The Chechen Mafia Strikes Back: War Profiteering, School Sieges and a Turncoat Named Kadyrov
53:59 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat that's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld. September 1st, 2004.

in Beslan, a sleepy town in the Russian Caucasian Republic of North Ossetia Alania. It's the first day of the academic year and the sun's out. But as mums and dads ferry their little ones through the gates of Beslan's school number one, a terrifying sight comes screaming into view. The terrorists are nowhere, and then they're everywhere.

A military cargo truck rumbles up to the school's entrance and halts, emptying into its yard a horde of heavily armed men, many of their faces hidden behind ski masks. They're stoned with tactical gear and magazines and firing beat-up Konashnikov rifles into the blue sky with chilling cries of Allahu Akbar. They're young and bearded and they're speaking Chechen, the language of North Ossetia's war and crime-ravaged neighbour.

Some seem like experienced soldiers, others illiterate thugs. A couple of women who wear, alongside their black hijabs, chunky explosive belts.

One father primes a pistol and fires at the horde. He's dead in seconds. Other men of fighting age are executed, leaving the remaining men, women and children, over a thousand of them, to be herded like goats into a sprawling sports hall, which the terrorists bedizzen with a series of nail-packed bucket bombs, strung together with wire like diabolical black piñatas.

"If any of you resist us," one of the killers tells the parents, "we will kill the children and leave the ones who resist alive."

As a Russian military veteran, Kazbek Mizikov knows very well who his murderous captors are, and the long, brutal decades of conflict out of which they've emerged, in a Chechnya that has since the days of Stalingrad seen gangsters and warlords and gunrunners and Salafist mujahideen coalesce into one lawless republic, hell-bent on violent revenge, no matter if hundreds of innocent children are their victims.

Chechens have lived in fear of brutal death from above since the early 90s. Now, their most radical sons and daughters are turning the tables. Kazbek glares at the bucket bomb hanging above his head and wonders if there's something he can do, anything, to prevent further bloodshed. It's hot and sweaty, and there are sights trained on him from almost every angle.

If the bomb's wires are tripped, he realizes, they'll blow shrapnel into the skulls of him, his wife, and their two sons, killing them all instantly. Kazbek can't fight. Instead, he clasps a stretch of the wire in his hands, silently and surreptitiously kneading it like play-doh until there's a crimp. He does this over and over, out of sight for hours. If he can break the wire, the bomb won't explode. But as a veteran himself, he knows something else, and it turns his blood cold.

The Russian army won't just sit back and watch this play out. They're coming with gas and grenades and gunfire. And when they do, people are going to die. So Kazbek keeps turning the wire moment by moment. It's the only hope he has to save his family. Whatever happens next, God only knows. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

hi guys deep breath now and welcome to the underworld podcast the show where we tell you stories about global organized crime without saying kinda a million times although quite a few i'm your host in the alteration williams kiore te wiki or teriyamaui by the way i'm joined by daddy gold in new york city we are two journalists who've been all over the world in trenches trap houses and toilet cubicles

And today's episode is the second of three parts on our history of what some might call the Chechen Mafia, but it's far more than that. Weaving through war and terror and oligarchs and auto plants and drugs and riots and political assassinations. And yes, MMA fighters with cauliflower ears and pointy beards.

Yeah, I mean, hopefully we'll get to the Noho Hank origin story too in this episode. But what was the saying kind a million times? Is that a reference or some sort of slight to some other podcast that I didn't recognize? Yeah, I think I've been listening to too many crap podcasts doing the research for these ones.

Yeah, I really don't need to know what people think about Chechens from certain podcasts. But anyway, anything else we should be mentioning up top? I don't know. I think as this show is going out, I think maybe one of my stories is out, maybe two of them. One of them actually, our Patreon subscribers actually encountered around 18 months ago, so...

We'll do something on that for sure. Any other stuff you've been working on? Want to shout out any colleagues whose input you've been enjoying lately? Not really. Yeah, you're still getting sued, right? 100 million, I think, at the last I heard it. Still getting sued. We got to find a way to publicize that to get some attention because that's a big number. Yeah, it's a little bit more than we make on the podcast. And I might actually have to buy a suit if I'm going to be summoned to a court appearance in California somewhere. But...

That will be fun. Something tells me... Can you sue someone under a fake name? I don't know. Something tells me I might get thrown out. But, oh, our friend Lily is running the TikTok for us where she's doing these cool one-minute videos. I think it's...

at the underworld pod if you guys are or the underworld podcast if you guys are on tiktok definitely go follow her on that because she's working really hard and um i just like i the first time i opened tiktok i just gave up right away like there was no chance that was going to work what else patreon.com podcast for bonus episodes which we have like almost one a week now i think yeah instagram is always the merch at underworldpod.com

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, this is like one of the most fascinating subjects. I thought I knew a little bit about it, but there's just millions and millions of more stuff that's behind all of this. I mean, you know, I realize some of you may have had to press pause and touch grass after that intro. And yeah, we're going to head back to Beslan and the siege and what happened next later in the episode. It's like...

