ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano
Reconstructing his life story is a way to understand how the most violent crimes—extortion, murder, arms and drug trafficking, and prostitution rackets relate to the crimes committed by businessmen, politicians, and financiers. Tracing the rise of Don Semën, or Don Seva, as he’s also known, lets me photograph a world in which borders have fallen and criminal energies are interwoven, converging on a goal of maximum profit.
Mogilevic was born in Kiev on June 30, 1946, to a Jewish Ukrainian family that was probably quite typical for the Soviet era: not religious, broadly speaking middle-class. He got a degree in economics at Lviv University, one of the oldest in Eastern Europe, then moved from Ukraine to Moscow, where he arranged funerals. Funerals are a winning business. People never stop dying, and mafias worldwide have their hands in the funeral trade. They’re an excellent money-laundering tool and a fine cornerstone for building a fortune. Mafias never renounce concreteness. Tangible things. Earth, water, cement, hospitals, the dead. In the 1970s, Mogilevic joins a criminal group that deals in counterfeiting, petty fraud, and minor thefts. Small-time stuff compared to what he’ll do later, but the street provides essential training in how to command, survive, build self-confidence. He spends his time in airports and train stations, exchanging rubles for dollars, hustling perfume and handbags to ladies who want to look Western, and selling “black” vodka to their husbands, who remain true to Russian traditions. Shortly thereafter he’s arrested for one of the most common crimes: illegal currency exchange. He ends up in jail twice, for a total of seven years. Which turns out to be his lucky break. In prison he befriends some powerful Russian criminals, friendships that will last his whole life. The turning point in his criminal career comes when the Soviet government allows more than 150,000 Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. It’s a race against the clock for these families. They can leave, but they have to go right away: Their precious relics, their earrings and necklaces passed down from generation to generation, have to be left behind. Mogilevic realizes that an occasion like this won’t come around again. He’ll take care of selling the emigrating Jews’ possessions, then send the cash to them at their new address. Many believe him and entrust their possessions to him. But the money never reaches the legitimate owners: The fortune he accumulates will form the financial base of his criminal career.
Second page of the photo album, another famous photo. A man in three-quarter pose stares defiantly at the camera. He’s bare-chested and looks surprised: his mouth slightly open; his nearly invisible eyebrows raised; his eyes like two crushed almonds. Vaguely Asiatic features; deep furrows across his forehead, from one temple to the other. But what’s most striking are two identical tattoos at his collarbones. Two eight-pointed stars, with an eye at the center. The symbol of authority, of power. The photo is of Vjaceslav Kirillovic Ivan’kov, also known as Japoncik, or Little Jap. He was born in Georgia in 1940, but his Russian parents soon decide to move to Moscow. In 1982 he’s arrested for illegal firearms possession, robbery, and drug trafficking and is condemned to fourteen years imprisonment in Siberia. Years in which he rises to the rank of vor, just as the regime that marked their beginning is about to collapse. Vor is short for vor v zakone, literally “thief in law,” in other words, a criminal who has earned himself the right to command according to the rules. He was supposed to remain behind bars until 1995, but the tentacles of the Mafija are long and reach everywhere, from politics to sports, from institutions to entertainment. In 1990 two popular figures, one a singer—the Russian Frank Sinatra, and with a similar collection of dangerous acquaintances—the other a former Greco-Roman wrestling champion who is using an association of retired athletes as a screen for Mafija interests, mount a campaign supported by numerous political, cultural, and sports celebrities: Ivan’kov has sufficiently expiated his guilt; it’s time he is freed. Eventually even Semën Mogilevic offers a heavy helping hand: He generously pays off the judge on the case and involves a high-ranking Soviet functionary. The Little Jap goes free in 1991.
The Iron Curtain has fallen. The Soviet Union is crumbling. Russia is changing, its capital city is changing too. Feuds break out: Russians against Chechens. There’s no end to the blood, but it flows more from business interests than ethnic hatred. Ivan’kov is an old-fashioned vor—he doesn’t delegate, nor does he shy away from getting his own hands dirty. He starts eliminating Chechens and their business friends one by one. But it’s an elementary rule that the more people you kill, the more likely it is that someone will return the favor. And that’s not all. All that death and tumult leading up to it are starting to annoy the Mafija higher-ups, who decide to send Ivan’kov to the United States. Two birds with one stone: relative tranquillity at home and a business to build in the States. It’s easy now that the borders are open. All you have to do is ask the American embassy in Moscow for a two-week visa. Vjaceslav Ivan’kov travels as a cinematographic consultant for a movie company headed by a Russian magnate who’s lived in New York for years. Ivan’kov uses his real passport—just over a year after being released from jail in the USSR, which has only recently officially become part of the free world again. The Soviet Union had dissolved barely two and a half months earlier.
