The Chechen Mafia Goes Global: Ramzan Kadyrov, Car Bombs, Guns-for-hire and The World's Weirdest Reality Show
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February 18, 2001.

famed Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya, travels on assignment to the Caucasian Republic of Chechnya.

It's two years into Moscow's second war to subdue the embattled state, and Politkovskaya, who works for the crusading Novaya Gazeta, has been getting tip-offs about Russian war crimes, bodies in mass graves, torture, civilians starving and freezing to death, brutal punitive raids on defenceless villages. The kind of information you need to verify in person.

Poletkovskia doesn't wait long to learn of the horrors. People thrown into shallow pits, defecating and growing sick and being tortured with electrical wire and planks. Prisoners missing fingernails and others dead from days in a flooded hole the Russians call the bathtub. Sexual abuse. A junior officer tells Poletkovskia the Chechen women have, quote, nice butts, telling interned Chechen men that they're being punished because, quote, your women wouldn't let us. Well, I won't complete the quote.

it's getting worse than grim on the front it's horrifying i heard dozens of harry and accounts from people who had been exposed to torture and maltreatment by russian troops stories so horrific that one's hand refused to jot them down writes poliskovskia in the guardian and then she adds i myself was the victim minutes after leaving an officer who expresses his regret over the abuses she's detained and held in a rutted field

Soldiers arrive, accuse her of being a Chechen rebel herself. Young officers say they're getting their orders directly from Vladimir Putin himself. "They made it clear to me that freedom was over," she writes. From time to time, Politkovskaya adds, the zealous young officers were joined by a senior officer, a Lieutenant Colonel with a swarthy face and dark, stupid, bulging eyes.

Every now and then, he sent the youngsters out of the tent, switched on what he thought to be romantic music, and hinted that if I behaved right, I could count on a quote "favorable outcome". After three hours, Polikovsky is marched outside to be shot. A cruel mock execution. Then she's held in a bunker for days. "You're one of the bandits," an FSB officer tells her. "If you worked for us, you would get everything. But you came here to look at the pits. You're a bitch."

She is released soon after. Far from cowing her, the experience galvanizes Politkovsky's energy against the Russian presidency, Putin, and, as vanquished Chechnyan leaders give way to terror, guerrilla warfare and, in his capital Grozny, the Kremlin-backed Kadyrov family.

On October 5th, 2006, Poletkovskaya once again gets on a plane to the Caucasus to meet Ramzan Kadyrov, son of slain dictator Ahmad Kadyrov, in the Kadyrov family's home village of Tensuroi. It's the younger Kadyrov's 30th birthday, and he's already been groomed for his state's leadership by his father and Putin.

But Polikovskaya doesn't pull her punches. Tentoroy is, she writes, "one of the unsightliest of Chechen villages, unfriendly, ugly and swarming with murderous-looking armed men." Polikovskaya calls the young tracksuit-wearing despot-in-waiting a "Stalin of our times," a moniker sure to stink given the Stalinist purges that have, in part, created Chechnya's modern mafia state.

It's an old story, she writes, repeated many times in our history. The Kremlin fosters a baby dragon, which then has to keep feeding to stop him from setting everything on fire. Kadyrov bites back. Politkovskaya, he says, is a, quote, enemy of the Chechen people. She should have to answer for this. He, too, understands the language of Soviet-era brutality.

Weeks later, Politkovskaya is riding the elevator of her Moscow apartment when a gunman shoots her four times, once in the head, with a Soviet-era Makarov pistol. The significance of the date is lost on few of the thousands who march through Moscow protesting Politkovskaya's murder. It is Vladimir Putin's birthday. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hey guys and welcome to the show whose co-hosts put in the hard yards to write shows even if it's a public holiday and 80 degrees outside or maybe I'm just projecting. I'm your host in Wellington, population 212,000 people. In New Zealand, Sean Williams and I'm joined by Danny Gold in New York City, population 8.5 million which is more interesting. I'm writing this before the Rugby World Cup finals so go the All Blacks I guess.

But it was very, very fun to see England getting beat in both rugby and cricket within 12 hours this weekend. And I just published a feature about Chinese pensions, which I'm not sure how that is better or worse. But anyway, how are you doing? I mean, you're just you're cheering against England in cricket and rugby. It's just...

I don't know. Couldn't be me, man. You're hate for the homeland. But how am I doing? I mean, I'm here, you know, I'm recording with you and there's nowhere else I'd rather be on a beautiful fall afternoon. Well, let's bring that energy to this episode. We got a cool thing I did up in Auckland on the Patreon for subscribers. Thanks guys for being there. I went up to interview this guy about his life in music, weed and cocaine, transshipment, prison, and he's

pretty weird relationship with his brother who died recently. It's a nutty story. I've been meaning to like write it down for, for years, but, um, I really want to go back to it and you'll get a really good taste of it if you've got the Patreon. Uh, but if you can't afford that, or if you don't just fancy it, in which case, all right.