It's a really pivotal moment, not just for Chechnya, but modern Russian history, the response to it, Putin's involvement and what it did to the elusive concept of an independent Chechnyan state. Yeah, I think as I was reading this, I was like, isn't there some theory that Putin was behind this? But I was confused.

That's the apartment bombings, right? From years earlier. Here, the scandal was like the inept response, right? Yeah. I mean, inept is like a very passive way of putting it. These guys go in like completely batshit when they get a sniff of a terror attack like this. So, yeah, this fits a theme that was going on for years and years. And, yeah, we'll get to the apartment bombings too. Very, very controversial moment in

in, I guess, like European history, really. But the story of Kazbek Mizikov as well, I got that mostly, of course, I think plenty of people know from CJ Chivers' Esquire article, The School. It's just like an amazing piece of work. I think one of the best long-form articles I've ever read.

It's on the list for subscribers, of course. Any feature articles you've thought race of late? I mean, I read Michael Lidov's one about the mad Russian Senate-docking New York director for GQ last week as I was doing Russian stuff. That's one of my all-time faves. No, I mean, I'm reading Wanderings by High and Potok, but that's not really our...

niche, but oh yeah, our friend Zeke has his book out on crypto, I think. It came out this week and there was a... Oh yeah, I got the email. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's going to be great. I mean, there was an excerpt in New York Magazine, which was fantastic, but he's...

I mean, he's just a funny dude who covered all the grifters and con artists and all that. So I'm looking forward to reading that. What's it called? Money Go Up? Money Go Up. Yeah, I've got a PDF copy of that because I think we're going to do something with Zig soon on that book. Yeah, it's great. There's a whole lot of organized crime going on there. Yeah, that's going to be awesome. So to get you guys up to speed on this podcast,

Pretty whopping three-parter on Chechnya so far. Last episode, we went from ancient Chechnyan history through its invasion at the hands of the Mongols, the Russian Empire, you've got Islamist freedom fighters, Stalin's purges, and the birth of Chechen organized crime in exile across what is nowadays Kazakhstan and Russian Siberia.

And then we had the fall of communism and the increasing collusion between Chechen gangsters and rebels in its independence movement and a grisly double murder, of course, in central London. Now, that killing happened in 1993 and it resulted in the revenge killing of an innocent British woman in the sleepy town of Woking, of all places, the following year.

And that's where we're picking up for part two. And in case you're wondering, no, it doesn't get any less crazy from now on, nor will it do in the third episode. So hold on to your butts, guys. Here we go. That whole sorry episode, the BBC journalist, the Armenian pool attendant, the KGB killers and the Utsiev brothers on a mission either to buy weapons, steal contracts and oil for the Chechnyan independence movement, or just to take all the cocaine in London. And that's a lot.

This is when we see Chechen organised crime and the gears of its political players all grinding together as one. And this is coming at a time when, I probably don't need to mention, the Soviet Union has collapsed and its largest former constituent and seat of power, the now Russian Federation, is a complete basket case free-for-all.

Russian corruption, of course, is older than Rasputin, but in the embers of the Soviet Union, it really, really goes bananas. You've got scams on minerals, scams on currency, something called the Great Ruble Scam, which is when the Russian deputy PM sanctions a bunch of Western businessmen to buy billions of dollars worth of exchange, but they're all actual Ukrainian con artists. It's mad. Yeah, we have that great episode on those car wars, right? Toiletti, however you say it? Toiletti, yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't you... Yeah, that...

And I think I've always wanted to do something on the aluminum wars, which was like a big industry mafioso war there. Maybe I'll get Ostrovsky to write something up on it. You know, I was about to fly to Togliatti to write that story for a big American magazine. And then, well, we know what happened. But yeah, it's pretty hard to get there these days. Anyway, on December 26th, 1991, the Soviet Union is formally broken up.

And might I add, Albania is still going strong under communism, but I just thought I'd get the Albanians in there. But politically, things are still a powder kick. In 1993, Communist Party chiefs are pissed off that Russian President Boris Yeltsin, yes, that Yeltsin of the drunk dancing and the nose more noble than a druid's pimp stick. He's dishing out mineral wealth and formerly state owned conglomerates to oligarch powers like Kandy.

creating the world's biggest black market in everything from tanks to tungsten mines. Yeah, Moscow in the 90s. I mean, we're talking Russia, but Moscow then just seems like the most insane place. Like a party scene like Caligula. Yeah. Thousands of murders. I mean, have you ever seen the numbers for murders in Moscow during the 90s? It's insane. Yeah. Like thousands. Mafia wars over like ball bearing factories and stuff like that. You know, just insane. Yeah, I mean, remember that Toiletti episode? There are people like fighting over...

The windscreen wiper section of the company. And people are dropping in their dozens over that. It's fully mad. I mean, I remember the first time I went to Moscow and it felt very, very un-European and moody. And I went to a few of those old famous bars that people talked about. I think it's one of them called the Pravda Bar or the Propaganda Bar. It's really a very, very weird vibe. I remember going to a bar in the bottom of the Ministry of Defense or the Ministry of Information.

And I was going for a pint with an Australian dude and there were just tons of guys in black suits, black ties, sunglasses with guns on the table, eating plates of like 50 bucks spaghetti. It was really, really weird. Anyway, that was a fun weekend. These communists...

