Russian Mafia Superhitman: Alexander Solonik
55:50 Share

Location, the lab. Quentin only has 24 hours to sell his car. Is that even possible? He goes to Carvana.com. What is this, a movie trailer? He ignores the doubters, enters his license plate. Wow, that's a great offer. The car is sold, but will Carvana pick it up in time for... They'll literally pick it up tomorrow morning. Done with the dramatics. Car selling in record time. Save your time. Go to Carvana.com and sell your car today. Pickup fees may apply.

The NBA playoffs are here, and I'm getting my bets in on FanDuel. Talk to me, Chuck GPT. What do you know? All sorts of interesting stuff. Even Charles Barkley's greatest fear. Hey, nobody needs to know that. New customers bet $5 to get 200 in bonus bets if you win FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook.

April 10th, 1993 in Moscow, Russia. The Berlin Wall has fallen, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and Russia's wild 90s are underway as every two-bit street thug scrambles for cash and control.

Oligarchs in waiting are taking over entire industries and using bullets instead of board meetings to do so. As the empire falls, the chaos and anarchy rise at alarming rates. Former KGB men and Afghanistan war vets ply their trade. And by trade, I mean killing people for money. Moscow is a gangster's playground, as thousands of gangs and organized crime groups have sprung up out of nowhere. The streets are feral.

And it's not just guys in tracksuits with thick necks and shaved heads taking out other guys in tracksuits with shaved heads and thick necks. We've got businessmen, politicians, and mob bosses themselves being picked off by, you know, day-of-the-jackal types. We are talking tens of billions of dollars at stake here, up for grabs. And nowhere is more deadly than Moscow. In 1992, there are 2,500 murders in Moscow alone, with that number closing in on 3,000 over the next few years.

Moscow in the 90s is a war zone. There's a lot of action and everyone wants a piece of that action. Problem is, sometimes two people want a piece of that same action. In Moscow in 1993, they don't go to the courts. They go to the hired killers. On this April night, Valery Dlugach, also known as Globus, is leaving the nightclub with his girlfriend.

He's a rumored thief-in-law, the highest level of Russian gangster, born in the trenches of the gulags. Only something a few hundred people can claim at this point in time. A rare breed. Not what you would call a soft target. He's with his girlfriend and bodyguards as he exits the club. But alas, it's not enough to keep you safe in Russia those days. A single sniper shot hits him. Some reports say in the chest, others say right in the head. Dead just like that. One of Moscow's top gangsters.

One of his associates leaves the club seconds later, another mafioso, and he's killed too. It doesn't stop there. Only a few days later, one of Globus' business associates, who goes by Rambo, is gunned down in his own stairwell.

Fingers point to one man orchestrating the whole thing. Sergey Sylvester Timofeev, a soldier and tractor driver turned karate instructor who formed an organized crime group with some of his trainees that went from scrappy car thieves to billionaire players with control everywhere in less than a decade. Rumors fly about motivations. Drug trafficking competition, control of a certain nightclub, Globus partnering up with Sylvester's sworn enemies, a bunch of Azeri crime groups.

But one thing people are sure of is who pulled the trigger to take out Globus and a whole host of other mob bosses. Alexander Solonik, also called Alexander the Great and Sasha the Macedonian, because he liked to fire two pistols at the same time, one in each hand, which is apparently called the Macedonian way. Within a few years, he'll have another nickname, the Super Killer. This is the Underworld Podcast. ♪♪

Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast, where every week we dive into the world of international organized crime, hitman, drug trafficking, scams, flim flams, all sorts of shenanigans from all over, past, present, and future. And who are we? That would be me, Danny Gold, and my co-host, Sean Williams. And we're going to be talking about the world of international organized crime, hitman, drug trafficking, scams, flim flams, all sorts of shenanigans from all over, past, present, and future.

And we have traveled the world writing and making docs about these topics. And now every week bring you our dear listeners stories to help you make it through the week and maybe provide a little entertainment as always.

Bonus episodes at patreon.com slash underworldpodcast for the low, low price of $5 a month. Or you can sign up on Spotify or iTunes, underworldpod.com for merch, t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, and whatnot. The Underworld Podcast at gmail.com for any tips or monetary offers. Support our sponsors. Shout out to Magic Mind and everyone else. Follow us on social media where we have grown increasingly lazy at posting stuff.

but maybe we should hire someone to you know make one minute videos for tick tocks i don't know what do you what do you say williams yeah i mean you want to go through and pick one of the random guys the tens of thousands of bangladeshi fellas reaching out on the facebook page i mean yeah like fair play to them the real rising grand isn't some miami-dade trader with his head in a like a bucket of cold water it's it's a self-taught graphic designer in daca yeah

Yeah, those guys get after it, man. Enough respect to them. I mean, I'll never ever use them, but like they email every day, you know? Good for them. Hello, the underworld podcast. Yeah. Now, is there anyone more vaunted in the world of organized crime, or at least organized crime stories, both fact and fiction, than the Russian mob hitman? I think maybe like, you know, the godfather, the Sicilian mafia boss, but I'd say the Russian mob hitman, it's either tied with him or like a close second. I mean...

