Thieves in Law, aka crooks, aka criminals – Russian mafia

In the area of the station girls hired Caucasians and paid good money, used prostitutes not for their intended purpose, namely: the old “Corolla” bypass several addresses in Khabarovsk, near which stood for several hours and looked for something.

These trips went on for about a week, during which time the prostitutes were never let go and were always taken with them, even to the apartment where the Caucasians lived. At the right moment, the girls escaped and told everything to an acquaintance of a district police officer. After paying a small sum of money to the market beauties from our own pockets, we made a trip to all the addresses we’d given. These were places in which often appeared Neighbor, which included the home address of the criminal authority in Ladozhskaya 27, and the address of the urban shooter. At that time it was held in a former bus control room at the railway station.

They decided that the best place to set up an ambush was in the apartment that the Caucasians rented, in an apartment building in the vicinity of school №38. It was clear that the “guest workers” were preparing an attempt on Merkumyantsev’s life and they needed the prostitutes as a cover in case the surveillance was discovered by the Neighbor’s guards. At the established address was only one Caucasian, in his forties, with a briefcase stuffed to the top with U.S. dollars, and several new portable radios. Carefully inspecting the apartment, in the kitchen we found several Russian passports glued with duct tape to the inside of the dining table, in one of the rooms in the closet we found rags with gun oil, no weapons were found in the apartment. In the parking lot next to the house where the killers lived, they found an old Corolla that had been cleverly purchased: the owner of the Corolla was listed as dead.

We sat in an ambush for 24 hours without waiting for the killers. We had to let the Caucasian who was in the apartment go, he had nothing to show us and had already begun to demand a lawyer. That’s how we prevented the murder of the “responsible” from the OPS “Obschak” for the city of Khabarovsk.

As I said, there were about ten thieves in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the 1990s. “About”, because Jem, making an approach to the new “tramps”, removed the crown from some of the old ones for various offenses.

Vasin Evgeny Petrovich (Djem), born November 10, 1951. – was essentially a man who was crowned in a Tobolsk indoor prison in order to organize a thieves’ movement in the Far East. Vasin was tried for hooliganism, meaning “cormorant” in French. In the “juvenile facility” he wore a red armband, i.e. he cooperated with the administration, while serving his sentence he wrote an application for parole and worked in the penal zone as an unconvoy (prisoners loyal to the administration – author’s note), making putanka (barbed wire for fencing zones – author’s note). In the 1980s Vasin organized the “Union of True Prisoners” and propagandized against the thieves’ movement, which, as Crab used to say, “you can’t put on any dick at all anymore”. All these nuances are not only contrary to the thieves’ code, but can easily lead to the murder of a prisoner, however, given the authority of Jem among gangsters of all stripes, Vasin was still crowned, based on political considerations – to organize the thieves’ movement in the Far East.