Then we've got a bunch of stuff on Instagram, YouTube. If you like and subscribe, you'll be doing us all a favor here. Speaking of Patreon, I reckon if we get another, what, like 20 or 30 subscribers between now and the end of next month, I'm off to Papua New Guinea on assignment. And I'll spend a week or I'll spend a day or two trying to meet armed rascal gangs in Port Moresby if you guys subscribe. So everyone has been absolutely trying to convince me not to do that. So I'll leave it down to you guys.

Yeah, basically everyone has told Sean, if you guys don't know about the Rascal Gangs, I think we did an episode on them, but they're also exceedingly violent, and everyone has told Sean that if he does this, he

he will 100% get robbed. So I'm, of course, encouraging him, but all of your new Patreon money and iTunes subscribers that you guys join up, your money's going to go to replacing everything that Sean loses. So it's going to a good cause. Thankfully, I just got rid of that 100 mil that I had sitting around in my pocket. So yeah, I don't really have anything worth stealing. But yeah, I'll do that. I'll go and meet some guy with a homemade gun if you guys sign up to the Patreon. Anyway, so I think...

It's a month after, or a month or six weeks after the second episode of this Chechen trilogy, and finally we get to the conclusion. And of course, everyone's favourite pot-bellied, bushy-bearded religious zealot, gold machine gun wielding, IG influencer, and all-round murderous psychopath, Ramzan Kadyrov. I guess if there was ever an arch-nemesis to our show's tagline, Don't Insta-Rammy Crimes, it's this boy.

And I'm not going to get too deep into Kateroff's account in this show because it's about as well trodden ground as the five families. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't head over to our own brilliant account on Instagram or, of course, Twitter, where both of us are defending the world against hordes of dummies on a daily basis, except only one of us actually has any followers. I would actually never advise people to go on Twitter, even if it's to follow us and even Instagram now, right, which used to be like my happy place.

just full of like food and bikini pics and, and you know, boots I wanted to buy, but now it's just overtaken by, by activists. And I think, you know, I might just have to like get on Pinterest or something. Cause I'm just, I can't do it anymore. Yeah. I was really up for seeing like pizza places around my neighborhood, but now I'm getting feeds of,

weird villages in New Zealand trying to show solidarity to Palestine. So yeah, keep going guys. Anyway, first of all, if you haven't listened to our previous two shows on Chechen crime, you might be wondering what's going on a lot in this one. So if that's the case, stop, go back, listen to them and then just keep everything else on play. So we get more money, but by way of a short catch up before we get to Kaderoth and Polikovsky is killing and political assassinations, drug wars, and of course, MMA, uh,

I'm going to take you all the way back to 1954 in the mountainous terrains of the northern Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic. Because that is where and when a hugely influential Chechen gangster by the name of Kozh Ahmed Nukayev, I hope I've got that right, or Kozha to his pals, is born.

I didn't get into his life in the previous show, but Kozha might be the most influential Chechen gang leader of all time. And he is a conduit between the Soviet thieves-in-law and the Chechen mafia that came to dominate in the late 80s, and the Chechen independence movement, wars, and terror attacks that characterized the Republic later on. Again, if you don't know about that stuff, go back to part two where we get into that in a pretty deep way.

So, Qajar is born in the Chuy region of the Kyrgyz, I'm going to get all these names wrong, SSR, now the independent nation, of course, of Kyrgyzstan.

It's the northernmost province and home to the capital, Bishkek, and Kozha grows up there as one of the hundreds of thousands of Chechens exiled by Stalin's purges during the war, what's commonly known as Operation Lentil. That's just a terrible name. Like, aren't these things supposed to be named, I don't know, Operation Falcon, Tiger, Eagle, Sword, and shit like that? Yeah, yeah, I mean...

are so nice they go into such great curries and now I've forever got the idea of Stalin murdering hundreds of thousands of Chechens in my head but uh

I don't know, man. Social media's got my mind on that, so I'm sure I'll just be thinking of dogs and cats in a minute. But anyway, he moves to Moscow in 1971. That's Kozha. And he studies law at Moscow State University, one of the greatest buildings in the world. And it's there that he has an epiphany, as he tells the Dutch filmmaker Jost de Putter in the very, very good 1999 documentary, The Making of an Empire, quote, My eyes were opened.

When I saw the true face of Soviet reality, my worldview was turned upside down. That's when I became a rebel. I saw that if you have a communist government mafia and you want to fight it, then you need a structure like them. We had to collect money and create a battalion of Chechens in Moscow.

That is how we started. I guess there's a lot of references to some of the stuff you've done as well, right? With the Brighton Beach Mafia, this guy's coming out of communism and making this crazy life of crime. But Kozsik doesn't really have the sort of enigma of some of those other guys. He doesn't have the oratory style, but he's definitely dead-eyed and he definitely knows his way around a pistol. And this structure he creates, this is what's called Obshina. It's a Russian network of Chechens committed loosely to the liberation of their homeland.