If we're talking lore, like he has to be up there. And this guy, the super killer, he has a hell of a lot of lore and is the quintessential Russian hitman. And it's not just, you know, American podcasters looking for a salacious episode title to catch your attention. In Russia, this guy is the subject of at least two movies, nine TV series, three books, and countless documentaries.

He's become a symbol, if not the symbol, of Russia and Moscow's murderous Mafia War 90s. Though I would kind of argue that like the oligarchs, right? They might be more so than him. Yeah, yeah, we've done a bunch of shows on this kind of world and it's crazy, man. It's so bloodthirsty. You sometimes wonder why they managed to go down the Putin route, this kind of like Stalinist thing that he's reviving. And then you read literally anything about Russia in the 1990s and then you're like,

Okay. Yeah, I get it. I get it. That was mad. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't expect it to have been utopian right after everything. You know, a state like that collapses. And we've seen it in other countries too. When a state like that collapses, Albania, we talked about that. When a state has, you know, been under a regime like that for decades and generations, like it's going to be chaos right afterwards because there's no real structure to take over. But enough of that.

Enough of that. Yeah, there's not a lot of English language stuff on this guy. You know, you have your usual 10-minute Wikipedia ripoffs and like quick LadMag style internet BuzzFeed articles. Pravda has a big piece on him. And I pieced together some other reports from Russian sources. But I want to give a shout out to this guy, Dan Cummings, who has a podcast called Time Suck.

who actually did a phenomenal job. I think he had the only book on Amazon about this guy translated, which is like self-published and terrible, I think he says. So definitely respect to him. I owe him a huge debt for this episode. And also, you know, most of these storytelling podcasts are super boring and not funny. I typically like can't even bother to listen to them. But this guy's actually, he's entertaining and he's pretty funny, man. So enough respect to him. You're giving a big shout out to someone who seems to be stealing our entire podcast.

USP at this point so maybe we should I think he was doing I think he was doing it before us dude damn but not the same subjects not the same subjects but oh yeah but I'll follow I don't know but uh but good man anyway

Besides that, I join a bunch of our other Russian Mafia episodes we've already done from the Brooklyn Brighton Beach Wars, which is one of our first and incredible stuff of the 1990s. Sean's great Toiletti Russian Mob War Story, which is an amazing 90s Russian mob story that you probably can't hear anywhere else. The NHL Extortion episode, and of course, the one on my one-time Shabbat dinner companion, the legendary Boris Mayfield.

Boris, wherever you are now, I think you might be in Russia. Let's hang out soon. I've got a list of people leaving angry comments on our podcast that I would like to give you. So let's set the scene, right? This guy gets his criminal career started in the 80s, but the 90s is really when things went up. Now, the term Russian mafia, it's not really a mafia, right, or one group. It's just the generic term for Russian organized crime groups. And in the 90s, these groups exploded with the end of communism, police state, and Russia becoming a free-for-all.

By 1994, Russia's interior minister said that there were close to 5,500 organized crime groups slash gangs in the country, up from about 1,000 a decade earlier. By 1996, there's 8,000 such groups, and most of them have between 50 to 100 members. Now, Russia always had some level of organized crime. We've talked about it before. The thieves-in-law, the old-school Russian gangsters. I think, how do you pronounce it, Sean? Vory? Vory Zakon? Vory Zakony. Yeah, yeah. I'll get you doing that little accent.

Um...

As they're called that, they've existed for generations. I mean, they exist before even the establishment of the Soviet Union. And they started up in prison during the Tsar days. So they were professional criminals who lived by a cove that was way more brutal and serious than like La Cosa Nostra, right? They basically weren't allowed to function in normal society. They swore to have nothing to do with the normal world. They had their own laws and customs. They're also supposed to be the judges of the Russian underworld. And they command respect from everyone.

They're not every Russian gangster, right? They're not a common thing. By the way, there are very few left. I think even in the 90s, there was only a few hundred or so.

But of course, during communism, these guys have to keep a relatively low profile. There's also, you know, black markets and tons of corrupt officials and military leaders and all that. But the government then obviously is the real mafia. And then the 80s, you know, Yeltsin gets his mind blown by a walkthrough of Wegmans and communism starts to collapse. And there's a sense of lawlessness basically pervading Russia. Money is draining out of the economy. Society is breaking down. It's the perfect time to rise up. And then, of course, we have Russia.

