ZeroZeroZero (28 page)

It was his wife, Paulina, who periodically made transfers from Mexico, and whom the vice president of Citibank’s Mexico division had introduced to his Mexican colleagues as Patricia Ríos. Under that false name, Señora Salinas deposited checks drawn on at least five Mexican banks into her account, so they could be converted into American dollars and transferred to New York. There the money ended up in a so-called concentration account—a deposit account into which capital from various clients and bank branches flows before being sent on to numerous final destinations.

It seems rather ironic that the blow landed in Switzerland, the country most famous for its long tradition of banking secrecy, and where judicial proceedings against Salinas have been in progress for many years. They continued even after Carla Del Ponte became prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague, where she investigated the crimes of Slobodan Milošević, and ended in a trial in which the Swiss judge ruled that the Mexican government structures were protecting drug trafficking and that the money could not have originated legally. In fact, it remained frozen in Swiss banks, waiting for the Mexican courts to issue a verdict on the connections between Salinas and the cartels. But there was insufficient proof on that crucial point, and the case was closed. And so, in 2008, Switzerland decided to hand over $74 million of it to the Mexican government, a sum that had grown to $130 million, and to return an additional percentage to third parties who had entrusted their money to Raúl Salinas. And it’s not over yet, because on July 19, 2013, a Mexican federal judge absolved Salinas of the crime of illegal accumulation of wealth. The evidence was insufficient to prove that Salinas’s fortune had been generated through illegal activities.

The problem that emerges from this interminable saga is the frequent lack both of tools of legal recourse and often of interest in going after dirty money, even when the accused is not a notorious member of some criminal organization but an exponent of that elite and that institutional apparatus that is needed to keep the machine of white profit running. Cocaine money first buys politicians and officials, and then, through them, the shelter of the banks.

“The Amalfi Coast, Sardinia, the Costa del Sol, Tuscany, Malta, Ibiza. It’s all Russia!” The man who is speaking knows well the difference between Moscow’s penetrating chill and Italy’s refreshing warmth. A Russian like so many others who invade Italy when summer calls for bathing suits and sunscreen. The Russians are everywhere; you see them and automatically you think: Russians, Russian mafiosi. . . . As if all rich Russians were criminals. But the presence of the Russian mafia—the Mafija with a
j
—is as powerful as it is complex, difficult to understand and to learn about. We know it through clichés, through tales of jailbirds covered in barbaric tattoos, ex-boxers with broken noses, brutal ex-
specnaz,
hooligan pushers with eyes shot through with vodka and low-grade drugs. But the Mafija is something completely different. To get your bearings you have to look at the powerful families, observe their strength. Families bound not by blood but by the organization’s common interests. And like all families, they have a photo album. Everything’s in there: the color of the past; faces of distant relatives; snapshots of important moments; places of the heart.

It is not easy to leaf through a Russian Mafija family album, but I’ve
tried to do that with the life of one quick-thinking boss, who is known as the Brainy Don. He’s a way for me to understand how big business is linked to big crime. I imagine I saw him countless times in bars along the Italian coast, or drunk at dinner, with other mobsters. Hallucinations? Sometimes you have to go with your hallucinations, so I immerse myself in the story. I have a collection of the protagonists’ photographs with me, a sort of album I’ve put together these past years; I need to start from something I can touch. The Brainy Don. He doesn’t look like a mafioso. Like a Russian, yes, but he could also pass for American, German, Spanish, or Hungarian. At first glance he’s just another elderly, obese gentleman. We tend to think that people who are that slow in their bodies must be so in their minds as well. Harmless. Innocuous. But that’s not true; you have to take a closer look. In the most famous photograph of him he’s holding a cigarette, caressing it with his chubby fingers. He’s not looking at the camera but at some point above the photographer’s head. His shirt and finely tailored vest barely contain his 290 pounds, which press against the fabric, creating pleats and wrinkles. Behind him, a fireplace framed in marble tiles; before him, a laptop and a pair of elegant reading glasses. To complete the picture, an office chair and a transparent ashtray, which suggests that the cigarette he’s holding is not the first of the day. A businessman, rich and powerful, the head of numerous companies that operate in a wide range of sectors. Sure of himself, authoritarian, devoted to his work. With thousands of employees to oversee, budgets to review and approve, important decisions to make. The Brainy Don’s name is Semën Judkovic Mogilevic. On January 20, 2011,
Time
magazine put him first on its list of Top 10 Real-Life Mob Bosses of all time, followed by Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Pablo Escobar, and Totò Riina. American and European security agencies consider him one of the key Mafija leaders, the head of the Russian octopus, with tentacles all over the world.

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 fifty thousand dollars a month in order to manage its supermarkets in Russia. Coca-Cola announces that it is not its policy to give in to blackmail, and the next day its new factory near Moscow gets a visit from a machine gun and a grenade launcher—two security guards are seriously wounded. The company reported the assault to the Russian authorities,
but the case remains unsolved. According to I
nterpol
, other multinationals targeted are IBM, Philip Morris, and, curiously, Cadbury, Mars, and Hershey, as if there were some special sweetness in earnings extorted from chocolate factories.

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.