[5] In August 2010, Alain Bauer, a criminologist from France, said that the Russian mafia "is one of the best structured criminal organizations in Europe, with a quasi-military operation" in their international activities.
The highly publicized Sicilian Mafia is believed to have inspired early criminal groups in Russia to form mafia-like organizations, eventually spawning their own version.
The level of political corruption and arms sales in post-Soviet Russia allowed for their massive expansion, as well as the incorporation of many government officials into the crime syndicates.
In the aftermath of World War II in 1945, the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, more gangs emerged in a flourishing black market that exploited the unstable governments of the FSU.
American attorney Louis Freeh, who headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) between 1993 and 2001, said that the Russian mafia posed the greatest threat to the United States in the mid-1990s.
[9] After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, Stalin recruited more men to fight for the nation, offering prisoners freedom if they joined the army.
Outcasts, the suki separated from the others and formed their own groups and power bases by collaborating with prison officials, eventually gaining the luxury of comfortable positions.
[4][9] Also during the 1970s and 1980s, the United States expanded its immigration policies, allowing Soviet Jews, with most settling in a southern Brooklyn area known as Brighton Beach (sometimes nicknamed "Little Odessa").
[15] In 1990, his former friend, Monya Elson, back from a six-year prison sentence in Israel, returned to America and set up a rival heroin business, culminating in a mafia turf war.
[8][17] Gangster summit meetings had taken place in hotels and restaurants shortly before the Soviet's dissolution, so that top vory v zakone could agree on who would rule what, and set plans on how to take over the post-communist states.
Former Soviet bureaucrats, factory directors, aggressive businessmen, and criminal organizations used insider deals, bribery, and simple brute force to grab lucrative assets.
Russia's new capitalists spent millions of dollars for protection, buying armor-plated cars, bomb sensors, hidden cameras, bulletproof vests, anti-wiretapping gear, and weapons, recruiting veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars as their bodyguards.
It was agreed that Vyacheslav "Yaponchik" Ivankov would be sent to Brighton Beach in 1992, allegedly because he was killing too many people in Russia and also to take control of Russian organized crime in North America.
[11] Within a year, he built an international operation that included but was not limited to narcotics, money laundering, and prostitution and made ties with the American Mafia and Colombian drug cartels, eventually extending to Miami, Los Angeles, and Boston.
[27] Back in Eastern Europe in May 1995, Semion Mogilevich held a summit meeting of Russian mafia bosses in his U Holubu restaurant in Anděl, a neighborhood of Prague.
"[29][30] Mikhailov would later be arrested in Switzerland in October 1996 on numerous charges,[19] including that he was the head of a powerful Russian mafia group, but was exonerated and released two years later after evidence was not enough to prove much.
[31][32] The global extent of Russian organized crime was not realized until Ludwig "Tarzan" Fainberg was arrested in January 1997, primarily because of arms dealing.
Alexander Yasevich, an associate of the Russian military contact and an undercover DEA agent, was sent to verify the illegal dealing, and in 1997, Fainberg was finally arrested in Miami.
[9][11] The FreeLance Bureau (FLB.ru) [ru] published a website in 2000 containing Philipp Bobkov's MOST Group Security Database along with files from RUOP and other departments and special services.
[39][40] In the same year, Semion Mogilevich was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for his involvement in a complex multimillion-dollar scheme that defrauded investors in the stock of his company YBM Magnex International, swindling them out of $150 million.
Russian organized crime was reported to have a stronger grip in the French Riviera region and Spain in 2010;[6] and Russia was branded as a virtual "mafia state" according to the WikiLeaks cables.
[46] They were also accused of operating secret and underground gambling dens based in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and using violence against those who owed gambling debts, establishing nightclubs to sell drugs, plotting to force women associates to rob male strangers by seducing and drugging them with chloroform, and trafficking over 10,000 pounds of stolen chocolate confectionery; the chocolate was stolen from shipment containers.
[49] On 26 September 2017, as part of a 4-year investigation, 100 Spanish Civil Guard officers carried out 18 searches in different areas of Málaga, Spain, related to Russian mafia large scale money laundering.
[51] On 19 February 2018, 18 defendants were accused of laundering over $62 million through real estate, including with the help of Vladislav Reznik, former chairman of Rosgosstrakh, one of Russia's largest insurance companies.