Georgian mafia

It is thanks to cooperation with the Georgian crime that the young and energetic Joseph Stalin so successfully engaged in robbing banks, extorting money and stealing property from wealthy citizens.

Interestingly, a similar process was observed in the Soviet criminal underground, where up to a third of strategically important positions were taken by immigrants from Georgia, while the share of the Georgian ethnic group in the general population of the USSR did not exceed 2%.

At the dawn of independence of the country, a number of local wars and military conflicts, the course of which largely depended on which side they took a well-organized Georgian criminal groups.

After these events, a number of "double flowers", strategically important areas, blossomed previously unknown to local residents of the phenomenon, such as human trafficking, weapons smuggling and illegal drugs.

Suddenly it turned out that corruption and organized crime pose a threat to the country no less than Chechen terrorists, who feel at ease in the Pankisi Gorge.

Due to an absence of any other means of funding, the militias engaged in protection rackets and smuggling and the weak Georgian government had no choice but to embrace them.

[6] The paramilitaries were first deployed against the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but attempts by President Zviad Gamsakhurdia to rein them in resulted in a violent coup where he was replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze, who had the backing of the militias, which continued to operate with impunity.

One of the famous members of the Georgian government, Kakha Targamadze, the Minister of Internal Affairs, was connected with such criminal authorities as Aslan Usoyan, Tariel Oniani and Dzambo Dzambidze.

During the 1990s, as rival criminal gangs, corrupt law enforcement and oligarchs fought one another for supremacy over the lucrative protection rackets of the emerging private business sector in the chaotic transition to capitalism, the Georgian mafia made its presence known in Moscow.

[13] In more recent years, the Georgian underworld in Russia, Georgia and elsewhere has been characterized by a violent feud between the Kutaisi and Tbilisi clans, led by Tariel Oniani and Aslan Usoyan, respectively.

The conflict claimed the life of notorious Russian thief-in-law Vyacheslav Ivankov, who was assassinated while attempting to mediate in 2009, while Usoyan was himself killed by a sniper in January 2013.