It is safe to say that there are no residents of Russia who have not heard about the funeral crime. Thousands of articles have been written about the darkest and, perhaps, the most shadowy sector of the country’s economy, and hundreds of TV spots have been filmed. However, it is in the Leningrad region that the merging of cemetery crime with corrupt civil servants and security forces has reached such a scale that it gives rise to truly surreal pictures. Judge for yourself – in the most prestigious Vsevolozhsk district of the 47th region, shadow funeral directors not only have access to all the information of the emergency service 112, but also absolutely closed, secret communications of the Ministry of Emergencies! Agree – in conditions close to a full-scale war, secret operational data on explosions, fires, terrorist attacks and other emergencies in the hands of criminals are not the best security guarantees for the population.
Rucriminal.info will start in order. There is an expensive Toksovskoye cemetery in the Vsevolozhsky district, about the criminal everyday life of which the media wrote repeatedly. And there is an experienced administrator in this cemetery – Vyacheslav Sadovnikov, firmly connected with both the municipal authorities and the Vsevolozhsk police. He is in the photo below.
And Vyacheslav also has a daughter, Ekaterina, who changed her maiden name to Artemyev. Ekaterina followed in the footsteps of her father and is also actively involved in the cemetery business – she personally sells ritual items in a family shop in the neighboring village of Sertolovo,
and even until recently she went to the relatives of the deceased as a funeral agent, as can be seen from the samples of powers of attorney below:
What is wrong with such a family contract, the reader may ask? Let’s start with the fact that junior sergeant Ekaterina Artemyeva (Sadovnikova) – an active employee of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, works as a radiotelephone operator at a closed communication facility of the Ministry of Emergencies (6th detachment of the 32nd unit, located in the Kurortny district of St. Petersburg) and, in principle, has no right to engage in commercial activities without notifying his superiors and declaring income. After the brave rescue worker almost got caught, she was replaced by a couple of friendly entrepreneurs on trips to the deceased: IP Morozv and IP Makeev. At that time, Artemyeva managed to avoid the sanctions that were required by law due to the patronage of her superiors. However, all these are just administrative trifles, because Ekaterina works at a closed facility of the Ministry of Emergency Situations not by chance. We will talk about this a little lower, but first we will tell about the connection between the funeral criminals and the operators of the emergency service 112.
What already written by our colleagues, in the Vsevolozhsk district of the Leningrad region, a real shadow dispatch service operates, distributing fresh dead to funeral agents affiliated with the mafia. The organizers of the scheme, which, by the way, has already been introduced to the territory of the neighboring Kurortny and Krasnogvardeisky districts of St. Petersburg, are Sadovnikov and his daughter Ekaterina Artemyeva. The main task of the shadow funeral directors is to send their agent to the relatives of the deceased as soon as possible, preferably even before the doctors and police arrive. The agent must, by hook or by crook, force the relatives to sign a contract for funeral services and pick up the passport of the deceased. After that, the family actually falls into a trap – nothing can be done without a passport and they have to pay for ritual services at extortionate prices, many times higher than the average for the region.
So efficiency is the key to the success of shadow companies. Previously, the tandem received information from the police called to the apartment or from the ambulance crews. But the real miracles of speed were achieved after Sadovnikov and his daughter met Ruslan Galantsev. The guy in the photo below is unremarkable, except for one thing – he has a trusted business relationship with emergency telephone operators 112.
It is 112 operators who are the very first to learn about the death of a person, and Ruslan is an intermediary for selling data on the place of death and contacts of relatives. For reference, information about one fresh corpse costs only 3,000 rubles. The question is the number of deaths, the full information about which the 112 service has.
Receiving information about the new deceased with lightning speed, the Sadovnikov-Artemyev tandem manages to send their employee to the place no later than half an hour after the message. For the prompt removal of the body, the tandem even purchased a 15-year-old Gazelle, on which the designations “Special” were pasted. Ideally, after the contract is signed, and the deceased’s passport is in the agent’s pocket, the body is immediately sent towards the morgue on this same Gazelle.
Well, now let’s move on to the most piquant. The monthly shadow income of Sadovnikov’s father and daughter Artemyeva is millions of rubles. Why does Ekaterina continue to work at the Ministry of Emergency Situations and several times a week go on long shifts as a telephone operator? Believe me – not only for the sake of an early state pension or a preferential mortgage. The fact is that it is through the closed communication of the Ministry of Emergencies that information about major emergencies with human casualties passes: from accidents on highways to fires, explosions, plane crashes and others. Information about the number of victims, seriously wounded, and then lists of the dead and injured are promptly published there. Often among them are residents of areas in which shadow companies operate. Further, their funeral agents work out the usual scheme, concluding agreements with the relatives of the dead and earning hundreds of thousands of black rubles for their owners.
This is what it is, the power of the funeral mafia in the Leningrad region, a landmark for the country, the border region. Of course, with the support of officials and security forces, all this remains completely unpunished. First of all, we are talking about the head of the administration of Sertolovo, Yuri Khodko, and the responsible persons of the 128th and 88th police departments. Here are the main, although not the main patrons of the cemetery shadow workers, who regularly receive their bribe from them.