Back to those communists. They then attempt a coup in Moscow, prompting Russian leaders to take the extraordinary measure of ordering tanks to fire on their own parliament building, the so-called White House. Coup might not be the right word. They just didn't want Yeltsin to divvy up everything so quickly.

It's all threatening to fall to pieces for the new Russia, and amid all of this, just as the Russians had done during the Second World War when Starling accused restful minorities of collaborating with the Nazis, and it should be added a small number of them actually did,

Politicians accuse, who else, the Chechnyans of plotting to bring down the Russian state. So they're just, they've been like the scapegoats going back centuries now, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's just so weird that they're basically a vassal state now. I don't know if I want to, spoiler alert, but like, it's, I don't know, man, it's wild how that reversal happened. Yeah, I mean, I can't speak for all Russians, but it does really seem like going back centuries, they really have been the bogeyman of the entire Russian empire. Yeah.

And they're always, always viewed as others. And it's not going to stop at this point either. Writes journalist Stephen Handelman in Comrade Criminal, quote,

Easily recognized by their dark hair and skin coloring, as well as their names, they are often targeted by thugs and police and were the victims of a pogrom organized by the mayor of Moscow after the siege of the White House in October 1993, when many were expelled from the city by the militia.

I mean, I'm pretty certain there is quite a lot of anti-Semitism in Russia at this point. There was, of course, an uptick in anti-Semitic and racist violence all over the Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Iron Curtain, not least in former Eastern Germany, which we go into in the show about Rynazontai. But if you can set your watches to anything in 20th century Russia, it is that the Chechens are going to get it in the neck. And to be honest, given the shit they've gone through, I'd forgive a fair number of the Chechens for wishing Russia would just disappear off the map altogether.

At this time, leaders in the Caucasian Republic itself are gearing up for an aggressive independence run. Aggressive might be the biggest euphemism of all time. Very few coincidences are going on here, guys. In 1992, forces loyal to proclaimed Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, I think we mentioned him last episode, they ransacked Russian military posts in the region.

Russians withdraw soon after, while in early 1993 a schism opens up between pro- and anti-duty factions in Chechnya itself. And Grozny, the capital, blooms into protest. Remember, as much as Chechens might want their own independent state, this is also the Caucasus. So you get tribes facing down rival tribes, families versus families, infighting within infighting.

As inevitable as a loss at a Moldovan craps table, a Russian dole of tribal enmity, you could call it, if you're a second-rate writer, but I, of course, wouldn't do that. You're really just on one these days. I mean, it's marvelous stuff, you know? Are you still getting over the goat in the gulag? I'm just happy to witness it, you know? We're all witnesses. Yeah, I'm not sure if you're witnessing a renaissance or a slow breakdown, but we'll go with it.

This is exactly, by the way, when the Utsiev brothers are being offed by the Armenian KGB in the UK. So you can see how quickly things are unravelling in the Caucasus at this point.

Later that year, with two of his most trusted deputies laying on North London mortuary slabs, Dudiev pulls a Russia, and he shells his own people in downtown Grozny. It doesn't have the same effect as Yeltsin's bombing of Moscow's White House, however, and the coup in Chechnya explodes into a civil war. And that is precisely the excuse Boris Yeltsin needs to order a full-scale invasion of his febrile southern vassal. The First Chechen War is underway.

At first, Russia thinks this will be little more than a couple days steamrolling its way to Grozny. Sound familiar? If it doesn't, no, it definitely will in a moment. First, Yeltsin's air force softens up the Chechen capital with indiscriminate strikes that kill scores of civilians. Then, he sends in 40,000 troops and three armoured columns that rumble towards the city from the north, east and west. Easy? No, of course not.

These Chechens have been fighting asymmetrical guerrilla conflicts since before Russia even existed. And while they might have been ripping each other's face off before the Russian invasion, nothing galvanizes Caucasian identity stronger than attack from the old enemy itself. The Chechens, basically, are about to hand Moscow's ass right back to it, gift-wrapped. Yeah, I mean, it's just really a foolish move, and I've seen that a lot in, like,

places I've covered in history too, you should let them exhaust themselves fighting each other, then you move in. Nothing brings a warring group of people together like an attack from an outsider. It almost always happens. I guess actually...

Thinking of like the Kurdish civil wars in the 90s, sometimes they teamed up with various outsiders, but in general, like let them exhaust each other. Yeah, a lot of the... Don't like interrupt them. A lot of the Caucasian stuff has got kind of people's front of Judea like connotations. But I mean, this kind of thinking is going to go both ways. So we're going to kind of go full circle on that thinking as well in a minute. Yeah.

So the Chechens are, of course, above all, they are brigands, abreks, those are the outlaw exiles we spoke about on the last show. And they're just about the toughest, grisliest fighters anywhere on the planet. And these guys are running on hate. Hate for Russians, which is basically Chechen crack. Oh yeah, and let's throw religion into the mix too. This is the early 1990s, of course, a time when Al-Qaeda is embarking on its holy war against America with the bombing of New York's World Trade Center.