David Hasselhoff and and the winds of change which still one of the top ten songs ever even though a Patrick rating Keefe who was a friend of the show tried to ruin it and failed but uh, yeah, the USSR collapses in 1991

And all of a sudden, you have a pool of young men with some hardened skills looking for work and not afraid to do crime. Obviously, ex-KGB and ex-law enforcement guys, but also a lot of veterans of the war in Afghanistan who had all sorts of violent skills and all sorts of mental issues.

And the country was essentially a free-for-all, with money pouring in, money pouring out, lots of guns from the old Soviet armories, all that Soviet hardware built from when the Cold War was supposed to turn hot and didn't. It's all out there on the market. And no control, pretty much, almost a complete vacuum of power, really kind of building a state from the ground up. Yeah, I feel this is what's going to happen when AI takes over all the journalist jobs and we're going to have mobs of...

I don't know, Beltway, Ivy League grads just stalking the streets of San Francisco looking for copywriting gigs at startups. Yeah, but I don't think, I think you could take them, dude. You know? Yeah. Physically? I mean, I'd be up for it.

Get that concealed carry. Are we saying that if Russia had just sorted out its mental health issues after the Afghan war, then they wouldn't have had any crime? Oh, God, no. No, no, no. I'm just saying it was like a thing to throw in. A lot of those guys had like insane PTSD and did a lot of violent things and came back. Fighting the Mujahideen. Yeah. Yeah.

Not easy. That's when you get the emergence of a lot of the criminal gangs that are going to start small time and end up very, very big time. And when I say small time, I mean like extorting street vendors and running women and stealing cars. And when I say big time, I mean like literal billionaires.

Things go haywire as all of them fight for the rackets. Bodies start getting dropped. Sean has this fantastic episode on the Toiletti Wars. What was that about again? Was it car plants or some metal factory? Yeah, it's their national car maker at the time. Was it Avtovaz or Autovaz or something like ethnic Tatar assassins, bomb blasts?

The lot, man. It was like insane. Fun story. Bloomberg was actually going to send me out there to do a story on it. And then those pesky Russians went and invaded Ukraine. So I never got to do it. So you know who the real victim of that war is, Danny? It is me. Yeah. Yeah.

As the great Sean Williams once said, quote, at one point in the fall of 1994, an average three contract killings are carried out in Toiletti per day. Gunfire rattles around the streets and civilians get caught in the crossfire or blown up in car bombs. The two battling gangs are hiring muscle and hit man from outside town. It's like Burning Man for Russian gangsters. All right, man. If you will. There we go. Still got it. But yeah, I'm going to quote you in these episodes, dude, from previous episodes. I think it works.

You know? Yeah, so the Russian oligarchs, you know, they fought brutal gang wars to take over these big industries too. One I'd love to eventually do an episode on is the aluminum wars where a number of oligarchs are very powerful and connected guys tried to gain control of Russia's multi-billion dollar aluminum industry. There were multiple wars fought over it. The first one, I think, the first big one in the mid-90s, you know, they were being sold for pittance and privatized and these are big players, like famous names, guys who own sports franchises now.

Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, who I just learned is only 57, which is insane. That means he was doing all that stuff when he was like 25. Yeah, hundreds of people killed in these wars and lots of contract killers getting lots of work. From a website called European CEO, quote, in the words of Roman Abramovich, who testified recently in a suit over events of that period, every three days someone was being murdered.

You know, Roman, if you're out there, we'd love a sponsorship. Please do holler at us. Does he still own Chelsea? What does he own? No, no, he had to divest out Chelsea because of the war. But I don't know, man. If you get through to mention that I helped run all the electrical wiring through Stanford Bridge in one of the shittest jobs I ever did because I was getting bullied by the big men and the big boys on the construction site. But basically, Roman, you owe me. Well, look at you now. Huh?

Look where I am. Yeah, look at you now. You should bully them. You got a microphone in front of you, dude. Name names. Damn. Get after it, dude.

But yes, bodies are being dropped all over. Someone needs to do these killings or at least do them well. Well, at least the big ones, not the tracksuit ones. You can't send any Tom, Dick and Gopnik out to do the big business ones. As the gangsters and oligarchs emerge into one sort of hybrid, dealing with these business problems is basically killing the guy you had the problem with. And that becomes a super popular way of basically solving business negotiations. In the 90s, once that I saw said there were 10,000 shooting deaths some years across the country.

600 estimated contract killings, though I've seen numbers up to like 1500 per year during that point, some for as little as $1,000. There were 95 bankers killed, hotel bosses, restauranteurs, sports figures, businessmen, politicians, journalists, Afghan war veterans. At one point, even a prominent American businessman traveling in Moscow, 1996, a guy by the name of

Paul Tatum was straight up machine gunned in the streets. Yeah, I just looked that guy up. It's wild. He's like 39 years old, Oklahoman, got in a dispute for the ownership of this building.

