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Two Bullets to His Head
Alexander Lesser
Viktor the Yid's untimely death in a hail of gunfire casts light on the Russian mob scene
On August 2, the last morning of his life, Viktor Israelevich Kogan, a Moscow gangster known as "the Yid," dressed in his trademark silk suit and tie, left his wife, Lena, and their 11-year-old son, Lev, at their spacious apartment and went to work.
"Work" for Viktor meant taking protection money from pinball arcades in his territory, Orekhovoi-Borisova, a south Moscow neighborhood. But that day, two toughs from a southwestern gang headed by Sergei "Sylvester" Timofeyev came into one of Viktor's arcades, and a turf argument turned into a shoot-out. Viktor got the two guys, but they got him too. Two bullets caught him in the forehead.
According to Detective Mikhail Sumtsov of the Moscow police, who'd known Viktor for years, it is rare to find Jews among the gangsters whose shooting wars in recent months have made Moscow look like Al Capone's Chicago of the 1920s.
"We find more Jews on the shady side of show business or in art theft or what have you than among the muscle guys," says Sumtsov's boss, Captain Vladimir Rushailo, chief of the city police's organized crime division. But both Sumtsov and Rushailo hasten to add that criminal groups in Moscow with the exception of gangs from the Caucasus region, such as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya are not organized along ethnic lines. "We have cases involving Jews, but a Jewish mafia? Small groups maybe with ties to Russians living in Brooklyn, but even in these groups the ethnic content is mixed," says Sergei Murashov, head of the organized crime division's analysis department.
Viktor's 15-member gang, for example, was mostly ethnically Russian. The only other Jews in the group are Adolf Hershovich Zelyony, a smuggler nicknamed "the Respected"; Volodya "the Fish" Ribitzky, a locksmith and safe-cracker; and Yakov "Yasha" Barsky, a goldsmith. All three are still at large.
More frequently, Jews are victims in one way or another. Local gangs, for instance, may burglarize the apartments of prospective emigrants to Israel or the United States who are holding large sums of cash after selling off their possessions to leave. A few months ago a local Jew, the uncle of an Israeli diplomat in Moscow, fell victim to a burglary that ended in his murder. "They must have heard he was emigrating," said the diplomat.
Jews among Moscow's foreign community have also been touched by the violence. New Jersey restaurateur Jeffrey Zeiger (profiled in The Jerusalem Report, May 20,1993) lost his Russian partner in the successful Moscow Tren-Mos eatery to a professional hit in August. The partner, Moscow politician Sergei Goryachev, was shot twice in the head and neck by unknown assailants. "Sergei may have been into things I didn't know about," says Zeiger, "but I'm sticking it out here."
Crime has exploded in Russia since the fall of Communism, aided by the time-honored Russian disrespect for law, low police salaries and big profits to be made in a new and virtually unregulated market economy. There are over 3,000 organized crime groups in Russia, according to the Interior Ministry. But the term "organized crime" is somewhat of a misnomer, since nothing is really organized in Russia, a country that does not even have phone books. The gangs tend to be small, and many are involved in both legal and illegal activities. Since business itself was illegal until very recently, the line between licit and illicit in Russia is very thin.
Rock-music managers in Russia, for example, commonly demand large under-the-table payments from their performers in return for protection from other "managers." In sports, the bosses of the Moscow city Committee on Sports and Physical Culture ride around town in big Mercedes sedans brimming with antennas and bodyguards. How do civil servants afford such cars?
Muscovites know the answers to questions like that. Under the grudging free-market policies initiated during Mikhail Gorbachev's Communist twilight, music and sports were two fields that allowed Soviet citizens the chance to earn hard currency by sending people abroad. These fields soon fell under the control of certain figures who are now prominent in post-Communist Russia, among them more than a few Jews.
The end of the Soviet Union brought a freedom of movement that created new opportunities for criminals. The end of the U.S.S.R. also showed that the fall of Communism didn't suddenly turn honest people into gangsters. It exposed what was always there: people like Viktor Kogan.
Viktor began his life of crime at age 25 in 1968, when he was sentenced to three years for "hooliganism." "The file doesn't say what he did," says Detective Sumtsov, adding that there was nothing political about Viktor's long criminal record; he was neither Zionist nor dissident. He was the son of a Jewish father who died when he was very young and a Russian mother who is still alive.
"Viktor was a little bit nuts," says Sumtsov. "At times he would call me up and say: `Misha, get your cops away from my house.' And I'd say: `Vitya, none of my men are near your house.' He was laying on the paranoid bit."
Whether or not he was certifiable, Viktor discovered that playing crazy could get him out of a 10-year sentence he got in 1975 for stealing icons from Russian Orthodox churches, a crime that later became his specialty. At the trial, his accomplices testified that Viktor bit the throat of a church guard dog that attacked the thieves, a legend that enhanced his reputation.
Feigning insanity, he was soon transferred from a hard labor camp in the Urals to a cushy hospital near Moscow. Released two years later, Viktor made sure he always had with him a real certificate attesting to his insanity. It didn't hurt that, by chance, the head of the hospital he'd stayed at was also named Kogan, so the stationery Viktor stole there had a ring of authority. The idea itself was not original. "That system existed in the mid-1980s, until a bunch of doctors were arrested for selling such certificates," said Sumtsov.
During perestroika, Viktor branched out into protection. His first victim was a Jewish businessman named Rodion Zigband who, says Sumtsov, later became Viktor's partner. From there, Viktor moved into the theft of computers and other imported goods that began to flood into Russia. With his profits, he crossed the line into the newly legal world of private enterprise in Viktor's terms, the transition to a market economy by investing in real estate and importing pinball machines, which he sold to arcades in his territory (thereby increasing the number of shops he could squeeze protection money out of). His wife, Lena, whom Sumtsov calls a "gun moll" opened a store near Moscow's Luzhniki stadium to sell stolen goods and, among other thing, live snakes.
"Viktor liked snakes. Once when we searched his apartment, we found two snakes slithering around loose," says Sumtsov, adding that Viktor also liked foreign cars and guns, keeping several of each. Sumtsov recalls: "Once I said to him, `Viktor, hand over the machine gun,' and he said, `I threw it in the river.' Of course he had it, but he always had with him a certificate stating that the weapon in his possession was `to be delivered to the KGB' and he'd say he was just on his way there."
Despite his new endeavors, Viktor retained an affection for church jobs. During the night of November 23-24, 1991, Viktor bluffed his way into a church near Moscow's famous Donskoi monastery by telling the night watchman he was a lost soul in need of God. Once inside, he knocked out the guard with gas and stole half a dozen 16th- and 17th-century icons laden with gold and precious stones a haul worth more than 100,000. Or so says Sumtsov, who admits he was never able to pin the job on Viktor.
Unlike some Jewish mobsters, explains the detective, Viktor didn't have trusted export connections to Brooklyn gangs. So he relied on Yugoslav contacts and corrupt West African diplomats to handle the export of stolen gold, precious stones and icons, such as those from the Donskoi job, to Germany. The ultimate destination of the goods, says Sumtsov, wasn't part of Viktor's operation.
As long as police salaries are low around $120 a month and profits from crime high, groups like Viktor's will continue to operate, says Captain Rushailo. "You can't have organized crime without official corruption," he says.
Viktor the Yid is gone but others will take his place. His widow, Lena, is running the gang for the moment, says Sumtsov, but maybe his son, Lev, will someday step into his shoes. "They talked freely in front of him. I would say Lev has grown up in a criminal environment," says the detective. "Once we entered the apartment and found him cracking nuts with the butt of a pistol. He was nine at the time."
1993
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