Issue #24/49, October 10 - 22, 1998  

low-yield murder	"skull-brain trauma"	podyezd	really stupid criminal	children	Russian Sports Connection	murder-suicide
cries for help ignored	"investigation continuing"	carved up like a turkey	related to victim's job	cannibalism	riddled with bullets	old people

I'll "C" your gram, and kill U

'Member those birthday parties when you were a kid? They kinda sucked, didn't they? Nothing but disappointment. Never as fun as you'd expected. The gifts were never as cool as you'd hoped. The cake was always topped with cheap-O sugar frosting. And the worst part was the pinata. You could never break the damn thing open with your whiffle bat, so finally dad had to come and tear it open with his electric carving knife, when out would poor... cheap, lousy Mexican candy that no one wanted to eat.

For some anonymous drug dealers, a none-too-disappointing human pinata arrived in Moscow on September 16th from Dushanbe, Tadjikastan, on the infamous flight 632, known to vice squad fellas as the flight favored by Tadjik smack mules. According to the October 2nd issue of Moskovsky Komsomolets, the 25-year-old Tadjik's mutilated body was found three days later after arrival in a forest in the Solnechnogorskovo region near Zelenograd. The corpse had a large "C" (that would be a Cyrillic "C") carved into his stomach, entrails leading to the side of the body. The "C" didn't represent "Cut Along Dotted Line," but it may as well have. Upon further examination, police found a small 4.5x1 cm foil wrapper close to the body containing... you guessed it... 16.68 grams of Afghanistan's finest heroin. Folks, 16.68 grams has a street value of roughly $1,600 dollars, and these days, every penny counts.

Police figure that the luckless Tadjik swallowed a few balloons of heroin before boarding, but somewhere along the way, one of the containers burst open in his stomach, perhaps due to eating that last serving of spicy plov', rendering him a very blue Tadjik. But not before his Moscow partners were able to whisk him away from the Moscow airport and into the forest, gut him, and make off with most of the jones.

Investigators are confused as to why the partners would bother taking the corpse into the forest, and leave a stash of smack by the body. It's thought there might have been plenty more where that came from, and maybe the geniuses decided to leave one packet behind as a way of saying, "Hey, just because we knocked the pinata open first, doesn't mean we're not gonna share." Or maybe they're just imbeciles. We'll keep you posted.

Killer Bee-Line

Here's a trick question. Let's say there's this organization of big-time businessmen, a roundtable forum, who banded together to increase their political influence. Then let's say that one guy from the roundtable got turned into human confetti, and another had his telephone soaked with poison, leading to a brutal two-day death that included vomiting up a "milky substance," like that cyborg in Alien. Now let's say you're the next guy in line. What do you do?

"Billy, you come out of that alligator's stomach right this second!"

Most of us would make a Bee-Line straight to Sheremetyevo, book a flight to Bermuda, and never look back.

Not roundtable honcho Sergei Ivantsov, who, as the formal represtentative of Bee-Line cell-phones, stayed right where he was. The man who made cellphones synonymous with 90s Moscow haute flathead couture stuck it out at the roundtable and, as of a week ago Wednesday, wound up in the trunk of his Saab-9000, dead from bullet wounds.

The 40-year-old Ivantsov was discovered by a local villager in an area between Svistukha and Klyazma, on the edge of the famous old "Rodina" pioneer camp, who was perplexed by the sight of a foreign car wedged into an old fence. When the old villager took a look into the cab, he noticed blood splattered on the back seat, and ran to call the police, who discovered the bodies in the trunk of the car. Both Ivantsov and his nameless chauffeur had been shot execution-style in the back of the head.

Ivantsov first made his name in the famous Roundtable group a few years back, a group which was considered highly influential in Mayor Luzhkov's circles. When leading roundtable figures Oleg Kantor and Ivan Kivelidi ended up going from the roundtable to the autopsy table, the Roundtable folks took a more lowkey approach.

According to MK, rumors linked Ivantsov with the Baumanskaya gruppirovka, the very roof that keeps angry readers from burning down the eXile offices. Supposedly, the police will be working double-shift to see if the Baumanskaya boyz had anything to do with Ivantsov's murder. If the police have as much luck solving this brain-teaser as they did the Kantor and Kivelidi murders, you can bet that the Baumanskaya Boyz will be shitting... well, shit.

Another lead police are following is that the murder is connected with his professional activities at Bee-Line. Kinda hard to Bee Happy in that case, isn't it? Readers may recall that Bee-Line's parent company, Vimpelcom, was the first Class-3 Russian ADR to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It's stock has fallen from 59 to around 4 earlier this week. MK also noted that Ivantsov's dacha neighbor was none other than the late Mr. Vukolov, one of the heads of the Disabled Afghan Veteran's Fund, who not long ago was turned into human latticework in a hail of bullets somewhere near Khimki. Surprisingly, police still have not been able to solve Mr. Vukulov's murder. However, police still hold out hope that they will find Ivantsov's killers, and have even left a telephone number for witnesses to call: 573-0202. No word on whether or not Bee Line will offer a special hot-line number, but we're pretty sure no one will Bee That Fucking Stupid to call the police and offer themselves as murder witnesses.