I think it's like the Radisson now on the banks of the Moscow River. He cut his rivals' phone lines. And how's this for hubris, right? Quote, there's no telling how quickly this country could develop and how much it could look like the United States in a very short period of time. I don't know. Maybe he just meant like 50s and 60s Vegas. But that is some pretty bold speak shortly before. That was him saying it?

That was him saying that, yeah. How do you end up... I mean, that's like Oklahoma Cowboy stuff, man. Just like, I'm going to go to Moscow in the 90s. Yeah. And...

Didn't work out too well. There must have been loads of media about that, right? They're like, everyone getting excited about McDonald's and Burger King and stuff. Yeah. Things did not go... Don't do that. ...go well. With all this happening, the Russian contract killer or hitman becomes a big sort of cultural fascination in the 90s, not even just in Russia, all over the world. And it continues to be one to this day. And the guy, the face of these big time hits, the one you call when you need one done, is none other than our friend and your friend, Alexander Solonik.

All right. So, you know, the thing about journalists and especially documentary producers and podcasters is that, I mean, I'm sure Sean can tell you as well, you kind of lie, right? I mean, not lie, but like embellish and be incredibly hyperbolic. And you do this with like headlines meant to catch the eye or even pitches to editors who then will change the headlines themselves. And you want people to pay attention. And what I mean by that is that like,

You attach superlatives, right? Like, biggest ever, most dangerous, most murderous, most powerful, that sort of stuff. Like, we do it all the time for these episodes, especially on YouTube. We just throw caution to the wind. Every story we've done has been about the most brutal gang of all time. But it's also, you know, journalists, NGOs, politicians, activists. And it gets more insane, like I said, on YouTube, podcasters, and the sort of BuzzFeed websites that make up the glut of, like, the internet now. So you have this guy, right, who...

You see stuff like this about the super killer, the most dangerous and successful Russian hitman ever, and I'm initially extremely skeptical.

And you should be too, for sure. In all these things with gangster and crime law, we've always kind of talked about that. And there's a lot of this here in this guy's story, like beating up 12 people at one time in prison. But it certainly does seem like he is pretty much for real. Like he might not be the most prolific Russian mob hitman ever, but he definitely killed a whole lot of people, confessed to a bunch of them. Though sometimes, as we'll see, people kind of do that to gain themselves some notoriety. And there's some theories he did that as well.

But in some cases, he actually walked police through how he did it. So I think my verdict is, and Sean will get yours at the end, is somewhat legit, maybe even mostly legit. But there is a whole bunch of competing facts and stories that we'll dive into. We do know that Alexander Solonik is born in 1960 in Korgan, in the southwest of Russia, close to Kazakhstan. Middle of nowhere, his father is a house painter, his mother is a gymnastics teacher, and he's a smart kid who plays sports and does well in school.

He's not setting cats on fire, he's not getting kicked out of school for sexually assaulting the janitor or anything like that. He seems normal, you know, not at all like a young Sean Williams terrorizing the other kids at, I don't know, Miss Derbyshire's Finishing House for Exquisite Gentlemen or whatever the hell British schools are called. Oh, she was married, so you can call her Mrs. Dobbs. Oh, okay. Yeah. He gets very into martial arts.

Boxing judo, you know all that gets a judo black belt at 16 a karate one at 18 And he does gymnastics with his mom which um, honestly gymnastics is like really good super assassin training I have a friend who grew up doing gymnastics, dude. He's the most rip person I know and he doesn't even work out anymore. Just like uh force your son to do gymnastics Sean He will thank you later, especially when he can do it. I'm on it. Yeah, it'll be cool. Yeah, I

He also gets into wrestling, too, which is, you know, gigantic in the Soviet Union and obviously still is in those areas, especially in like, you know, Dagestan and Chechnya and all over Russia, too. And coincidentally, a lot of the early iteration of Russian street gangs and mafia groups formed out of like wrestling, wrestling gyms in the groups there.

In 1979, around the time he's 18, Solanek enters the Soviet army and serves in a tank division in East Germany. That's according to one source. He trains with guns there and is apparently a really good marksman. His lieutenant is quoted as saying he was incredible and was such a good shooter that he started training other soldiers.

Now, Pravda, the Russian publication, and this is the only source I found this in, says they're unsure if he actually served in the army and instead maybe served in the CID, which is the Central Intelligence Department in East Germany with Soviet troops. There, these CID guys were allegedly trained in how to assassinate high up officials of NATO countries. Some reports also say he served in a sports division where he was an excellent wrestler.

