#6 | April 24 - May 7, 1997  

Give Blood-Play Hockey

Hockey is a tough sport; on the ice, Russians are said to play more of a finesse game than the Canadians, but off it, they seem to be a few Maple Leafs up on the competition. Soon Russian hockey officials may start wearing green lights over their heads so that assassins will know when they've scored; the latest victim was none other than Valentin Siych, the President of the Russian Hockey Federation, murdered on April 22 at nine a.m. The assassin used the by-now cliche method of the bullet in the head at nine a.m. in the victim's own podyezd; Siych was on his way to be interviewed by Komsomolskaya Pravda.

"Your penalty boxes are a lot less comfortable than the ones we have in Canada."

The hit comes on the heels of a major shakeup in the CSKA hockey team-once an international powerhouse and a huge source of revenue and publicity for the state and now reduced to two separate, poorly-performing, money-losing clubs. Gangland threats abounded during the Red Army breakup, but police, predictably, have yet to connect Siych's killing to anything.

An Unlucky Number

How easy is it to kill 13 people in Russia and not make it into the newspapers? Pretty easy, judging by the experience of the "Sokhin" gang, a small group of car thieves who branched into murder when their leader discovered he liked to kill the drivers as well as take the cars. According to the Moscow GUVD press office, the party ended after the gang's 13th murder, when Federal and Local Moscow uglovniy rozisk officials arrested five in connection with the killings. "Sh," the police pseudonym for the 24 year-old group leader, apparently was sexually excited by murder and chose new methods each time, killing one with a champagne bottle, another with a shovel, another with a hammer, etc. The strange mix of serial killing and gang activity came to an end after police traced the stolen cars to fences in Belarus, who fingered the killers.

A GAIshnik Caught Moonlighting

"New shoes- what a pain! Always slipping and sliding, slipping and sliding..."

Maybe if your first name was a breakfast-and maybe if you were a former Georgian GAI officer who had emigrated to Greece and found it hard to get a job, maybe you, too, would get involved with a little kidnapping. So it went for Omlet Buntagov, originally from Tblisi, who was arrested in Moscow last month and is now awaiting trial on charges of kidnapping, Nina Logvinenko, 8, from her home in Kharkov. Buntagov was just one of a six-person gang who plotted the kidnapping of Nina, daughter of Alexander Logvinenko, president of the import-export firm "Berill." Nina's kidnapping was a typical new Russian crime story; Logvinenenko's own business partners planned the crime, only they overestimated his net worth, so when they called and asked for a $1.5 million ransom, he was not immediately able to provide it. The kommersant's failure to pay up right away resulted in the gang's increasing reliance on Buntagov, who had been recruited to play the middleman in the scam. Buntagov and the gang led the girl from city to city, until finally a meeting between father and middleman in the Moscow hotel "Akademicheskaya" was monitored by RUOP officers, who followed the "omelet" home and recaptured the girl.