But it's also kind of a mafia and it becomes known as one. And the foundation for the modern Chechen mafia we've mentioned in episodes one and two.

By the late 80s, these gangsters' plans to push out the other major clans of the Russian mafia largely succeeds, and they turn their focus back on Chechnya itself, again, as we've gotten into in the previous shows, forging ever-closer ties between organised crime and the Chechen political and military resistance to Russian occupation. According to a review of the movie, the Russians, not surprisingly, regard Nukiev as a criminal.

Whereas most of the Chechens consider him a hero. Okay, wait for it. Drum roll, guys. Modern day Robin Hood. Honestly didn't know that story. It traveled all the way to Grozny, but the RH vortex knows no borders. Yeah, I mean, it's really something, right? It's up there with the idea of like,

getting involved in real estate, like as real estate investors. It's just everywhere. Yeah. I think we could probably do a modern day Robin Hood t-shirt. It's pretty good. If you remember in our previous two shows, we get into the local concept of the abrec, which is similar to a Robin Hood, I guess. Maybe like a, basically a noble rebel, a scoundrel, a criminal, whatever.

Well, Chechens know kozha as something a little different. It's called, and I'm going to completely ruin this phrase, my Chechens, well, Rusty, a jigetej.

A traditional godfather-like character who looks after the village and vanquishes enemies. As one guy in the film says, quote, good boys. I might be wrong, but this word appears to come from the Caucasian term jigit, which describes a skilled horseman or a brave person generally, basically coming from Turkic languages and you'd think related to the famous Mongolian equestrians who took over half the planet. Anyway, you're all for etymology on this show, I know that. People like this guy in the movie, they are backing Koja.

That's what you need to know anyway. And as communism begins to crumble, he's sitting pretty, he's very rich, and he's getting deep into the Chechen arms struggle against Russia. In 1991, however, authorities arrest all of the main leaders of the Chechen mob in Moscow, including him.

Now upon the outbreak of the second Chechen war, that's in 1999, Koca moves around the Turkic Caucasus from Baku out to Istanbul and he gets more and more into hardline Islamism that's turned a generation of Chechen guerrillas into Al-Qaeda backed child killers. See again the second episode and the harrowing accounts from the 2004 school siege in Beslan.

Amid all this, Kozsa allegedly sneaks back into Chechnya from abroad, but he's allegedly surrounded in the Dagestani mountains with other allies and they wind up dead even though Kozsa's own body is never recovered. Still to this day, he's known as the godfather of the Chechen mafia and somebody whose life was bound up in this symbiosis between rebelhood and criminality.

In 2003, with the Chechen leadership dead or in disarray, Ahmad Kadyrov turns coat and becomes its Kremlin-backed leader, crushing opposition and supporting the inclusion of Chechnya into the Russian Federation with massive kickbacks from Daddy Putin and the protection of Russian agents.

Of course, that doesn't endear him to the thousands who've been fighting a years-long dirty war for independence, and the following year, Kadyrov is killed by a bomb blast at a Grozny stadium while he's watching soldiers on parade. It's later that very same day that Ramzan Kadyrov, aged just 27, whose interests include boxing, weightlifting, and just generally beating people up as a leader of his father's personal militia, is summoned to meet with Putin.

I'll let Josh Yaffa, recently on the show a few weeks back, will you Danny take it from here in his 2016 New Yorker feature called Putin's Dragon. Quote, "...in the meeting with Putin, which was televised nationally, Kadyrov's blue nylon tracksuit set him apart amid the Kremlin's pompous formality."

Alexei Chesnikov, who worked in Putin's administration at the time, said that a bond seemed to form between the two men that night. Quote, Putin thought of Kadyrov the father as a person with whom he reached a particular political agreement. Their relations were honest and businesslike, but ultimately political, Chesnikov said. But he relates to the son with a certain warmth.

With Putin's blessing, Kadyrov claimed the throne that had been granted to his father. No wonder then that when Kadyrov does assume his father's title in 2007, he's already accustomed to taking whichever law exists in Chechnya into his own hands. And Chechens, once kings of the Russian underworld, get a rep as hired muscle and contract killers.

In 2004, for example, Paul Klemnikov, the New York-born Russian editor of Forbes magazine, who we quoted in the last show about his work on Boris Berezovsky, he's gunned down in Moscow, walking between his home and his office. He just published a less than flattering book about none other than Kozha himself, and everybody points the fingers at his and Kadyrov's goons, but nobody's sentenced. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Obviously, Kadyrov can do whatever he wants in Chechnya, but having impugned the...

like all over Russia, right? In Moscow. I wonder if Putin ever kind of pushes back about stuff like that. Obviously, quietly, that's done so openly and it kind of makes him look weak or whether he just doesn't care about these people getting gunned down or whatever headlines can come out of it. I think it helps him. I think it helps Putin a lot because, I mean, as we'll see with other sort of political assassinations, the idea that there's this kind of almost orc-like mentality

group of people who can just take you out any minute. And they've got the backing of Putin. That kind of keeps this, installs this fear, basically, in the Russian people. And it goes all the way up to today in Ukraine. But we'll get into that too. So the idea that he's impugned kind of helps everyone. It's pretty dark.