According to his lawyer, quote,

So it kind of sounds like he's saying he didn't serve in that special intel assassin unit. He just kind of gazed at them longingly as they trained near him and got real big into like male action hero daydreams. I mean, you know, it kind of does sort of fit from what we'll eventually learn. Yeah, I've never heard of a guy who, what, joined the Red Army in a tank division but always wanted to be a real hard man, like a cop. That sounds, I don't know, that sounds legit. I suppose Russian cop, which...

Yeah, the guys I ran into in 2016 or anything to go by, not the friendliest and quite large men. So yeah, maybe it does check out. They do not have that reputation. But his term in the military for whatever he was doing, it's soon up. So once he gets demobilized and leaves the military, he decides he wants to be a cop specifically in the Oman unit or internal affairs. These guys are no joke. They are originally formed in 1979 to make sure there are no terrorist attacks during the Moscow Olympics. And they are elite.

It's 1983 when Solonik joins. He gets great training there. They're sort of like a SWAT team, and he gets all these psychology classes, academic stuff, some nice sorts of Soviet indoctrination. He's eventually sent to get sniper training, but brawls with some officers apparently repeatedly. He gets into a number of fights in a few months and gets tossed after only six months in Copland for being too violent. According to his superiors, he was not psychologically all there and lacked compassion. Sort of like a

a young Sean Williams. So he returns home to, to Kirgan, not sure what to do. A man at a crossroads, not unlike again, a young Sean Williams or me right now. And for the last decade, if you work as a manufacturing facilities engineer, installing a new piece of equipment can be as complex as the machinery itself from prep work to alignment and testing. It's your team's job to put it all together. That's why it's good to have Granger on your side.

With industrial-grade products and next-day delivery, Grainger helps ensure you have everything you need close at hand through every step of the installation. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, clickgrainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. Jan Marselek was a model of German corporate success. It seemed so damn simple for him. Also, it turned out, a fraudster. Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself.

But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him? His secret office was less than 500 meters down the road. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong. I don't know if they followed me to my home. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story. Because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.

Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's fix that with Ring Boost, the go-to service for custom phone numbers that make your business stand out. Whether you're running a small business or scaling something big, the right number makes it ridiculously easy for customers to remember you and actually call. You can get a local number to connect with a regional audience. You can also get a number like 1-800-HOME-CARE or 833-ROOFERS.

There's plenty of options for every industry. You know, if you're a plumber and your number ends in like four, nine, five, seven, no one's going to remember that. But if your number ends in 888-LEAK,

Somebody is going to remember that and they're going to call. Here's the best part. Super affordable, super easy, and it can help drive more calls to your business, more trust. So if you're ready to sound like the business people want to call, head over to ringboost.com and use promo code underworld for an exclusive discount. That's ringboost.com, promo code underworld, ringboost, because voice matters.

According to TimeSuck, he gets a job as an undertaker, but most reports I've seen have him as a gravedigger. Yeah, let me repeat that. When the soon-to-be super killer Russian mafia hitman leaves the army and gets kicked out of the elite police squad for being too violent, he goes back to his hometown and gets a job as a gravedigger.

I mean, like I said, you know, this dude definitely existed and killed people, but some of this stuff just sounds completely made up. Like, it's too good to be true. Yeah, Gravedigger is a bit of a red flag, right? Because on one hand, it fits this supervillain vibe that you might do if you were going to write a story about him, but on the other hand, I don't know, man. Everyone who knows a small-town gravedigger knows it's the guy who flunked out of school and was smoking weed and playing Call of Duty all night, so I'm not really sure that one fits, really.

Do you know a lot of small town gravediggers? I know nobody else, actually. That's my entire circle of friends. My football team is called the gravediggers and that's all they are. Is that true? Dirty Tackles. That they're called the gravediggers? No, it's not. That would be a good name for a rec league of people over 35 playing football for sure, dude.

I'm still playing with the young guys. I'm not doing over 35s. I want to have that kind of slander. Oh, my bad, dude. I've seen Sean sends photos. He sends photos every week of his football field hijinks, like portfolio model shots to me and Dale, our audio producer, in the group chat. Literally every week. And we're proud of him. He looks good on the field. I'm not going to lie to you. Please keep sending those photos, dude.

I'm going to send you one right now and you can react to it on the show. Because look at the state of this. God, the people who are complaining about the banter are not going to like this episode. This is me playing on Sunday. Look at that face. Oh, wow. Dude, can you hold this up to your camera just so the people at home can see it? Yeah, hold on. I don't know if you want that out in public. I got papped looking pretty pathetic. Oh, yeah, they can see that. Oh, yeah. You kind of look like you're doing a dance. You're just pretending you're doing a dance after you scored. Wow, man.