Ivan’kov arrives in New York, where everything’s already been set up for him. Starting with money, which the Little Jap immediately invests to begin his new life. For a mere fifteen thousand dollars Ivan’kov buys a fake marriage with a Russian singer who is a U.S. resident. He settles in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, where so many Soviet Jews had been coming since the 1970s that it’s nicknamed Little Odessa. There’s the ocean and beaches, but if you’re thinking melting pot with fiddles and balalaikas, you’ve got the wrong idea. The most typical thing these immigrants brought with them to the trash-strewn brick tenements is the mafia, the Mafija with a j.
The third photo in the family album is of another neighborhood. Whoever snapped it was really good; he managed to soften the squalor with a play of chromatic reflections between the incendiary sunset and the chilly lake that laps at its shore. But not even the most gifted artist could do anything about the violent eruption of barracklike structures on the horizon. They pop up unexpectedly along Moscow’s western periphery, in the middle of an immense park sliced brutally in half by four lanes of traffic. Seen from a distance they look like a bunch of rabbit hutches for giants, anonymous, stained by smog, and pathetic in their attempt to seem like a business district. This is Solncevo, a working-class neighborhood the Soviet authorities built in 1938. They had a sense of humor, those authorities. Solnce in Russian means “sun,” but in Solncevo whatever light there is crashes into the buildings, so shadows reign unopposed. This is where Solncevskaja Bratva, the Solncevo Brotherhood, was born.
Sweat, bodies colliding: the very lymphatic fluid of Solncevskaja Bratva. The founder, Sergej Michajlov, also known as Michas, was born there. His youth was spent between odd jobs and petty swindles, for which he had a brush with jail. In the 1980s Michas makes the most of his love of fighting and gathers together all those who share this passion. Is this the beginning of a sports club? Or the nucleus of what will become an army?
Michas is arrested twice: once for extortion and once for murdering a casino owner. But he is never sentenced: insufficient proof. Meanwhile, the Solncevskaja Bratva, as Michas’s handful of followers is now called, is expanding. Sweat and struggle. Violence and strength. The organization attracts other like-minded individuals: street fighters, hooligans, men ready for anything. They need to unite to defend themselves against other gangs, to pump up their muscles if they want to survive. They merge with other organizations, such as the Orechovskaja group, and within a few years Solncevskaja Bratva is powerful enough to extend its influence beyond the neighborhood, and to get involved in finance and business.
But their core business is protection, which in the 1990s takes on proportions that are nothing like Italy’s idea of payoffs. According to the FBI, the Austrian shopping chain Julius Meinl has to pay fift
The Russian Mafija came into being thanks to men who knew how to exploit new opportunities, but also because it draws on a history of structures and rules for how to dominate amid the great disorder. In my years of navigating the world’s criminal sewers I’ve noted that mafias always flourish under such circumstances: a power void, weakness, something rotten in the state in comparison to an organization that offers and represents order. The resemblances between the most far-flung mafias are often striking. The Russian organizations were toughened up by Stalinist repression, which amassed thousands of delinquents and political dissidents in the gulags. That’s where the Vory v zakone group was born, a society that within a few years was running every gulag in the USSR. An origin, therefore, that has nothing in common with Italian organizations, yet the principal characteristic that has allowed them to survive and prosper is the same: rules. Rules have many shades; they are made explicit through rituals and myths and made concrete through precepts that one must follow to the letter in order to be considered a worthy affiliate, that establish how to join and become part of the organization. Everything is codified and everything lives within the rules. What unites the camorrista and the vor are honor and loyalty, as well as the sacredness of certain gestures and the meting out of justice within the group. Even their rituals are similar. What grounds the ritual—the passage from one state to another—is common to both, since both share the desire to create an alternate reality, with different codes but equally coherent: Camorrista and vor are both baptized, punished if they step out of line, and rewarded if they obtain results. If in the past a vor was an ascetic who was averse to all earthly pleasure and every imposition, to the point of having his knees tattooed to signify that he would never bow down before authority, today luxury and ostentation are allowed. It’s no longer a sin to live on the Côte d’Azur.
Russian bosses are swathed in designer gear, from their underwear to their luggage; they have political protection, control who gets appointed to public office, and throw megaparties without any police interference. The groups are becoming more and more organized: Every clan has an obšcak, a kitty where a percentage of profits from crimes such as extortion and robbery are deposited, in order to cover the expenses of vory who end up in jail, or to pay off police and politicians. Soldiers, armies of lawyers, and highly skilled brokers are all on their payroll.
During the communist era the vory worked side by side with the Soviet elite, influencing every corner of the state apparatus. Under Brežnev they took advantage of the heavy stagnation of the communist economy and created an impressive black market: the Mafija could satisfy any desire as long as you could afford it. Shop and restaurants managers, heads of state agencies, government functionaries and politicians: They were all dealing in something. Every imaginable good was traded on the black market, from food to medicine. The vory tracked down whatever filthy capitalist goods the populace was forbidden in the name of socialism and introduced them into the homes of Party officials, thus forging an alliance between the nomenklatura and crime that was to have enormous consequences.