Anyway, soon after this killing, Politkovskaya, of course, she is shot dead in the Russian capital too. 10 people are arrested and Russia's chief prosecutor blames the Chechen mafia boss and rogue security officials. And the assassinations continue. In 2009, Kadyrov's former bodyguard, who's alleged torture at the hands of his former boss, is shot dead in Vienna. Yeah, I mean, I assume you'll probably get to this because I think it happens a lot, right? But even now there's like Chechen dissidents dying.

dodging assassins all over Europe. I don't remember exactly. Oh yeah. Maybe it was Scandinavia or the Baltics, but that video, that guy a few years back who got his Chechen diss and he got attacked and he turned the tables and like beat his attacker with a hammer. Do you know what I'm talking about? Wow. I didn't come across that one. No. Yeah. I was, I was pitching a story a while ago about just, um, yeah, about finding all these Chechens. I had a connection with these Chechen dissidents in Europe who, um,

We're like essentially dodging assassins. I like every corner, but yeah, it's wild. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. No, no, good. I mean, I had a similar thing. I think I'm going to mention that further down the show as well, but I mean, it's pretty nuts. Like that same year, a Chechen opposition politician is killed all the way in Dubai. I guess there are no laws in Dubai. Half a dozen prominent Chechens are shot dead in Turkey where compatriot gangsters become increasingly active.

In 2015, Chechens murder Boris Nemtsov, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, on a bridge opposite the Kremlin. I mean, that is nuts. And in August 2019, a former Chechen rebel named Zelin Khan Kangoshvili, love the Georgian names, he's walking from his home through Berlin's Tiergarten Park to a mosque when a man approaches him and shoots him twice in the head before discarding a wig and running along one of the city's canals.

A Russian named Vadim Krasikov is jailed for life and Germany expels two Russian diplomats over the death. Prosecutor Lars Malekis tells the court that Vadim, quote, liquidated a political opponent as an act of retaliation. So that's kind of

turning the tables a bit there's a russian i think he was an fsb agent essentially doing the job gru agent doing the job for the chechens yeah behalf of katarov so they're kind of working hand in glove now more recently chechen killers have been active on the battlefields of ukraine with katarov desperate to show his loyalty there to vladimir putin in fact until the recent killing of yevgeny progojin which he got into with josh i think what two or three weeks ago that was a great show

There's been a rivalry between Chechens under Kadyrov and Prigozhin's Wagner military group, or mercenary group, rather. Last year, the Russian gangster Grisha Moskovsky warned that two new gangs were forming in the country, and it could prove disastrous to the Kremlin, which, well, he wasn't kind of wrong. Quote,

Now there is a change of power in Russia. Who is a scoundrel and who will come to power? You know, by all accounts I've seen, the Chechens have sort of lost their mystique, I think, at least as war fighters, right? Then Ukrainians and their supporters, they all call them TikTok fighters because they film themselves like recklessly shooting machine guns or firing grenades at apartment blocks without anyone there. And it just kind of looks like they're not actually getting anything done. And I don't know. I've heard theories that like, you know, Katarov has taken them from these sort of proud guerrilla fighters into just these guys who...

haven't been tested in a long time and might have kind of forgotten the hardscrabble origin stories of what they've done. Yeah, for sure. I think that there's definitely a lot of truth in that. Like, IG, fake it till you make it doesn't really work when you're in like back mud or something. But yeah, I think that everything has basically coalesced around Kadyrov and it's become a little, I guess, lazier in terms of sort of organized military stuff. But yeah,

There's this long, long track record of hits. So we're going on to like contract killings now carried out by Chechen gangsters who it's alleged are working on the orders of Ramzan Kadyrov himself, of course. But who is Kadyrov the man?

Well, as you may have guessed, I mean, I can't do maths, but he's born in 1976. He's a former anti-Russian rebel, of course, before his dad's change of heart. He becomes de facto leader of Chechnya in 2005 and he takes over proper in 2007. And very quickly, of course, he cozies up to Putin even more than his father, which is useful on more than one front.

By the middle of the 2010s, for example, the Kremlin is backing Kadyrov's dictatorship to the tune of $1.6 billion a year as gas subsidies, the lot, same stuff you get in Transnistria, essentially. So according to a New York Times piece from 2016, quote, Moscow is propping up its most chintzy regional leaders' habits at a huge cost to the taxpayer.