Wasn't a good performance. Anyway, moving on. Solanik at this point, he's now training MMA, accordingly is what they say. Though I don't think MMA was a thing in the 80s, right? Like it's kind of weird to say that. I think it's just starting. I don't even know if it was like called MMA in the 80s.

But either way, he was doing some sort of fighting for sure. He's making inroads with some of the local hooligans, primarily those in a gang that would later be called the Ornikovskaya Organized Crime Group. This is the mid 80s and they must have been small time then, but by the late 80s and into the 90s, they're going to become massive. And I've seen other reports too that he was with the Kurgan, basically called the Kurgan Organized Crime Group for that city that he was in, or that Kurgan was like the affiliates of Ornikovskaya

who I think are based in Moscow in Kurgan. So I don't know, it's very confusing. That's how it works, right? They had satellite groups in different towns and Soviet republics or whatever. So they're formed by a bunch of guys from the same gym, so that's where he does check out, led by a mob boss by the name of Sergei Timofeev, who is also known as Sylvester because he's jacked and looks like Sylvester Stallone. Yeah, good. I like that nickname. It's been a while since we had a good one. I feel like they should have just gone with Stallone. Isn't that a better nickname than Sylvester?

Maybe maybe it's the one it doesn't sound maybe it's like Russian for idiot or something Solonik is gonna end up putting in a lot of work for him and his big gang But like I said according to a Russian source It's his co-workers the cemetery who get him involved in organized crime as they eventually form up a Kurgan based gang and The Kurgan based gang like I said might be a local affiliate or top ally who really knows certainly not anyone who wrote about this guy

Either way, the gang he's rolling with is involved in the usual, which is prostitution, extortion, blackmail, kidnapping businessmen for ransom. This is, of course, in the mid-80s, so it's not wild cowboy Russia just yet. Solonik is approaching a new career as a goon, just serving as a local enforcer, collecting payments, that sort of thing. He also meets his wife around the same time and gets married, but he's said to be living a spare sort of minimalist life, but he does own a ton of guns and goes target shooting a lot.

So now we get into more of like this, is it real or kind of nonsense? And according to the book, Time Sucks Sourced, which the guy says is just terribly written and sounds like one of those self-published Amazon books. In the mid 80s, Solonik already killed seven or so people just through his enforcer work. People who didn't pay debts, you know, things like that. But in 1985, he gets his first contract killing. A guy by the name of Vladimir Solstin, a mob boss from the city of Kursk.

who was beefing with Sasha's boss, Sasha the Macedonian, sorry, that's Solonik, over the prostitution racket. Vladimir was not paying some agreed upon tax and Solonik's boss said he had to go and he would pay him $250,000 to do it, 200 on delivery and 50K upfront. And the way to do it was when Vladimir visits his favorite dentist in Moscow that he sees every few months.

Solonik finds out when he has an appointment. He gets there two weeks early to scope out the place. Vladimir is a mob boss, remember? He's not like a, just a dude wandering around. He's traveling with bodyguards and an armored car. Not some guy you can just kind of walk up to and take out on the street.

Solanek makes an appointment with the dentist himself. He goes to the office, gets a little teeth cleaning, scopes everything out. He is a professional. He also asks out the receptionist and they go on a date and she's going to become his mistress and then his second wife later on, which again, just movie type shit, you know? Solanek decides he's going to take out the mob boss when he's in the dentist's chair with a sniper rifle from a nearby building where he locates a storage closet. He really like, you know, plots it out. This is not a guy who would IG his crimes.

And the day comes, and it works perfectly, and he fires a single shot into the mob boss's dome, and when he's in the dentist's chair and splits his head open, a perfect hit. Yeah, this is starting to read like an actual movie script now. I guess, except that in the movie script, he would need some sort of inner turmoil, emotional...

density and he sounds just like a stone cold nutcase killer. I mean, we don't know. Maybe he was going through a lot, you know? Yeah. Or maybe he was a sociopath. Maybe he was setting cats on fire and they just didn't figure it out. So that's when he allegedly gets the nickname super killer. Lots of allegedly here. Now he returns to Kurgan and gets his second assignment, another mob boss known as Miroslav the Terror of the Balkans, which is a sick nickname. Yeah.

Similar situation, he's encroaching on the territory and business of Solonix bosses and had been warned other Hitmen have tried to take him out before and it hasn't gone well for them, meaning they got taken out instead.

Solonik gets offered $750,000 to take out Miroslav and three of his bodyguards that he always travels with. Yeah, so this is US dollars? That's what they say. And again, the price seems so inflated to me. I mean, they are taking out mob bosses, but like, that's a lot of money, especially because this is supposed to be the mid-80s in Russia, right? It kind of doesn't make sense. How much would $750,000 be? I'll do it.