Chechnya's own Grand Mufti wants to ride the wagon too. He's a pug-faced, goateed zealot named Ahmad Kadyrov, born in Kazakhstan, 1951, to an exiled Chechen family. He's a decorated theologian which, in 1990s Chechnya, basically means rabid Islamist, and he's a staunch ally of Dzhokhar Dudiev and independence.

So what do you do if you're a Chechen Grand Mufti, born in exile, with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp in a library full of well-thumbed Qurans? Yes, it's jihad time.

Kadyrov declares holy war on the Russians and he invites fighters from across the Islamic world to join the Chechen struggle against its huge ancient nemesis. And it works. In flood thousands of jihadis from the Arab world and beyond. And before long, there's an official Chechen mujahideen led by a Saudi guy named Ibn al-Khutub who's got experience kicking Russian backsides in their own disastrous war in Afghanistan.

By now, it's still less than 13 years since the Soviets were booted out of Afghanistan by armies of Mushardin and families who hid in mountains, attacked armored convoys with booby traps and artillery, and were happy to snipe and shell from the windows of city apartment blocks.

Now, they're embroiled in a war against Chechen Mushardins and families, destroying armoured convoys with booby traps and artillery, and who are happy to potshot and shell out of the windows of city apartments. Bad news for Russia. But also for humanity in general, because the First Chechen War is a blood-soaked affair that culminates in the Battle of Grozny. This two-month conflict leaves almost 30,000 civilians dead and reduces the city to dust.

It's the biggest bombing campaign in Europe since World War II, and media soon refer to Grozny, whose name, by the way, means fearsome, as the planet's most destroyed city. I think Robert King was there for that, like he was one of the only photojournalists, or the only one, who stayed behind. And his photos are insane. I think there's video of it too. I mean, actually, you know what?

That might be the second. The second war was 99, right? The second time that Grozny was destroyed. It might be that, but either way, his photos from that second war are just like breathtaking. And it's covered in this documentary about him called Shooting Rubber King. It's a mad doc. I worked with him in the Central African Republic and he's a madman, but definitely watch that documentary. It's got footage from Grozny, you know, not this war, obviously the next one a couple of years later, but it's,

it's insane how destroyed this is. I'm impressed that you managed to work with the guy. He's like, he's a bit of a legend. That must have been amazing. Oh, I don't know if amazing is the word for it. It was definitely, I definitely, it was interesting. It was interesting. I learned a lot. He's a, he's a good guy to be in a conflict zone with and a madman at that, but a very talented photographer. Most photojournalists. Yeah. Yeah. Have a bit of a screw loose. I should add like,

We're not getting across how destroyed this city was, I don't think. 30,000 civilians dead in Grozny. Even today, the city only has a quarter of a million people. I mean, that is pretty insane casualty rates. During the campaign, Russia, unsurprisingly, of course, blockades Chechnya, which means that the breakaway republic...

Yeah, it's similar when we talk about the war in the Balkans, right? Or really any blockade of a city under siege. It's always a huge boon for gangsters and black marketers. They can make a fortune off it. Yeah, Arkand, right? Yeah, and a bunch of other guys too. Exhibit A.

Yeah, yeah. So weapons bazaars pop up all over Chechnya. And even though it's completely surrounded by the enemy, the Chechen mafia, whatever that is as a concept, is so powerful and connected that Grozny's pockmarked airport receives up to 150 unsanctioned flights per month. And I'm guessing they're not full of tourists.

writes one academic quote,

Similarly, Dudiev was able to reach financial and material benefits while flaunting Moscow's embargo. Right, that's the same thing. The elites there don't care. I think Misha Glennie talks about it. Was it him or someone else who wrote about the wars in the Balkans? Whether it was Serbs or Bosnians or Albanian gangsters, they all worked together to make money off the embargoes and the blockades and the war as their people killed each other. And they sort of ratcheted up the rhetoric. It's a similar situation here.

There's no suggestion that these mafiosi are kind of, you know, ennobled by this war. They're pretty mercenary, but it kind of suits everyone at the time. So, right. It's just a sort of Faustian pact. Before we continue with the first Chechen war, it's worth asking, how are these Chechen gangsters getting so big that they can sustain an entire guerrilla war?

Well, as the last show got into, they're already a pretty formidable force when communism ends. After that, the answer lies in the oligarchs, particularly the most powerful oligarch of them all, Boris Berezovsky.

There are dozens of men, and they're all men of course, getting wildly rich siphoning off former state wealth in the early 90s, but none of them as consummately as Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky is short and stout and he's a Muscovite. Born in 1946, the son of a Jewish engineer, Berezovsky works as an engineer himself, publishing 16 papers in a distinguished career that runs up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But in 1989, Berezovsky capitalises on Perestroika to found Logovaz, an auto dealer with connections to state-owned automaking giant Avtovaz. Now, we're going to go back to Togliatti here, but that's Russia's Detroit, and you'll know that in the early 1990s, gangs get really feral about controlling various limbs of this huge lumbering corporation. You've got gangs killing, like I said, to control accessory and windscreen wipe production companies,

Gangs for trucks, gangs who control vans, cars, the machinery itself, street battles, bombs, the works. Go back and listen to it if you haven't already. And Berezovsky, who's busy buying up shares in Russia's auto industry, comes under fire himself. In 1994, just as a gang war erupts across Russia that will last until the year 2000, he survives a bombing assassination attempt that kills his driver.