So in addition to getting on his knees and kissing Putin's shoes, Kadyrov has to at least show he's trying to earn money beyond Instagram ads. Even Kadyrov himself has admitted that his state wouldn't survive without Moscow's largesse.

And Ramzan does this not only via brutality, which we'll return to soon, but by promoting a so-called path of Ahmad. This is a kind of Juche-style personality cult where Kadyrov Sr. is portrayed absolutely everywhere as a savior not just of Chechnya, but of Russian unity.

Ramzan goes in hard on promoting this neo-Chechen vision through culture, media and sport, writes OC Media, quote, on visiting any museum or cultural centre in Chechnya, the visitor is greeted by the, quote, without culture, there is no nation. This reminds the visitor that Ahmad Kadyrov considered, quote, the main factor in the successful revival of the Republic to be raising the level of culture.

as declared in the Republic's official histories. The most famous example of this, of course, is an intense programme of sports washing. Continues the OC article, quote, whether rubbing shoulders with athletes or sending his sons out into the ring, head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov uses training and competitive sports to bolster his public image, construct a national identity that suits his aims and secure the future of his regime.

Now to do this, Kadyrov has something called the Ahmad Kadyrov Regional Public Fund, a state charity that's essentially his own slush fund, and it helps him not only to build lavish complexes like Grozny's gigantic Ottoman-style mosque,

but also to stage elaborate glossy PR events such as football matches, MMA tournaments, or just birthday parties and other luxury events, which the likes of Mike Tyson, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and weirdly, Hilary Swank, I guess she played a boxer once, right, have all attended. Public sector workers are expected to donate 10% of their earnings to the fund, which of course isn't taxed.

And it's rumored to bring the dictator between 50 and 70 million dollars a year. And I think I got that figure from like 10 years ago as well. So it's probably a lot, lot more in today's cash.

Kadyrov has helped put the local Russian Premier League football team Terek Grozny on the map, handing it a 30,000-seater stadium, elite players like Brazilian national Everton, Czech star Martin Jirinek and a couple of Kadyrov's nephews, one of whom only played a single game, of course, such a promising career cut tragically short.

Most notably, the side gets Dutch legend Ruud Hulit to manage, although he lasts less than a year. That was in 2011. Oh, and in 2017, the team is renamed. Yep, FC Ahmad Grojny. Still playing in the top league.

Kadoff hasn't been busy sports-watching anywhere more than MMA, however, but he's groomed some of the best fighters in UFC, and he's even created his own promotion, Absolute Championship, which this year has announced plans to hold Grand Prix tournaments across a whole bunch of weight divisions with a total prize fund of $10 million. That's not nothing.

And for Patreon subscribers, I spoke to the brilliant Kareem Zidane of Bloody Elbow magazine, I think it was back at the start of this year, about MMA's queasy relationship with Kaderov's regime. So go and check that out because Kareem is 100% the world's expert on this stuff. But the speed with which Chechnya has churned out champion fighters and the breadth of Kaderov's influence within the sport is pretty crazy.

for his own gym called yep akhmad fight club katarov has developed the likes of magomed ankalev abdul kareem edelov albert dureyev adlan at amagov zubayet isabel now diev and magomed bibber latto i mean that was just like

Your pronunciation skills, I mean, you could have gotten those all wrong, but it sounds right to me and your confidence is admirable. Seriously. Oh my God. Thank you so much. Anyway, among the fighters to visit Kadyrov on the other hand, here we go again, former champions Khabib Nurmagomedov

Kamaru Usman, Chris Wildman, Henry Cayudo, and Fabrizio Verdam. Of course, Fabrizio. He's one of the biggest celebrities in the game, is Kadov, which doesn't say a lot for it. Yeah, you know, we got to give some respect right now to the OG Brian Gumbel, who, have you ever seen that Real Sports PC for HBO a couple years ago?

I assume that's how they got Kadoff to sit down for an interview, but they pretended they were doing one about his support for MMA.

And like the growth of MMA. I'm not sure if it was exactly that, but that's kind of how they got their way to get him to sit down with them in Chechnya. And then Gumbel started asking questions about like repression of, of like, you know, LGBT of gays being tortured and killed. Like it was ballsy, man. And started asking, and Kalarov just like froze. Like he didn't, he didn't understand what was going on and like had no response. He was like asking his like handler, like, what is this guy asking me about? Uh, but he was,

I mean, it is a ballsy piece of journalism right there. Wow. I saw a piece for the BBC that was done a few years ago by Steve Rosenberg, of course, like brilliant reporter. And honestly, Kadyrov is terrifying. When he like gets his teeth into an interview, he's really, really fucking scary. Not to Brian Gumbel. Not to Brian Gumbel. Brian Gumbel doesn't scare easily.