That's probably like a tenner. So it's got to be... It must be US dollars, right? That's what they say, dude. Last time I went to Russia, it was like 50 to the dollar, maybe. So it can't be... Maybe it's that low, actually. We are talking like mid-80s, though. So I don't even know what the dollar was back then. A few grand. I don't know. It does sound far-fetched, not least because of those prices. And...

Yeah, it just seems a million dollars seems incredibly high, but maybe it was a million rubles. There's no way really to tell. This hit, again, is going to take place in Moscow at a nightclub. Solonik returns to Moscow, takes his receptionist mistress out on some dates, including to the nightclub where he's planning to do the hit so he can get some recon in. He plots it out, aware that Marislav is going to be playing poker with some buds there in a few days. And again, he comes in cold as ice, smooth as ice.

I don't know what smooth silk and takes out Miroslav and his three guys like it's nothing and escapes out the door, leaves Moscow and returns to Kurgan where he is now balling out of control.

Now, that is one version. But according to Russian media, he doesn't commit his first big murder of a mob boss until 1990. So I'm not sure if I buy these initial stories. I'm also under the impression that there weren't many wild contract killings there in the mid 80s, at least without massive repercussions. But I could be wrong about that.

What is agreed upon by all sources is that in 1987, he gets arrested for rape that he claims was consensual, which, you know, that's problematic, Sean. He's handcuffed and put in a cell. And according to one source, it's three counts, but he's found only guilty of one or one count and found guilty either way. He's supposed to be locked up for eight years, but somehow manages to escape out of a window and goes on the run. Yeah, I'm probably going to be cutting that bit from the movie script, to be honest. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't. It gets a little, little messy.

He gets out, allegedly, with the help of some gangster buddies acting as getaway drivers, ends up in Siberia, back and forth to Kurgan, gets divorced, remarries his dental receptionist wife, and continues to do gangster things. At one point, still a fugitive, he decides to get some cosmetic surgery done to become less identifiable, gets a mole removed, and gets a tattoo removed as well, and he gets busted at the cosmetic surgery center, which again...

Like, that's a movie thing that's happening, right? Is it real? I don't know. Does it sound real? It sounds too goddamn good to be real. So, 1988, he's locked up again, and here we get a real Van Damme type of story. Prisoners locked up with him find out he's a cop or was a cop, even though it's just for six months, and he gets attacked by 12 guys at once, who he manages to, despite taking some hits, fight off with the use of a shovel, taking a bunch of them out. Did I mention he's only supposed to be like 5'6", too? Yeah.

After that, he is. After that, he's left alone and spends the next few years basically lifting weights and plotting his escape, probably reading The Art of War or Zen in the Motorcycle Club or some human psychology mastermind book shit.

He's a model prisoner, though, and within a year or two gets special privilege to work in one of the less restricted areas. Sean, do you have any idea what's going to happen next? I bet you don't, you adult. I don't. Do you know why? Because my neighbor just rocked up in her kitchen opposite me completely naked, so I'm going to try and keep my eyes off of that and focus on... Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's standing there right now. I don't know why she's doing it. Yeah.

maybe it's some kind of failed message, not failed. A lot of digressions this episode. Does your wife listen to the podcast? No. No, she does not. Anyway. I'll just make sure I let her know that I'm not looking now. Oh, she's gone. Thank Christ for that. So,

So once again, he is, what we're talking about, he is able to escape. He crawls out through a vent or sewer system, just real Shawshank style in the April of 1990. Now, according to the book from Time Suck, his gangster buddies had paid off a guard and now he needed to do a job for the same gang he had been working with to pay off the debt.

And now we're entering the street warfare area where things just get a little nutty. According to his own testimony, his first big mafia hit happened shortly after he was released from prison in July of 1990 in the city of Tumen. He shoots and kills the leader of the Ishim criminal group, a guy by the name of Nikolai Prinkrinich.

That's according to the main Russian sources. Prichnich. Prichnich. To the main Russian sources when he first gets known as a contract killer of mob bosses specifically. Another source says he killed a mafia boss named Dunya at the time. I'm assuming it's the same person. He walks up to Dunya when he's eating at a mafia hangout spot. They know each other. He holds out his hand like he's going to greet him. And then he dumps his entire clip into the guy, killing him instantly. So it sounds like...

Like it sounds like complete anarchy, right? These are sort of like hundreds if not thousands of small groups focused mostly in like a city or a territory or something and they're just always trying to muscle in on other gangs. So is it kind of like that? Yeah, I think Moscow dictated a lot of the rules. So it always seems like things are concentrated in Moscow and dictated out to these smaller cities. But yeah, I mean these guys are named guys. Apparently some of them are known quantities, you know?