1. Strelkov Oleg Alekseevich (Strela), born October 2, 1963. At one time the thief closest to Jem. He was dissolved by Vasin in 1997 just after Strela was released from Khabarovsk detention center. Strelkov was deprived of his crown for deceiving his father: the former thief claimed to have quit drugs, although he himself was “in the system”. In 1997 Cem sent the newly crowned Shokhiriev and Lepeshkin to Strelkov, so that the thieves could switch over the merchants who paid Strela for “protection”. The pensioner and Lepeshkin frightened the former thief so much that Strelkov left Komsomolsk together with his wife and three children and tried to hide his family in Sovgavan. Strelka himself hid in the taiga, in the Sovetsko-Gavansky area, with hunters. While drinking alcohol he was shot dead in a dugout by one of the hunters and buried in the taiga.
2. Alexander Anatolievich Volkov (Volchek), born in August 29, 1960. Alexander Anatoljevich Volkov (Volchek, born August 29, 1960) crashed to death while riding with Crab on a water scooter on the Amur river in 1999.
3. Sakhnov, Eduard Georgiyevich (Sakhno), born 02/10/1963. Edouard Georgiyevich (Sakhno), born on October 2, 1963, was sentenced under Article 210 of the Russian Criminal Code in the penal colony-6 in the village of Ikovka of the Ketovsky district, Kurgan region, and was transferred from the penal colony-12 in Nizhniy Tagil, Sverdlovsk region.
4. Oleg Valentinovich Semakin (Eva), born on April 24, 1965. Sergei is serving his sentence under Article 210 of the Russian Criminal Code in penal colony No. 18 “Dubravlag” in Mordovia. The colony is considered quite a comfortable place to serve his sentence, especially for those prisoners who are well-financed. Eva ended up there, apparently, as a reward, after in 2013 in the penal colony in Minusinsk he wrote a pledge of cooperation with law enforcement agencies. Currently recalls the name Oleg Bolshoi.
5. Litvinenko Alexander Viktorovich (Litvin), born May 23, 1971. In 1995, he received money from Jam for drug treatment in Kyrgyzstan, but instead of Kyrgyzstan he went to Moscow, where he successfully spent it all on partying and drugs. He was dissolved by Djem in 1995, quietly and quietly. He now lives in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, broke his addiction to drugs, and works as a locksmith.
6. Vitaly Granitovich Turbin (Turbinka), born 23 March 1969. Vitaly Turbin (Turbin) was dissolved by Djem for not introducing himself as a thief in a Moscow pre-trial detention center after his arrest by the militia for drug dealing. He was killed in 2002 by his brother.
7. Sergey Alexandrovich Lepeshkin (Lepekha), born in March 30, 1974. Sergei Alexandrovich Lepeshkin (Lepekha), born in March 30, 1974, was killed in 2003 in a transit prison in Taishet. According to operational information, after being beaten in the press-house, Lepeshkin renounced his thieves’ title and committed suicide on the same day.
8. Oleg Slatoslavovich Shokhirev (Pensioner), born on January 31, 1975. He is serving a sentence under Article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in the Penal Colony 26 of the Samara region, Volga district, Spiridonovka village. The name of the prisoner is Oleg Malenkiy.
9. Vadim Anatolievich Belyaev (Belyai), born on December 14, 1958. A native of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur. He was killed by a hitman in Moscow in 1995. According to my information, the murder was ordered by a thief Boris Bryansky (Petrushin Boris Glebovich) because of the redistribution of the diamond underground business.
10. Kiselev Victor Yuryevich (Kisel), born on November 27, 1953. Born in Khabarovsk, killed in 1996 by order of Veksler and Konkin.

Kiselev, having ascertained the home address of the regional criminal investigator, rang the policeman’s doorbell the next evening. Tsigelnikov, who, of course, knew Kiselev personally, opened the door and immediately received a blow to the head with a newspaper, which, as the joke goes, contained an iron pipe, after which Kiselev calmly left the entrance of the apartment building.

It was Vasin Evgeny who initiated the coronation of all the above-mentioned, so that his decisions were legitimate and approved by the “pocket” gathering of thieves. I won’t bore the reader with the description of thieves’ traditions and ways, it was already described in detail in different sources and on the Internet-site “Prime Kreme”. I will only say that the thieves of the Far East created their own law, which differed from the old thieves’ law adopted in the USSR and Russia, and I will tell about those moments when I personally encountered the above-mentioned individuals.

According to the common law of thieves, since Soviet times, all thieves are equal to each other, are “brothers” and there can be no senior among them. Any thief who came to Khabarovsk, must ask the “responsible” for the “public fund” for a report, from which sources the money was collected and what it was spent. All criminals belonging to a criminal organization have the right to voluntarily donate any amount of money to the cash box of the criminal organization, regardless of the type of criminal activity.

Our fellow countrymen, in particular Jem, amended the above rules. Batya forbade the “responsible” from the OPS “Commonwealth” to report to outsider thieves, except the Komsomol, on the sources of cash replenishment and expenditures from the “Commonwealth”. The crooks (one of the slang names for thieves in the law) set all members of the criminal community a specific percentage deduction from any crime committed that brought material profit.

For the theft of a car, fifteen percent of the amount received from the sale of the stolen property or from the amount received from the victims for the return of the vehicle had to be contributed to the commonwealth. However, there was a proviso: “Whoever considers himself worthy or aspires to something more, should put into the “pot” (slang designation of the thieves’ cash box – Auth.) from thirty to forty percent of the income”. For apartment thefts or the theft of purse bags from cars, the same thirty percent had to be given to the “Common Box”. Half of the profits were always given from “break-ins” (robberies – Auth.). Of course, there was also the collection of money from merchants for the so-called “roof”, here you had to give fifty percent of the money to the “orchestra” (slang name for the thieves’ office – Auth.) and fifty percent was allowed to keep it. The “obschakovtsy” did not avoid the drug business and prostitution, but the collection of money from these activities was considered a thankless affair, the money was called dirty and was mainly used for local, so to speak, economic needs: to meet guests from a foreign region, to rent apartments in case they had to lie low, to pay for the funeral of a member of the OPS.