No, man. Wow. Yeah, kudos. Anyway, of course, Kadyrov. He loves little more than to post videos of him boxing and fighting in Grozny himself, including with Mike Tyson. Writes Bloody Elbow, quote,

and nation branding and sports washing by projecting an image of a man in good health, strong and close to his people and so offering an alternative image of Kadyrov to the West. Which I guess makes sense, but they weren't exactly known as sort of international pussies beforehand. Anyway, part of this has been to cement a sort of

Miami aesthetic conservative Islam parading around in pimped out G-wagons and sports cars in Chechnya, Dubai, keeping big cats. Check out our show about that from the summer if you haven't already. While lauding so-called traditional family values, subjugating women and banning alcohol. Did you coin? Yeah, yeah, I think I did actually.

Kaderoth himself is a Sufi, which if you know anything about religion, doesn't lend itself to conservatism. Anyway, he claims his 15-year-old son Adam is Chechnya's youngest Hafiz. That is somebody who's memorised and recited the entire Quran from cover to cover, something that takes most people years or even decades to perfect. I'm not saying he didn't do it, just saying...

He didn't do it. Last September, Adam Kadyrov was filmed beating up an activist who is claimed to burn the Koran. Quote, he beat him and he did the right thing, said Kadyrov, elder. Without exaggeration, yes, I'm proud of Adam's actions, he said, adding that he respected the boy for acquiring, quote, adult ideals of honor, dignity and defense of his religion.

That's beating the shit out of someone, in case you didn't know. A 2007 edict bans women from interstate buildings without a head covering, and Kadyrov has continually tabled a local version of Sharia law, which Moscow, despite its fair share of religious wingnuts in power, has batted back, citing secularism. I mean, if you go back to our first episode, Moscow is absolutely terrified of Islam, basically everywhere, especially the Caucasian region.

That hasn't stopped Kadyrov carrying out a pogrom of LGBT Chechens which began in 2017 and continued in ways through 2018 and 2019. I read a particularly harrowing account in Time magazine from Armin Jabrilov

in 2017 who's snatched from the grozny salon where he works handcuffed and thrown into the back of a paddy wagon then these goons take his phone and scour through photos and contacts threatening to out him to his family all the way as the time journalists quote jabrilov says the violence escalated when he refuses to name other gay men the men took out a black box that jabrilov presumed was a lie detector but it turned out to be a machine that delivered electric shocks

They attached wires to his fingers and put water on his body to help the current travel more effectively. Quote, it's so painful, you're just screaming. That's all you could do, he says. Eventually, one of the men pulled out a gun, put it into Zhabilov's mouth and threatened to kill him if he didn't give up names.

At this moment, I myself died, he says. Now, this pogrom affects dozens, if not hundreds, of mostly men, and it's forced many into exile across Europe. Quite a few escaped to Berlin at the time, I remember, which, if I'm being a tiny bit conspiratorial, I think plays into some of the other Chechen organized crime we're going to discuss in that country soon. But to close out this Chechen Juche cult of personality thing, Kadov has also turned attentions on film and TV.

And the results have been, shall we say, a little less successful than grooming MMA fighters. Here's the Moscow Times back in 2015. Quote, Ramzan Kadyrov, the feared head of Russia's Republic of Chechnya, decided to make a movie. In Chechnya, that might seem like a far-fetched idea. Then, the Republic only had two movie theatres for a population of 1.4 million. There is no local filmmaking tradition whatsoever.

So Kadyrov turned to Beslan Terekbaev. Soon, Terekbaev's Chechen Film Studio, that's Chechen Film, one word, like a crappy start-up name, had produced Whoever Doesn't Understand Will Get It, an action movie starring the Chechen strongman himself. Now, I've watched the 33-second trailer, and you all should too, it's on the reading list. Dale, can you rip the music and play it here? It's awesome. It's on YouTube. It's on YouTube.

Kadyrov's flanked by a bunch of tacticals in the mountains, firing a host of long-range weapons. He's jogging very, very slowly, like late stage to goal, like really late stage to goal. Essential viewing, five stars, no notes whatsoever. It's awesome. Here's the Moscow Times again. Quote,

The film has never been released publicly. That is a tragedy. But Kadyrov did publish a few clips to his famous Instagram account. One shows him surrounded by military vehicles firing a machine gun into the air. Another depicts him meeting an actress dressed as Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. We got to get that tape, man. We got to watch the whole thing. Yeah, like everyone was focused on the P-tape, but no one ever speaks about the Kadyrov tape. We need it. We need it.