The fall of communism created an economic, moral, and social abyss that the Mafija was ready to fill. Generations of people out of work, penniless, often quite literally starving: The Russian organizations enrolled legions of unskilled workers. Police, soldiers, Afghan war veterans offered their services unreservedly. Former KGB members and Soviet officials placed their bank accounts and contacts in the service of organized criminal activities, including drug and arms trafficking. The transition to capitalism was armed with neither laws nor adequate infrastructure. The brotherhoods, on the other hand, had money, predatory swiftness, and intimidation tactics: Who could possibly oppose them? The so-called new Russians—those who were getting rich at dizzying speeds with the new market openings—found it was convenient to pay a “tax” that guaranteed protection from other groups as well as helped resolve problems with slow-paying customers or competitors. The small fish had no choice but to bow their heads: There was one extortionist who went around with a pair of scissors and a severed finger: “Pay up, or I’ll cut yours off too.” The West only caught the occasional echo of exaggerated violence; for the most part it was distracted and deluded. Even the funds the United States and European countries donated to reinforce post-Soviet civil society contributed indirectly to fattening the Mafija. NGOs were the preferred recipients, for fear that the money would be pocketed by ex-communists and used to reanimate the old regime and its old bureaucrats. But much of the aid was intercepted by criminal groups and never reached its destination.
With the intoduction of new banking laws, banks began to sprout up like mushrooms. Mafiosi no longer needed to corrupt the old institutions’ executives. With their abundant cash flow and a few straw men, they could open a bank and staff it with friends and relatives, including some freshly out of jail. Then came the great plan for privatization, which was supposed to give all citizens a stake in Soviet enterprises, from colossal new energy companies to Moscow hotels. The value of the distributed stocks was low for those who already had money and power but huge for those who had trouble making ends meet. Poor people sold their shares, even below face value, to those who had the means to stockpile them, thus reinforcing the elite ranks of former Soviet managers and bureaucrats and mafiosi. The relationship between the Mafija and the government was symbiotic and long lasting, and it worked: Those envelopes stuffed with cash were handy for everyone, because everyone needed money to survive. The Mafija was everywhere. The Mafija had become the state.
In 1993, in Moscow alone there were fourteen hundred homicides linked to organized crime, as well as a shocking rise in kidnappings and explosions. Moscow was compared to Chicago in the 1920s. Businessmen, journalists, gang family members—no one was safe. People fought over the control of factories, mines, territory. Businesses and corporations were forced either to reach an agreement with the gangs or be eliminated. According to former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who also dealt with Italian American, Sicilian, and Colombian mafias, the Russian mafia is the most violent he’s ever known. But there’s something new here: Often the Russians have college degrees, speak several languages, and introduce themselves as engineers, economists, scientists, white-collar workers. When people abroad finally begin to realize that they’re educated barbarians, it’s too late. The Mafija didn’t simply fill the power void in Russia. Its most formidable members are already operating far beyond Russia’s borders, fashioning a new world according to their own ideas.
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“Death is always after you,” Sergej, one of Mogilevic’s closest associates, loves to say. Sergej is an insignificant little man in rumpled clothes, and therefore very good at making himself invisible. Don Semën despises him but finds him useful: To be untouchable you can’t be vulnerable to threats. And Sergej isn’t. Everyone in Moscow knows he always carries a briefcase around with him. But only a few know what’s inside. Mogilevic never talks about it, not even with his wife. Once Sergej was kidnapped by one of Mogilevic’s rivals, a builder in the running for a public works contract from the city of Moscow. Sergej didn’t put up any resistance; he let himself be dragged into the dark basement of some anonymous high-rise on the outskirts of Moscow: no pleas; no prayers to be let go; no hint of retaliation from his powerful boss. He simply opened his briefcase, and the next day—still in his threadbare suit, looking dazed and indifferent—he knocked at Mogilevic’s door. “How
Perhaps it was Sergej’s kidnapping, or the dangers of Moscow, now gripped by fear of gang warfare, that make Mogilevic think it might be better to get out of town. Money’s not a problem; he’s already accumulated several million dollars, which he’s made in large part thanks to his most dangerous weapon: his acumen for financial affairs. As soon as perestroika opened the doors to private enterprise he quickly set up several companies, officially for fuel import-export, and registered far from the spires of Red Square, on one of the offshore islands in the English Channel. One company is called Arigon Ltd., the other, Arbat International, of which Mogilevic controls half the stock, the other half being divided between the Little Jap and the Solncevo bosses, Michajlov and Averin. With such good friendships now signed in ink, all Mogilevic has to do is pack his bags. In 1990 he decides to move to Israel, along with his most trusted men. They’re the vanguard of the second wave of Soviet Jewish immigration, which is also the second wave of mafia importation, following that of the 1970s, which Mogilevic was so deft at exploiting. It wasn’t only innocent victims of discrimination who emigrated but thousands of criminals whom the KGB was thrilled to be rid of. Many of them landed in the United States, colonizing Little Odessa, where Ivan’kov would settle in 1992; others ended up in different parts of the world. But they stayed on good terms, as part of a global network in which Don Semën and the Little Jap merely had to insert themselves, without ever losing touch with the Russian brotherhoods.