“This is unbelievable!” I hear my reader cry.
Believe me, it fits the picture. This is exactly how, during the Yeltsin years, organized-crime syndicates were born and grew to maturity in Russia. Now, under Putin, they determine what happens in the state. It is precisely to them—powerful, influential, and superrich—that the president is referring when he says that any redistribution of property is impossible and that everything should stay as it is. Putin may be God and czar in Chechnya, punishing and pardoning, but he is afraid of touching these Mafiosi. Money is in play here beyond the dreams of most of us, and the price of a life, or a man’s honor, is peanuts when the profits are counted in millions.
THE UNTOUCHABLES
With the coming of the Fedulev group, the Urals stopped living by the rules, to use the criminal jargon that has found such fertile soil in Russia that even the president employs it in his speeches.
I asked people in the streets of Yekaterinburg whom they respected: Governor Rossel? Fedulev? Chernetsky, the city’s mayor? Their answer: “Uralmash.” Taken aback, I asked them how they could respect crooks. The answer was simple: “They live by their thieves’ law, but at least they have laws. The new crooks do not even observe those.”
This is what we have come to: respect for one Mafia in preference to another, because the one is much worse than the other.
Let us go back to 1997. Fedulev had the Yekaterinburg police in his pocket and had taken over the illegal vodka market. He continued to play the stock market and defrauded a certain Moscow firm—not just any old firm, but one that belonged to the consortium of a well-known metropolitan oligarch who was sponsoring Yeltsin and his family. In those days to try to defraud him was tantamount to committing suicide. Twice the firm reported fraud to the Sverdlovsk UBOP, but any information that could embarrass Fedulev was blocked there, and the CID refused to open a criminal case. Only after the intervention of the prosecutor general’s office was Criminal Case No. 142114 opened: in Moscow, not in Yekaterinburg. Fedulev went on the lam. An all-Russia arrest warrant was put out for him.
Remember Yury Altshul, the former spy who became Fedulev’s minder? Remember that all who knew him spoke of him as a thoroughly decent person, a man of his word and entirely fearless?
Having set up his own detective agency and security firm, Altshul continued to provide the Russian security services with intelligence. Information passed by him to the prosecutor general’s office and the FSB put several big wheels of the Urals underworld behind bars. Altshul did, however, have a particular obsession: the struggle against the Uralmash crime syndicate. Although the idea may seem bizarre, this was exactly what drew Altshul to Fedulev.
Faced with an all-Russia warrant for his arrest and knowing about Altshul’s idée fixe, Fedulev summoned him for a talk. Fedulev was afraid that during his enforced absence, Uralmash would take control of the two other hydrolytic factories in Sverdlovsk Province in which he maintained an interest. Fedulev asked Altshul to defend, by any means at his disposal, Fedulev’s interests against Uralmash. In return, he promised Altshul 50 percent of the profit from the Lobva Hydrolytic Factory, which he was in the process of completing his takeover.
Altshul went off to Lobva, a town with nothing apart from the hydrolytic factory. There he observed the deliberate running down of the factory’s production capacity. Altshul could not help asking himself why Fedulev was buying up so many shares.
Before Fedulev had become involved, the Lobva factory had been operating fairly successfully. Once he began transferring its assets to his other companies, they started selling or processing spirits illegally. The money from these sales naturally came back to the Lobva factory through his companies’ accounts, but not in full. Month by month, Fedulev sucked the factory dry.
When Altshul arrived at Lobva, the workers had not been paid for seven months. The factory was one step away from bankruptcy. Because the community had developed around the factory, without it the town would die.
At this point, Altshul decided to act on his initiative rather than on Fedulev’s behalf. He gave the workers his word that he would restore order and that as a first step there were two individuals the workers would not see at the factory again, because Altshul would not let them through the door. They were Sergey Chupakhin and Sergey Leshukov, Fedulev’s hatchet men.
Chupakhin and Leshukov had formerly been officers of the Serious Fraud Office of the province’s Directorate of Internal Affairs. They were also personal friends of Vasily Rudenko and colleagues of Nikolai Ovchinnikov, and had left the police in order to look after their financial interests in Fedulev’s businesses.
Some time passed before Fedulev was finally arrested—in Moscow, naturally. Even from his isolation cell he did everything he could to influence the course of events in Yekaterinburg. Members of the police who were under his control (Rudenko was, after all, in Moscow by now) arranged for Altshul to come, on Fedulev’s summons, to see him in prison. At this meeting, Fedulev insisted that Altshul should hand the management of the factory back to Chupakhin and Leshukov. Not wishing to lose his share in the business, Rudenko was demanding this of Fedulev.
But Altshul refused and flew back to Yekaterinburg, with Rudenko following in his wake. Altshul was summoned to the UBOP for a talk, and there Rudenko insisted that he give up the Lobva factory.
Again Altshul categorically refused. A couple of days later, on March 30, 1999, the former army spy was shot in his car. A criminal case was opened, this time No. 528006. Once again the prime suspect was Fedulev. This was the third criminal case in which he was implicated in contract killings, but can you guess what happened? Nothing. Case No. 528006 was shelved, like the others.
Fedulev’s calculation was criminally simple: with Altshul out of the way, the factory was his. Altshul, however, had left a friend and deputy in Lobva: Vasily Leon, another ex-spy and special operations veteran. Leon categorically refused all the demands from Fedulev’s people that he should get out.
The Rudenko-Chupakhin-Leshukov trio presented Leon with a compromise, or rather an offer not meant to be refused. Leon could stay on as director, but Chupakhin and Leshukov would return to handle the wholesale side of factory liquor sales, which was what really mattered. The three didn’t just ask Leon to agree; they intimidated him. He was openly summoned by Skvortsov, Fedulev’s head of the UBOP, who did his best to cow Leon into submission. In the meantime, Rudenko had been further promoted and transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The third source pressuring Leon was a certain Leonid Fesko, a friend of Rudenko’s and another high-ranking police official in Sverdlovsk Province. Fesko was shortly to depart for Moscow to manage the so-called Defense and Aid Fund for Members of the Sverdlovsk Province UBOP. Funds like it were a familiar institution for legally transferring illegal payments, bribes, and bonuses; they had been devised by gentlemen like Fedulev in the mid-1990s. Large numbers of them still exist.
Fesko later became Fedulev’s deputy for security and discipline in the enterprises Fedulev’s Mafia controlled. In emergencies, if competitors were turning up the heat, it was Fesko’s job to mobilize the special operations police units to crush the resistance. It was Fesko, in fact, who masterminded the seizure of Uralkhimmash in September 2000.