Crime boss murder won’t mean comeback for Russian mafia

Aslan “Gramps Khasan” Usoyan was leaving his favorite restaurant in central Moscow when a bullet from a silenced assault rifle hit him in the neck.

The portly 75-year-old’s private guards pushed him back inside, but more bullets sailed through the closed door, piercing the backside of a woman nearby, costing her 4½ liters of blood. Usoyan’s consorts sped him to the hospital in a Mercedes jeep, where doctors proclaimed him dead on arrival.

Wednesday’s assassination robbed the Russian underworld of one of its last legendary greats, and stirred up memories of the bloody turf wars that grabbed headlines in the country’s “turbulent 1990s.”

But experts do not foresee a revival of the all-mighty “Russkaya mafiya” of that time, with its glorified image and omnipresence in pop culture. On the contrary, they believe Russian organized crime has settled into a pattern similar to many other countries’, focusing on a few lucrative, mostly illegal domains, but outgunned and outmanned by government bodies, who have regained the upper hand over the past decade or so.

In press reports, Usoyan had long been labeled Russia’s most influential “thief-in-law” – a title denoting a don of the underworld both in Soviet and post-Soviet criminal culture. His spheres of activity have been rumored to include drugs, guns and construction materials, including some lucrative deals involving next year’s Olympics in the southern Russian city of Sochi.

After his death, Russian media swelled with speculation, blaming the hit on Usoyan’s numerous rivals, who supposedly opted not to wait until his planned retirement later this year and the ascent of a nephew he had carefully groomed as successor.
The Investigative Committee, roughly comparable to Russia’s FBI, also said it was looking into a possible dispute among crime bosses as the cause of Usoyan’s shooting.

One obituary called Usoyan, before his death, “the last surviving mammoth” of a bygone age. Indeed, Gramps Khasan emerged from a criminal subculture believed to have started taking shape around the time of his birth, in the 1930s.

Soviet-era thieves-in-law, who earned their stripes in prison, had intricate codes of etiquette and behavior enforced with no less zeal than the Criminal Code. They eschewed the state and derived sustenance from a classic mix of robbery and fraud, but gradually also from a shadow economy that started taking root in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, despite – or, perhaps, because of – bans on private entrepreneurship.

And it was this very connection to business that came to play the pivotal role in the rise of Russian mafia in the 1990s, experts told RIA Novosti.

The Soviet Union’s demise wreaked chaos in established state institutions in Russia and other post-Soviet countries, leaving them crippled and unequipped to deal with a new capitalist reality, said Andrei Soldatov, editor-in-chief of Agentura.ru, a non-profit online think-tank studying Russian law enforcement services.

This was also when the Russian mafia became a global phenomenon, taking advantage of the newly opened opportunities for travel and tapping immigrant communities abroad to join global networks of drug, arms and human trafficking – and to popularize the notions of onion-dome tattoos, perpetual scowls and ridiculous accents that can now be found anywhere from a Grand Theft Auto video game to David Cronenberg’s filmography.