount to about 5,000 people.
Forceful support for the Izmailovskys was not at all superfluous. They waged large-scale wars for property simultaneously in different parts of the country, where they were opposed by both local and hostile Moscow groups. For example, there was a real massacre of aluminum smelters in Siberia, Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, Khakassia, etc.
Those. According to Deripaska’s calculations, 34 (!) murders were committed in the fight for KrAZ (Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant) alone. It was disgusting, disgusting, he had to pay, but he still captured the KrAZ.