Anyway, it continues, quote, Chechen film would like to expand well beyond the North Caucasus. Quote, our plan is to seize the world through cinema, said Terekbaev. Okay, we're building our turnover and growing our muscles. In five years, the whole world will know Chechen film. It will be releasing more films than any other Russian film studio. So I think 2021 came and went. And I don't know about you, but I've not really heard of any more Chechen film movies. So,

As you can guess, Grozny would never really materialized. Grozny would. Yeah, that's also one of mine. I need to, I need to like TM this stuff. Anyway, in 2016, the year after this, Kadoff tries his hand at telly. And this actually goes a bit better. Here's the New York Times to introduce what must be one of the maddest TV shows of recent times. Quote,

Borrowing from Donald J. Trump's playbook, Mr. Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, is starring this fall in a reality TV competition called, quote, The Team. In a format that echoes The Apprentice, the show that enhanced Mr. Trump's fame, Mr. Kadyrov is winnowing a group of 16 telegenic young Russians down to one who will become his assistant. Yeah, it's like, you know, the reality TV show thing, stabbing someone in the back, except you literally stab them in the back, you know? Yeah.

gotta be great to watch I mean like photocopying like taking calls and shooting distance out the back it's pretty nuts anyway Kaderoth addresses the show and can't help sounding like a total psychopath doing so quote

People believe my image that was created by the liberals, that I am frightening, that I will kill whoever says anything about me, that I will put them in a dungeon and stab them, Mr. Calero says, steering his sports utility vehicle for a breathtaking landscape of jagged peaks. That's good journalism. Anyway, this continues.

That was invented by enemies of the people, enemies of our state, who know that as long as I am in the Caucasus, the Western European special services will not manage to change the situation here, he says. That is why they want to make the Russian people have a bad attitude towards me.

They want to make an enemy of the people out of me. On the contrary, people run to me. They hug me. I mean, I guess if you're stabbing their relatives in a dungeon, they probably would run and hug you as best as possible. Anyway, the show's name is Commander.

and i can't find the winner anywhere so uh i i really need you guys to kick into gear and let me know says the blurb quote you will see how chechen women lay out a table and how they observe traditions here contestants will have to prove every day and every hour they can fulfill assigned tasks on time and accurately

be ready to work 24 hours a day, overcome any obstacles and bring to life the most interesting products along with the team of the head of the Republic. Sorry, that quote was terrible. Anyway, basically sounds like a kind of Alabama, the real world definitely would watch. Dude, it sounds fucking terrifying. Like, I mean, I bet if you got the Mystery Science Theory 3000 sort of gave it that element, it could make great dark comedy, but it sounds terrifying.

Yeah, it really, really does. I mean, like those quotes by him, he is some cold motherfucker. Okay, so...

His PR is, to quote the brilliant Gennaro Gattuso, sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit. But something he definitely is good at is using Chechnya's reputation as a feared, abreck-filled republic of noble gangsters and drug lords to good effect. Remember Kozha, who topped up the underworld charts in the late 1980s Moscow? As you know from the previous two shows on Chechnya, the Chechen mafia moths and melds with the independence movement. And

And while Kadyrov seems to have leveraged it into his own personal militia, repressive regime, hitmen and battalion of nutcases he sent to Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, he's also calcified the power of the mob. This is according to a paper called Traditional Justice Prospects for Chechnya, but I guess they're not too good. Quote, Ramzan Kadyrov must balance the desires of Moscow with those of powerful local backers. He

He has managed to continue a system of patronage established by his father where illegal activity is tolerated provided the government can filter a percentage of the profits and the total level does not exceed what is tolerable to Moscow. In other words, Chechen gangsters can loot and smuggle all they want as long as they pay Kadyrov, their gangster-in-chief, his cut. And they don't disturb the Faustian pact with Putin.

The base of operations is, of course, Russia. And as I mentioned earlier, they capitalize on clout with other goons and real estate in Moscow. But the Chechen mafia doesn't end there. These days, Chechen gangsters aren't just powerful in Russia, but deep into Western Europe, particularly Germany. And that's not too surprising when you see how big the Italian gangsters are there, too.

There are some 150,000 Chechen expats living in the EU, most are apolitical of course, but some pro-Karabakh elements have grown pretty powerful, especially in Germany. A few years ago, after the assassination of that former Chechen rebel, Selim Khan Kangoshvili, in Berlin's Moabit district, I tried working a piece on a guy named Timur Dugudaev.

a member of the centre-right CDU, that's the German Tories, basically, a boxing promoter, and a zealous calorivite. But yeah, what can I say? The media industry doesn't respect a good story. Yeah, it's probably a good thing you're in New Zealand when you did this little series instead of doing these episodes from Berlin.

Yeah, I was slightly worried about that one. He was pictured shaking Angela Merkel's hand as well. It's pretty fucking embarrassing. Anyway, Chechens have become a fixture of Berlin's clan crime, which we covered way back in 2020 when we kicked this show off.

In 2016, they detonate a car bomb in central Berlin, killing a drug dealer. According to a 2019 Der Spiegel report, German justice officials become increasingly worried about something they call the, quote, North Caucasus Organized Crime Structure. Sorry, a lot of this might be wordy because I'm translating from the original, but it's basically the Chechen Mafia.