That incident is, oddly enough, investigated by a young FSB officer named Alexander Litvinenko. If you don't know who he is, well, I'd be surprised if you didn't, but pause this and look him up because he's coming back. Berezovsky then pivots, and he pivots again and again until he has controlling stakes in oil, public TV, aluminium, and even the National Sports Fund of Russia, plundering them and running them into the dirt.

Writes Yohanna Granville in her paper, The Russian Kleptocracy and Rise of International Organized Crime, Berezovsky is a, quote, politically ruthless and cunning tycoon who perhaps profited more than anybody else from Russia's slide into the abyss. He stood closer than the other oligarchs to all three realms, crime, commerce and government.

His success in both making money and claiming to be a valuable statesman in the government service was due in part to his relationships with some of Russia's strongest gangsters, particularly the Chechen mafia. The Chechens are acting as Berezovsky's quote "Krisha" or "roof", which basically means "hired protection". And there is a good reason for that. The car industry, as we've heard, is brutal and Berezovsky needs to fight fire with fire.

As many of Russia's other gangs have successfully pursued ambitions of becoming political players and business empires, Chechens are focused on cornering their traditional market niche, the inflicting of severe violence. It's a hell of a sentence right there. Yeah, he knows how to write things. I mean, people really have to read that book, Navori. It's like it sets up so much that's in this show.

Incidentally, Gagliotti bases this chapter of his book on a meeting he has with a Chechen hitman named Borys, who is a Soviet military veteran and graduate of family-led gangs in Chaly, which is a city home to around 45,000 and Chechnya's second largest behind Grozny.

Gagliotti meets this guy at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport and Boaz demands that they toast Allah with a shot of vodka, which is just a legit brilliant moment. And Gagliotti continues, quote, The Chechen criminals, often described as the Chechenskia Bratva or Chechen Brotherhood, and occasionally Chechenskia Obchinchina or Chechen Commune, have no formal structure in common.

They do represent a distinctive criminal subculture, though, holding itself apart from the mainstream Russian underworld. A characteristic mix of modern branding and bandit tradition means that they have such a powerful place in the Russian criminal imagination that they are now even a, quote, franchise, with local gangs not made up of Chechens competing to use their name.

And Gagliotti goes on, and I know I'm quoting a bunch here, but like we said in the last episode as well, it really is a great book. Quote, "...the Chechens' failure to prosper in the same way as the other major networks also reflects their clear and conscious determination to buck the rest of the Russian underworld's trend of diversification into business and politics. Both Chechen gangs have tended not to evolve beyond their core speciality, the use of threat and violence."

Perhaps remaining true to their bandit roots, they continue to be heavily involved in extortion and protection racketeering. However, in many cases they have become, in effect, the protection racketeer's protection racketeer, acquiring networks of client gangs from any ethnic background from whom they simply demand tribute on pain of gang warfare. So probably not the brightest, but definitely the most murderous.

Yeah, and I think in a minute or two, we're going to see the best example of that too. So the Chechens, intertwined with the bloodthirsty rebels of their want-away republic's bitter war, get a pretty well-deserved rep across Russia as lunatics, who really don't give a shit if they're in the mafia club at all. No wonder Berezovsky, the so-called godfather of the Kremlin, hires them to protect his bulging business empire.

This is not to say that Chechens just go and live in caves when they're not killing each other. They own fleets of casinos, bars and restaurants in Moscow, right under the noses of other crooks. But they're definitely different. As the war in Chechnya progresses, the Chechens begin to use kidnapping to raise funds to fight the Russians. Leaked telephone conversations suggest that Berezovsky even stages several kidnappings of high-profile foreigners by Chechens himself, paying them the ransom money.

Berezovsky's not the only one catering to his Chechen roof or Krisha. Vasyaslav Ivankov, better known as Yaponchik, who you got into a bunch in your Brighton Beach Russian mob episode, I think. He's one of the most feared gangsters in the country, and he works openly with the Chechens. Writes Chronicles magazine, quote,

Yaponchik wanted to modernize the Soviet Union's underworld, and to do this he had to deal first with the Chechens. During the late Soviet period, the Chechen Kostinostra openly operated across Russia and impudently occupied the gigantic Rossiya Hotel, whose windows looked out on the citadel of Russian power, the Kremlin.

Anyone who visited the Rossiya in the late 80s and early 90s can testify to the sea of black limos, hulking bodyguards and black fedora Chechen godfathers or clan leaders with their signature black leather jackets and droopy moustaches that encroached on Red Square itself. A relentless war of contract murders organised by the upon-chicks hand-picked man, veteran killer Andrei Isaev, who goes by the name Rossby's or signature Rossiya.

was waged by the blacks the caucasian chechens and azeris who were moving in on the turfs of the slavic georgian and jewish gangsters it's 90s russia man just completely insane

Yeah, probably avoid anyone with a handlebar moustache, Jesus. By the way, quick aside, but I fully recommend watching 2010 documentary Thieves by Law. It's on YouTube and on the reading list for all you lovely Patreon subscribers. Show ad-free guys to do it. Where the filmmaker for this movie, he gets insane access to all these Russian gangsters who've made their names in this mid to late 90s era.

