#14 | August 14 - 27, 1997  

shot in podyezd	connected w/ Russian sports	murder for less than $100	really stupid criminal	explosive device	cries for help ignored	perp in body count
children	"investigation continuing"	carved up like a turkey	cannibalism	riddled with bullets	related to victim's job

Innovative Management

There are many reasons to commit murder. There are even many reasons to spend years building an underground cavern in which to imprison and torture kidnapped strangers. If one is greedy and/or a sadistic sex fiend, these things make sense. But if your aim is to start up a low-overhead boxer short company, murder, kidnapping and torture don't seem like logical options. Nonetheless, one Aleksandr Komin of the Kirov suburb of Vyatskiye Polyani did just that. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Komin and a friend, Aleksandr Mikheyev, spent four years building a multi-story basement under his garage on the edge of town. Neighbors remarked at his industriousness. When he was finished, he began putting the basement to good use. He lured a series of men and women into the garage with vodka, then knocked them out with drugs and/or blows to the head and imprisoned them underground, where they were set to work making boxer shorts on sewing machines. He tattooed the word "Slave" ("rab") on his captives' foreheads, fed them on black bread and potatoes, and forced them to go to the bathroom into a 40-liter plastic barrel. For technical expertise he had to capture a seamstress who was the friend of a friend named Nikolai Malikh; Malikh's body was found in the local landfill two years after his seamstress friend disappeared. One worker named Vera Tolpayeva who lost the will to work was given a choice of suicide options: electric shock or antifreeze ingestion. She chose antifreeze and died after two days of agony; Komin had his first organized labor uprising when the remaining slaves refused to make ground beef out of her and eat her. Give 'em an inch and they take a mile, huh? In any case, tune in to the next issue of the eXile for more details on this story, which ended unhappily for the pair of Kirov slave drivers.

May I Kidnap You?

Maybe it's just a coincidence that Boris Berezovsky-controlled Aeroflot is showing better service at precisely the time when Moscow kidnappers have begun to show some manners. A few weeks back, Andrei Gloriozov, the deputy head of Unikombank, a bank closely connected with Oneximbank and mentioned as a key player in the VPK/Mig scandal, was kidnapped as his Saab turned onto Kutuzovsky Prospekt off of Rublevskoye Shosse. Unmarked cars with sirens pulled him over and men identifying themselves as state security officials asked the portly Gloriozov out of his car. He was then carted away in front of a whole crowd of indifferent onlookers in another vehicle and taken two hours out of the city to an apartment, where he was handcuffed to a hot-water pipe in a bathroom and beaten for two days on end. His kidnappers spent most of their time grilling him for kompromat, focusing their inquiries on his relationship with MFK chief Andrei Vavilov and on the personal bank accounts of various state officials and bankers. Then, after an aborted attempt to extort his personal savings through a fax transfer, they let him go, explaining that "the client disappeared." The "client" disappeared, incidentally, at around the time that Sergei Dubinin was doing an about-face and announcing that there was no wrongdoing in the MIG affair. Whatever.

It's tough to get ahead in this world!

In any case, the victim was released and even given money for a taxi, which he took to a private parking lot where his kidnappers had, as promised, left his Saab in good condition. Nice manners. Even the Deputy chief of the Security Council would be proud.