It's focused on a biker gang-like group called Regime 95, which has members all over the north and east of Germany, which is the Germans' way of saying former East Germany and Hamburg. In fact, as the Berliner Zeitung reports in 2020, Chechen and Arab clans have been fighting each other on the streets, escalating a gang war over the city's lucrative drug scene.

That year, a conflict is sparked by a fight outside of Spiti, that's a corner shop or a bodega, where members of the prominent Raimor clan fought Chechens with fists, knives and, what else, hooker pipes, on a street just down from where I actually used to live in the district of Nykoen.

writes the bit said quote police reportedly feel that chechen criminals no longer act as henchmen for the criminal drug gangs but has now built up their own criminal structures many gang members have combat experience from the two chechen wars they have also been known to be quick to take up firearms the polizei are terrified of these guys they're blowing cars up into

In 2018, police linked Chechen gangsters in Berlin to the financing of Islamist terror. In 2021, cops carry out raids on 20 properties a year into this turf war between the Remels and the Chechens. It's all pretty nuts. Writes the Konrad-Adnall-Stiftung in December last year, quote, "...the tendency towards isolation that can be observed in parts of the Chechen communities is a growing challenge."

The driving factor of this development is the survival strategy preserved in some of these communities as a result of a series of collective experiences of persecution. It continues.

In the face of the growing isolation of significant parts of the Chechen communities in Germany, the rise of Salafist actors and Cadero's violent diaspora policy, both security policy and integration policy countermeasures, are necessary. I am terribly sorry for the translation of that horrible Denglish. Anyway, in 2020, riots break out in the French city of Dijon. Yeah, that's the mustard place.

where Chechen gangsters issue a social media quote, call for vengeance after an assault on a 16-year-old Chechen kid. They publish videos of armed hooded men and promise to settle scores with rival mobsters. God, European police are just useless, huh? Yep. I mean, the French don't actually do any police work. And then actually in this case, it's the same. They send military police in to quality unrest. So it's even nothing.

or batons and shields. But many point the finger directly at Kadyrov, who's keen to stir trouble in anywhere that's turning against Moscow and Putin. Similar to the way the Chechens use their gang ties to smuggle weapons and soldiers in during the wars against Russia,

Kadyrov now appears to use Chechens to scare the shit out of the EU. So discord and make sure nobody topples him at home. There's this interesting op-ed in Al Jazeera by Harold Chambers recently, and it said that even if Kadyrov dies, which has been predicted and even reported in recent months, nothing is going to really change.

Not only has his eldest son, named what else, Ahmad, recently gone to meet Putin in what most believes is a symbolic clearing of the stage for his own accession,

writes Chambers, while there is indeed a lot of personalization of power in Chechnya, he alone does not represent the entirety of the regime. He sits atop the regime hierarchy, but he's not solely responsible for its function. There are a number of powerful men who manage various aspects of government. Chambers notes that the regime has grown increasingly repressive, even by Kadyrov's lofty standards.

In September last year, after Moscow announced partial mobilization in Ukraine, Chechen women protested in Grozny. Then they were rounded up, beaten, and frog-marched to the city's mayor's office, and their male relatives were shipped out forcibly to the front lines. Last December, a fight between two Chechen officials was followed by a large-scale security campaign which detained any residents who'd seen and recorded the incident.

Kadyrov can wield the threat of conscription to Ukraine against anybody who defies him, and others have been exiled, tortured or summarily executed. I guess this would be why they're not really renowned in Ukraine. Apparently some weapons caches from the war still exist out in the Chechen woods and mountains.

The Kaderoth regime has cracked down on weapons possession and gunsmiths. So you want good news? I guess you've got to go somewhere else. But that is Ramzan Kaderoth for you. And there is the history of Chechen crime from ancient Abereks to modern murderers. You're here for the blood and misery, aren't you guys? Yeah, I mean, that was just an incredible series you've done, man. Three episodes right there. Something else. Amazing research, great writing.

Way better stuff than stuff you hear from people who have a team of 10 or 15. I don't even know. But yeah, I feel like I know a lot about Chechnya after the last three episodes of this. Yeah, too much. You should too. Go out there and pretend you're an expert. Get involved on other people's social media. You know everything now, so don't hesitate to speak your mind with 100% conviction. Even if it's some professor who studies this stuff, who cares? Sean did three episodes on this, and if you listen...

If you listen to all of them, you know more than anyone else. What else? Patreon.com, the Underworld podcast, iTunes, subscriptions, YouTube, TikTok. Netflix. I don't even know. Do you think it actually matters saying this stuff over and over and over? Do you think somebody has heard eight episodes, but it finally clicks after I say it for the third time?

I feel like you gotta do it once an episode, but do you think if like, is there any, I guess repetition, right? Supposed to be a thing in advertising? I don't know, man. All right, guys. We'll see you next week. If you know the answer to these questions, please let us know.