In it, Artem Tarasov, who's introduced as the Soviet Union's first millionaire, says that when he founded the Russian Lottery, which is a $15 million per week cash business, that is dangerous in Russia, he takes the Chechens as partners because even the thieves-in-law, the Vori, are scared of them.

According to him, the thieves have meetings, arbitrations, parlays, and then he adds, quote, Chechen showed up at these meetings and immediately started shooting. Also, when a gangster describes how he'd get people to pay extortion, just another horrible detail in this movie, he'd get a homeless guy off the street, feed him, dress him in a suit, take him to a meeting with debtors,

And then when the guy refuses to pay up, they whip out a sword, cut the homeless guy's head off and tell the debtor that's what happens when they refuse to pay. This is like barbaric, sadistic stuff. But there is Russia in the 90s for you. I mean, is that like a real, is that an urban legend or that's like a proven thing that they're like, we did this?

So I was thinking that and I rewatched a scene and there's a moment, I think they go ice fishing with the filmmaker and the guy who leads the gang is like, hey, Andre, shut up. You shouldn't be saying stuff like that. And there's a few moments like that in this movie. You've really got to watch it. It's unbelievable. Yeah, I'm probably going to after this. Yeah.

Yeah, it's nuts. Anyway, in case you haven't got the message over the past, what, hour and a half of Chechen gang chat, these guys are tough as old boots and they absolutely love a fight. So back to the first Chechen war. It's 1995 now and the Chechens, vastly outpowered and outnumbered, despite their own successful tactics, they get even dirtier.

and they employ methods more commonly associated with Islamist terrorist groups, which is unsurprising given their ranks are swelled with fighters from jihads across the Islamic world. In June 1995, Chechens hold 1,800 people hostage at a maternity ward in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk.

I'm sorry to all Russian-speaking listeners for my pronunciation again. After five days, Russian troops storm the hospital, but only results in the deaths of around 140 people and a ceasefire with the breakaway Chechens. So I guess they're getting the message that violence very much works.

This ceasefire only holds for a short while, of course, and the bloodshed continues until the following year. In April 1996, Dzhokhar Dudiev is assassinated by two guided missiles. Russian President Boris Yeltsin claims victory. But religious extremism grows rife, jobs are scarce, the Chechen government is weaker than 3.2 beer, and kidnapping and organized crime become a way of life in the de facto state.

So much so that by 1996, there's a full-blown arms market operating right in the middle of central Grozny, controlled by rebel gangsters, where according to a BBC article, quote, a machine gun could be bought there for $200 to $300. Grenades were sold for 30 rubles or a dollar apiece. You know, I paid $30 in Cambodia, but they let you throw it there too. So maybe having a safe space to do that is worth an extra $29.

This is the only safe space that we talk about on this show. Did you shoot a cow with a bazooka? Because I heard you could do that. No, I mean, that was... I feel like we've talked about this before. That was just like a rumor. But I never saw... I have no interest in doing that and I never saw that. And they make you throw the grenade into like a pond. So...

you get to feel the ground shake, but it's not as cool as heaving it into a field. But there was also, yo, the craziest rumor, and I think it's in a book called Off the Rails in Phnom Penh that was written in the 90s, but I was there mid-2000s, so it was a book that was going around. But there was a rumor that was going around that you could pay a certain amount of money and they would send someone who had been sentenced to die by execution, like a prisoner, running up a hill and you'd get a shot at them

But I don't know. It was something like that and then you only get one or two shots and if they survive, they go for it. Something insane like that that probably wasn't true, but it was an urban legend that was going around. The cow grenade thing, I feel like everyone had a friend of friend who said they had done it, but I don't know if that was verified. It seems like a lot of... A cow is expensive. That's a lot of meat and a lot of money, especially in a country like that. I can't imagine that you could do it for a couple hundred dollars.

I guess if you had some kind of a plastic sheet around it, you could just turn it straight into burgers. But yeah, it does seem like a waste of money. What's that show? What's the one where they go around investigating stuff like this? Is it Mythbusters? I feel like that's more about not urban legends, but things about... I don't know. But they should look into that. I'd love to know. Yeah. Let's reach out to them. Maybe we can do a hookup in Cambodia. Yeah.

We do like a separate one of those, like a true crime podcast. That's 10 episodes of us just trying to figure out why this rumor is true about Cambodia. Yeah, or just get wasted in Cambodia.

Yeah, I'm up for both of those things. This BBC story that I just mentioned, it's really interesting on how the first Chechen war empowers organised crime. Quote, in the past decade of conflict, Chechnya has become a haven for racketeers who profit from oil thefts, kidnapping and embezzlement of state funds allocated to help the devastated republic. Musa Eskakanov, director of the Grozny-esque...

The Groznev's The Gas Oil Company, I'm really sorry, says that up to 600 tonnes of oil is being pilfered in Chechnya daily. A police unit popularly known as the Oil Regiment was set up to protect pipelines and oil wells. Groznev Gas spends 300 million rubles or more than 10 million dollars a year on it, but this still does not help.

