Issue #12/93, June 22 - July 6, 2000 
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Iggy Pops Officials
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Igor Shagin made ‘em san offer they couldn’t refuse, or so he thought. But, after running a criminal gang that tried to wax several Ukrainian government officials over the last three years, the Russian businessman’s gig is up. On April 28, the cops grabbed him off a Kiev street, citing ‘malicious disobedience,’ which in Ukrainian apparently means farming out hits.
Iggy is the owner of Top Servis Vostok, a food trading company with connections stretching all the way up to Ukrainian parliamentary deputies. And, according to Kiev City Prosecutor Yuri Haisynsky, rather than increase the bribe every time an official stood in the way of his business, he just ordered them killed.
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First came the attempt on Agriculture Ministry official Mykola Patsiuk. Mykola made the mistake of banning Top Servis Vostok from importing a large consignment of meat from Russia. He was knifed several times, but lived.
Then, after a conflict with local tax administration, Iggy sent flatheads out to take care of the chief of Kiev’s Zhovtnevy district tax administration Mykola Pidmohylny and his deputy Tamara Koliushko. They were knifed on their way out from work. The second time, Mykola proved as resilient as the first, but Tamara quickly bit it in a hospital.
When they weren’t busy trying to kill folks, Iggy’s thugs would supplement revenues carrying out armed robberies around Kiev. 14 gang members, including six hired killers and a weapons supplier, have been arrested.
Not everyone is convinced of Iggy’s guilt, however. His wife says she knows he could never do any thing like murder for hire. Former partner come Peoples Deputy Volodimir Fialkovsky to this day defends the Iggy’s methodology, saying he was an honest businessman victimized by a government plot to destroy his business.
Haisynsky, the prosecutor, responded that support is only natural. He alleges that Fialkovsky received $500,000 from Iggy to twist some arms and get him out of jail. Unfortunately for Iggy, parliamentary immunity doesn’t extend to one’s business partners.
Don’t ask, don’t tell
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Odessa cops were treated to an unusual surprise on May 6, when they entered a dormitory room at Odessa State Naval Academy. Not only were there five dead cadets on the floor, but four of corpses were buck naked and tied up. So much for keeping in the closet.
The story starts with a couple Moldavian fags, Vitali Kirillov and Petr Kasap. They were well known miscreants who often hung around the academy. Why fags would hang around sailors remains a mystery to this day. About a week before the murders, they bought a glass (250 g) of grass for about 40 bucks from a cadet named Alexei. Turns out they got a bag full of oregano.
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“It’s a damn shame, Vova, that we have to arrest this nice young gentleman.” |
That was not cool with the Moldavians. They told Alexei to return all their money plus another 950 bucks for emotional damage. Alexei apparently knew that these were two fags not to fuck with, agreed to pay and got the hell out of town. After a couple days, Vitali and Petr got bored waiting.
They decided it didn’t really matter which sailor gave them their money back, so they formed a plan. Albeit a bad plan, but a plan none the less. They declared war on the Ukrainian navy.
After occupying a second floor room in one of the Academy’s dorms, the pair started playing the part of sirens, to lure in sailors. They admitted one sailor at a time, threatened him with a knife, tied him up and demanded money. When that didn’t prove very lucrative, they covered his head with a plastic bag and knocked him out.
Once their collection of tied up and unconscious sailors reached the respectable number of five, they decided to raise the stakes. Petr sat on one cadet’s head, suffocating him. Then, he took all the money he had and stripped him naked for good measure. Not to be outdone, Vitali stabbed another one. The rest were strangled and stripped one by one. The stabbing victim was apparently too bloody to strip, and they left him in uniform.
After collecting all the money they could find in the now naked cadets’ pockets, the two casually strolled out of the dorm, never to be seen again. Chances are it didn’t come close to the 40 bucks they lost, so Simferopol beware...
One less folkie to worry about
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Bilozir probably should have been killed long before, when he founded the shitty Ukrainian rock band Vatra (Fire) in the 80’s. However, the menace to society managed to survive for almost two decades, even after making the vile transformation into a folk singer. His whiney ballads sung in Ukrainian eventually earned the title People’s Artist of Ukraine.
He continued to make horrible music until one fateful afternoon at the end of May. Bilozir, 45, was strumming his guitar and singing his terrible songs to a couple friends in Lvov’s Tsarska Kava Cafe when a group of Russian speaking locals started bitching and harassing him, telling him he should be singing in Russian. The two groups told each other to fuck themselves, and that seemed to be it.
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“Goddamnit honey, if I told you once, I told you a thousand times!
The expat Meeting Point is at Buddha Bar, not the Boar House!” |
But that evening, presumably after each group downed several bottles of horilka (vodka), the Ukrainian and Russian speakers met again by chance. This time, they brawled and Bilozir got wailed on so bad he fell into a coma. A couple days later, on May 28, he died.
Most of the Russian-language side was arrested after the brawl. Among them was the son of a top level cop in Lvov, who got out on bail and quickly disappeared. Hmmm. The prosecutors office didn’t show much will to bring charges against the good ol boys, despite popular opinion calling for them to fry.
Lvovites, the most nationalistic of all Ukrainians, decided to take initiative and started to riot. Obviously the bunch of pimply faced, metal head brown shirts didn’t give a shit about Bilozir’s music, they were just looking for an excuse to fuck up Russians. All power to them. That day of Bilozir’s death, a group of Ukrainian Nationalists leveled a cafÈ where Russian songs were sometimes sung. The Social-National Party of Ukraine, one of Lvov’s most militant ultra nationalist groups, mobilized about 3000 to shout anti-Russian slogans and trash Tsarska Kava, the cafe where it all started.
By the end of the month, the protests had gained in size to the tens of thousands, but the violence petered out. No deaths, and shockingly few injuries. The mass movement got the prosecutor moving on the case. Oh well—apparently, it takes more than the death of a folkie to really rile nationalists.
Cultural imperialism
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So much for mass murders in public spaces being the exclusive domain of American psychos. Now, not only is coke omnipresent and Hollywood piped into every Ukrainian’s home, but Ukrainians are learning how to “go postal.”
On June 6, the small town of Reni in southern Ukraine suffered from a disgruntled worker attack. A masked man burst into a cheesy disco and shot the place up with a Kalashnikov. By the end of his American inspired spree, three lay dead and another nine people were wounded.
Authorities say it had nothing to do with the settling of accounts and it was apparently completely random violence. They’ve not yet found any suspects or even clues. But at least Ukraine has proved it can compete with America on some levels.
