Col. Stanislav Lunev
Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2002

Currently, Russian officials and the government-controlled media are trying to give the international community a wrong idea – that the notorious Russian or "Red" Mafia exists largely in the imagination of Western intelligence experts.

However, the activities of Russia's criminal syndicates have been exhaustively documented, not only by the law enforcement agencies but also by the security services of their commercial competitors.

The very latest, but by no means the last, evidence of its existence could be last week's arrest of a reputed Russian crime boss who fixed two figure-skating events at the Salt Lake City Olympics by arranging a vote-swapping deal.

Alimzan Tokhtakhounov, arrested in Italy on U.S. charges, is accused of scheming to get a French judge to vote for the Russian team that won a gold medal, in exchange for the Russian judge to vote for the French team, which won the ice-dancing competition.

According to U.S. intelligence experts, Russia today presents a serious danger to the Western world because it still has huge stores of very poorly guarded weapons of mass destruction and radioactive materials, along with powerful criminal syndicates prepared to sell everything to everybody for cash.

The danger that Russian criminals may sell weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against the U.S. and its friends and allies is real and is recognized by Western officials.

At the same time, Russia's Mafia-type crime groups have a history of cooperating with terrorist organizations. As Moscow's press recently reported, Russian and Chechen criminal syndicates are cooperating to transport and market heroin from Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden used these criminal organizations to launder money for his terrorism activities, receiving from $133 million to $1 billion a year.

For these and other operations, Russian criminal syndicates need large amounts of money and are using all opportunities to launder the money earned from their openly criminal activities. We know that European prosecutors are currently continuing their "Spiderweb" operation to crack down on money laundering and the Russian Mafia, which uses unprincipled Western businessmen for illegal activities.

As NewsMax.com reported on June 20, the operation led to the arrest of 50 persons, and 150 more are under investigation in connection with a $500 million money-laundering ring. The probe, one of the largest in recent history, was born out of the U.S. Justice Department's investigation into the role of the Bank of New York in large-scale money laundering from Russia in 1999.

Currently, investigators taking part in the "Spiderweb" probe have focused on the repatriation of funds from the Bank of New York and offshore centers to Russia through Italian and other European front companies.

According to Italian law enforcement officials, the Russian criminals were sending all the money that they could out of the country, and at one point many of the same people decided they wanted to bring the laundered money back. The problem was that, since they had illegally sent the money out, now they had to find a way to re-launder their money to make it appear legal to the Russian authorities.

So they decided to use friendly Italian companies to issue false invoices or send goods to Russia and make everything look more or less legitimate.

In the center of the investigation is a group run by Grigori Loutchansky, whose company, Nordex, has been linked with the Bank of New York. Mr. Loutchansky is considered by law enforcement authorities to be a major figure in the Russian organized crime network connected with this case.

As an Interpol report stated, Nordex, a company based in Vienna, Austria, with offices in Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Russia, Switzerland and Ukraine, is accused of having had a central role in the money-laundering operation uncovered by the "Spiderweb" probe.

Nordex was created by the old guard of the communist regime to allow the exodus of former Soviet Communist Party funds before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Loutchansky's organization is also suspected of having trafficked in weapons, drugs and nuclear materials, and is alleged to have close ties to the former KGB and its successor agencies. Loutchansky was expelled from Britain in 1994.

In other words, the Russian or "Red" Mafia is not a myth but a reality that is dangerous not only for Russia itself but for the Western world.

Under these circumstances, it is just as important for the Russian government, which pretends to be our partner in the anti-terrorism coalition, not to pretend its Mafia doesn't exist, but to crack down on organized crime in Russia.

Col. Stanislav Lunev is the highest-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer ever to defect from Russia. Read his gripping story, Through the Eyes of the Enemy.

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