People who monitor this type of crime claim that nearly all the security forces based in Chechnya profit from oil. Stealing oil just always struck me as a huge pain in the ass. You know, tough to move, probably tough to find buyers. I bet you just like spill a lot all the time, but it must be worth it. Even the cartels get in on it. So what do I know? Yeah. I always wonder about those guys who do it in the Niger Delta. Like how, who are they selling to? Selling back to BP or something? I don't really get it. Anyway.

Chechnya, state, gangs, gangs, state. And this thing continues, quote, kidnapping becomes widespread in Chechnya in 1997 when a group of Russian NTV journalists are captured.

It's alleged that the company paid a million dollars for their release. Honestly, Russians really don't get how to deal with hostage crises. After that, the hostage business escalated. No shit. Kidnappers made millions of dollars targeting foreign humanitarian workers, missionaries and Russian officials. Good luck being a missionary in Chechnya. Jesus.

Failure to pay a ransom led to brutal killings of hostages. In one notorious case, three British Granger telecom engineers and a New Zealander were beheaded by their captors. In August 1996, the Chechens actually managed to win their war. And in 1997, Boris Yeltsin and newly elected Chechen President Aslan Maskadov signed a treaty in Moscow that will put, quote, "a full stop to 400 years of history."

i.e. Russians and Chechens blowing each other up in perpetuity. Both sides agree to reject the use of force, quote, forever. And everybody lived happily ever after. Oh no, wait, of course they fucking didn't. Because one side is Russia and the other side can't get enough of a fight. This is the Caucasus. In 1999, Chechnya invades its neighbor Dagestan, which technically is Russia.

Later that year, Russian then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pins a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and elsewhere on al-Khutab, the jihadi in Chechnya, and his Chechen terrorists, providing the Kursus Beli for another incursion into Chechnya. How do you say Kursus Beli? I don't know. I didn't do Latin at school unlike a lot of British journalists. Yeah, I'm the wrong guy for pronunciation, man. All my words come from reading, so I got nothing to help you with.

You were just speaking Latin before we did the show. I won't get into the bombings too much here. I mean, we mentioned about the top of the show as well, but if you already know about Putin's rise to power, this is a crucial moment and highly suspected to be a false flag operation. You could do very, very much worse than read up a couple of books. The less you know, the better you sleep by David Satter and blowing up Russia by our old mate and former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko.

which will mark him out for a painful and famous death in 2006, poisoned by polonium in his adopted home of London. That was a huge, huge story in the UK. I don't really know how it crossed over the Atlantic, but whatever the truth of the apartment bombings, they get the Russian public back on board for another fight with the Chechens, which from the off features more indiscriminate bombing, more civilian deaths and an armed march to Grozny.

By January 2000, Russia actually takes the Chechen capital, no more than a smouldering heap by this point. In a surprise turn of events, Ahmad Kadyrov about turns on Chechen independence and the Kremlin backs him as a pro-Moscow stooge. And yes, Kadyrov's son is a young, troll-faced former rebel and amateur boxer named Ramzan. We got there.

Kadyrov the Elder then embarks on a process of, quote, peace via Chechenisation, towing a fine line between Chechen nationalism and unity with a parent state that's been massacring its men, women and children for centuries. Hint, in case you needed one, he's not going to do it by building a liberal democracy. Remember how the first Chechen war emboldened and enriched Chechnya's band of mafiosi?

The Second War may not have gone in the Republic's favour, but there's rarely a scuff the Mafia can't monetise. Writes the BBC, quote, "...the embezzlement funds allocated for the reconstruction of Chechnya has become a source of income for Chechen and Russian officials."

According to the Russian audit chamber, 62 billion rubles, which is more than $2 billion, sent to Chechnya between 2000 and 2003, 5 billion rubles was, quote, spent extremely inappropriately. Sometimes the same building is officially restored several times or a partly ruined building is declared restored in official documents.

So even the flattening of Grozny is a chance for the fattening of the mob. Not that everyone is a contraband smuggling mercenary, of course. There are more than a few Chechen jihadis that have been killing in the name of a state and a man, Kadyrov, who's suddenly gone all Manchurian candidate, and they are not best pleased. Enter Shamil Basayev, a field commander and one-time deputy prime minister of Chechnya, also known as Abu Idris.

He's already been instrumental in the Budyonnovsk hospital raid in 1995 and the recapture of Grozny from Russia a year later. He's grizzled and experienced and wildly popular. And in 2002, Basayev goes rogue, besieging a Moscow theater. Russian forces don't hang around to negotiate. This ain't a 90s Hollywood movie. They just pile in mob-handed.

Spetsnaz commandos go tossing nerve gas into the theatre and then they rush in, slaughtering the Chechen terrorists. Only the gas also kills 133 hostages. Whoopsie. Basayev escapes the raid and the next year, Ahmad Kadyrov is formally installed as the President of the Chechen Republic, a Russian satrap.

