Mark Galeotti, The Vory: Russia’s Super-Mafia

Abstract

One day during my PhD research on organized crime in Georgia in 2009, I was sitting with five middle-aged men in an apartment in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea coast. All five had come to the end of long careers in completely different fields. Three of the men were former prisoners with long criminal careers going back into the Soviet past. The other two men were former police officers. The five knew each other intimately, though not quite as friends. One of the former prisoners, sitting top...