Drug trafficking and prostitution were monitored by people who were not directly part of the FPS, as if from the outside; there was even a man who later became a deputy of the local city council. A member of the community was severely punished for violating the percentage of deductions, up to and including beatings and being declared a creep (a member of a criminal community who has wronged a person of equal rank, not a thief – Auth.).

The Far Eastern crooks, in addition to mandatory contributions to the “Obschak” fund, introduced a tax on thieves. In fact, just an unsubstantiated sum of money had to be surrendered for maintenance of the “bureaucratic” thieving apparatus, which, of course, angered the homegrown criminals.

There is also no clear definition of who can be called a thief. In the subjects of Russia located closer to the center, it was allowed that a person who had not yet been officially crowned a thief, but who lived the life of a thief, “with heart and soul is a thief,” that is, he observed all the rules of behavior of an ideal criminal who was on a kind of probationary period, could be called a thief. In the Far East, such subjects were considered impostors. Much later, in the mid-2000s, Far Eastern thieves recognized the Georgian title of mamavali, the very same probationary period for criminals wishing to become thieves in law. There were several Mamavali in the Far East: Komsomolsky Sitenok, Gaer, Tatarin, Khabarovsky Kostya Vorobey, Maxim Fatey from YAO, but not one of them became a thief. This is connected to the fact that the forage base for the thieves has been exhausted and the majority of entrepreneurs have stopped paying to the “obschak”, preferring to go to the authorities in case of a “raid”. The police have practically shut down such a profitable activity for criminals as the theft and return of stolen vehicles for a fee. A victim could pay from ten to twenty thousand dollars for the return of an expensive Landcruiser.

Sakhnov, Semakin, and Shokhirev, who are currently in prison, certainly still receive large sums of money collected by the remaining members of the Far Eastern OPS “Obschak”. But these flows of money have greatly diminished in comparison to what they were in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In 2001, regional departments for combating organized crime were eliminated in Russia, initially done with good intentions: to increase the staff of the new unit by reorganizing the BOP bodies. The RUBOP was succeeded by the newly formed KFKM, the Committee of the Federal Criminal Militia. In addition to RUBOP officers, the KFKM was to include those who had been withdrawn from the services of the territorial and regional police departments:

• a classified unit engaged in covert surveillance;
• a service engaged in “wiretapping” of telephones, premises, cars, and other technical activities, no less classified than the “seven”;
• criminal police.

In fact, the police departments of the subjects were deprived of the entire operational apparatus and fully assumed the functions of only the public security police. Already the KFKM staffs were formed, the committee’s account was opened in the Tax Inspectorate, but overnight everything was turned upside down. The KFKM, which had not had time to form, was also liquidated, and there was an order from the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the creation of the main departments of the police in the federal districts without their own “snoopers” and “wiretaps”. Rumor has it that the “big brothers” (FSB – Auth.), who did not need a strong competitor in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, took part in this.

A tank without caterpillars is how the operatives dubbed the newly created structure, already toothless in advance. In 2014, the Federal District Headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, whose functional responsibilities included the fight against organized crime and corruption, were reduced to small departments, organized crime in the country was “defeated.

Shokhirev

The pensioner was crowned Jam in 1996 at the same time as his comrade Sergei Lepeshkin (Lepekha) in Moscow. At first the youth, with their provincial Komsomol habits, were a little shy, especially in Khabarovsk, where Crab was “the boss,” but soon the young thieves became quite comfortable and confidently felt like generals of the underworld. In 2002, Shokhirev attacked his housemates for some domestic reason, Lepekha pulled up to help him, and both successfully ended up on the federal wanted list.

Lepeshkin was detained, and he soon died in a transit prison in Taishet, the official cause of death being suicide. Far Eastern mob actively promoted the version about the murder of the thief, referring to the traces of beatings on Lepeshkin’s body. Operational information overlapped with the version of the blatnoys…