Basiev and his hardliners won't take this betrayal lying down though. Yeah, it really is just this absurd fiefdom, right? Like something out of medieval times now. Yeah, and the way they rule pretty much follows that as well. So the following year to this is 2004. Greece are somehow winning the European Championships and I'm riding in the back of a Sikynthos garbage truck at 5am with a bunch of pissed up Greek guys.

and French girls, those are the days, blissfully unaware that Shamil Basayev's reign of terror against Russia is at its apex. That May, a bomb attack kills 30 people during a military parade at Grozny football stadium, including Ahmad Kadyrov himself.

Two months later, on the night of August 24, 2004, explosive devices detonate aboard two domestic passenger planes that have taken off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport, blowing both jets to pieces and killing all 90 people on board. Subsequent FSB investigations discover that the bombs have been carried onto the planes by two female Groznyites, and Basiev came to responsibility online a few weeks later.

It's not just the Chechens, by the way. Separatists from the nearby Caucasian Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia carry out two Moscow metro bombings that year, killing 51 people. The Caucasus is restless. But nothing dismays the world like the siege at School No. 1 in Beslan, which begins on September 1. It's one of the worst terror attacks in modern history,

And we're going to go back to the story of Kazbek Mizikov and his family now, who, when we left him, was trying to thumb apart the circuit of the bucket bombs wired around the school hall and which are balanced chillingly above his family's heads. Look, I mean, I could just read Chiva's story for the next hour or so happily, but do go read it after this if you haven't already. Yeah, it won a ton of awards, I think. It was supposed to be one of Esquire's greatest stories ever, and Esquire used to have some of the best journalism in the world.

Yeah, used to. There have been some good stuff recently that I've read there, actually, to be fair. I think Dale based one of his... Dale based his recent bonus on a piece out there about the stuff in Portland and Benton Hills. That was really, really good, but...

Yeah, the days of Chivas, man. That was good. By the second day, Kazbek breaks the wire, ensuring that the bomb won't explode. But he knows that, just as been the case with the Moscow theater siege months before, the Russian forces won't wait around and parlay with the Chechen terrorists. They're going in.

And on day three, they storm the building. There is huge bloodshed and carnage and 333 people lose their lives. But Kazbek incredibly isn't one of them.

2004, then, is really the year where an independent Chechnya becomes all but impossible. Bazayev, you'll be pleased to know, dies pretty soon afterwards, in 2006, at the hands of an exploded mine. But Ramzan Kadyrov, Ahmad Kadyrov's son, who's been groomed for the throne since his father's death amid Bazayev's football stadium attack in May 2004, he becomes Chechen president in 2007. Clearly,

cleaving to theremlin line and forging a close partnership with vladimir putin that has lasted until today how old was he when he took over was he like 25 years old maybe a little older like getting on for 30 but very young yeah but still looking extremely weird

Putin channels billions of dollars into the shattered republic, furnishing Kadyrov with over a billion bucks in subsidies, without which Chechnya and Kadyrov's increasingly iron grip would surely never survive.

In return, Kadyrov vows to smash any resistance to his and Russia's rule in Chechnya, and he installs a dictatorship and cult of personality around himself and his father not too dissimilar to North Korea's Juche system, only with way better hats. He kills political enemies and journalists, subjugates ethnic and sexual minorities, builds palaces for himself, and Grozny, the once-destroyed capital city, even begins to look a bit like Pyongyang.

Writes Josh Jaffa in a 2016 New Yorker feature, quote, The Second Chechen War, which the Russians launched in 1999 in an effort to curb not only separatism in Chechnya, but the threat of militant Islam, wound down a decade later, with special operations carried out deep in the craggy wooded hills of the Caucasus.

These days the rubble is gone. The city's skyline is punctuated by the glass towers of Grozny City, a collection of skyscrapers that houses offices, luxury apartments and a five-star hotel.

Grozny is quiet and bland, with well-paved boulevards running through its center. There is still a faint air of menace. Men in black uniforms stand with automatic rifles on many street corners. But the city's flashier attractions, like a man-made lake with a light show, seem whimsical and family-friendly. Yeah, we've actually got Josh on an upcoming episode about Russian mobsters fighting in Ukraine and Wagner, which I think might be next week, but we'll see what happens.

Yeah, that's going to be awesome. Josh's stuff on that has been really cool. But Kadyrov's cadre in Chechnya is anything but family friendly. And as we'll dig into in our next and final Chechen installment, he is about to turn the folks who've helped build and raid and defend and steal from Chechnya for decades, the mafia.

And that is all for this week's guys. Thanks for listening. The third episode of this mega three-parter is going to explore Ramzan Kadyrov's criminal dictatorship, his men's use as hitmen, sports washing, German boxing gyms, drugs, French riots, murdered MMA fighters, anti-gay purges, and even Kadyrov's 2016 star turn on Russia's version of The Apprentice. It really doesn't get any bonkers, any less bonkers rather with these guys.

And we'll head back to Boris Berezovsky in that show too and find out what fate awaited the Kremlin's godfather. You know it's not good. Yeah, you could do a whole year on Russian oligarch battles. But as always, bonus episodes, patreon.com slash new world podcast, TikTok, iTunes, Spotify, whatever, man. Just sign up for stuff or give us money. Figure it out.