#9 | June 5 - 18, 1997  

Boy, Was He Pissed!

The eXile award for most twisted crime of the year so far goes to 46 year-old Alexander Petrov of the Tombov oblast, who left six people charred and burnt in the hospital after a freakish botched murder-suicide. A veteran mechanic at a sovkhoz in the tiny village of Verkhnyaya Yaroslavka, Petrov, like just about everyone else in the provinces these days, was pissed over not having received his salary for months. Unlike most others, however, he decided to do something about it.

"Well, the business card says M-I-C-H-A-E-L B-A-S-S..."

On the afternoon of May 16 he entered the office of the sovkhoz administration, poured gasoline all over the floor and over himself, and dropped a match to the ground. Within minutes the entire first floor of the small building was in flames, and the five workers who were at their desks on the second floor came barreling down the stairs to head for the exit. The only problem was that Petrov, by now himself engulfed in flames, was blocking the one door to the building. When a woman attempted to move past him, he stabbed her with a plastic-handled knife. Eventually, however, the remianing four managed to overpower him and burst out the door. Farm firefighters arrived quickly enough to put out the fire and the flaming Petrov, who by then had passed out in shock on the first floor. All six people were taken to a hospital in Tambov and remain in serious condition. Petrov, if he lives, will be charged with attempted murder and arson.

A Head Start

The newspaper "Kriminalnaya Khronika" reported in its newest issue that a new standard for juvenile delinquency was set when four ten year-olds- three boys and a girl- were arrested in the far eastern city of Nakhodka for armed robbery. The four pre-teens went into the clothing store with guns and came away with ten million rubles in cash. "Possibly, this is an all-Russian record, if not a world record," the newspaper wrote. The story brought further renown on Nakhodka, one of Russia's most notoriosly mobbed-up cities, for its criminal profile. "For orginiality in its reported crimes, Nakhodka can compete on an even field with Moscow, St. Petersburg, and even Rostov," the paper commented. The four suspects, incidentally, all had prior criminal records, all for unarmed petty theft.

"No, they're not here- maybe under the car?"

Three Years

There just must not be very many banks or jewelry stores in Siberia. According to the newspaper "Petrovka 38," two geeks from Chelyabinsk will probably get three years in prison for the crime of robbing, of all people, a tram conductor. The net haul on the theft was a leather bag, a conductor badge, and fifteen thousand rubles. For sheer stupidity, this robbery rivals last year's incident in Moscow where a homeless man shot off his own testicles while trying to hold up a bakery for 7000 rubles. In that case, however, the perpetrator was drunk. These two Chelyabinsk suspects were sober. Neither could explain their choice of target to police after arrest. "Probably the last thing I'd rob," commented Chelyabinsk police press secretary Anatoly Bogdanov.