Just Moscow in the 90s dude or Russia in the 90s. It really was nuts. I thought uh, yeah, was that wild?

Anyway, after that, it is off to the races. Mob bosses, big money. He kills at least four other prominent mafiosos over the next few years. The first is known as Kalina. Solnik kills him when he's in his yard, snipes him from hundreds of yards away with a dragon off. Kalina was no small fry. He was a thief-in-law, highly respected, feared. Solnik eventually confessed to this killing. Then comes the cold open, the killing of Globus.

Valery Dlugach in December of 1993. And there is a lot of stuff floating around here about why this happened. Globus is a big deal, a thief in law himself, a boss. One weird deep Russian source laid it out that, and these are all translated by the way, by like Google. So who knows? Globus was getting involved in drug trafficking to add to his portfolio of stolen cars, gambling and prostitution.

He was buddy-buddy, but also clashing with an infamous and powerful thief-in-law who operated in America for a period of time, Japonchik, who we've talked about. Japonchik was friends and partners with two men who have both been said to have been Solonix bosses, one guy named Petrov, who led a group from Kirgan, and Sylvester, who we talked about. They, with Japonchik, set up the murder of Globus over business disputes involving a stolen car ring and drugs.

Yeah, tell us a bit more about Yaponchik because you covered him way back, right, when we started doing the show. He's like one of the real big dogs in post-communist Russia, right? And he's called Yaponchik because he looks a bit Japanese, I think. So he looked a bit Japanese. There was a famous Odessan gangster called Yaponchik in like the 1920s and 1930s during Odessa's heyday.

But this guy was like in the 90s. I believe he served time. He got out. He was sent to America for one of two reasons. There's one that says he was sent there to organize all the Russian mafiosos and basically be like the ruler in terms of like passing judgment. Another just says he was sent there because too many people in Russia wanted to kill him.

But he was in in I think he interacted with with Boris. He was in America for a time and was eventually I think sniped or killed some people in Russia went to prison and then sniped and killed as well I don't remember the exact details. But yeah, he was a major major player So this is this world that the super killers playing in his like they're taught bosses man They don't call the super killer cuz he was killing, uh, you know any old Gopnik on the streets he was taking out the big boys or getting orders from the big boys and

The other story says it was on the orders of Sylvester, who, like we said, led the Orchkov-Skaya group we talked about. He was beefing with an organized crime group led by Globus because Globus was partnering up with outsider groups, groups from the Caucasus, specifically an Azeri crime group who were mortal enemies of Sylvester. And that war saw upwards of 100 people killed, so Sylvester decided Globus had to die.

Solanek takes out Globus at 3am outside the nightclub with a sniper rifle, then kills one of his friends, another named Mafioso, seconds later. Then a few days later, he takes out another partner of theirs, alias Rambo, in his stairwell. And months later, he also takes out one of Globus' deputies who went by Bulban. Another story has Solanek taking out Globus with an RPG when him and his associates use vans to box him and his bodyguards in while they're on the road, then killing Globus' replacement in the nightclub, and then a compound raid to kill another guy.

Like, who knows at this point? Interestingly, Sylvester, who ordered these hits, and like I said earlier, started off as a tractor driver before becoming a big-time player, got so big he would end up in a beef with notorious mega-oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He tried to take out Boris with a car bomb only to have his own Mercedes blown up a few months later, which is how it gets down in Russia, man. The unwritten rule of rap. You've heard of Boris, though, no? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's huge. Billionaire.

Solonik, who by then earned the nickname Sasha the Macedonian, because he would shoot with a gun in each hand, which is apparently the Macedonian way of doing things. I don't know. Also was nicknamed Alexander the Great. Also took out a Siberian crew led by a mafia boss named Mammoth, who owed a bank a massive debt. Solonik goes to Siberia to try to convince him to pay it unsuccessfully, and they all start dropping like flies shortly after. That's how business goes in Russia in the 90s. You need not get caught up in those overdraft fees, boy. Yeah.

I mean, now we've got Klana getting us in debt over buying, like, Chipotle. So, I don't know what's worse. I want Chipotle right now. I'm going to get Chipotle after this. At all times. Dude, it's so good. Is there Chipotle in New Zealand? No, no, no, no, no, no. We're not that good. We should get sponsored by Chipotle.

So, Solonik is running around taking out mafia bosses, he's a known quantity, he's wanted, all this stuff, probably should be laying low, but I assume at that time in Moscow, every gangster basically thinks the police did not care at all or were at the very least powerless to do anything if they did. But some of them actually do care, it seems.

as Solanek finds out when he's walking in a market in Moscow with a buddy. The police stop them for an ID check, which Solanek refuses. It's unclear if they know who he is. The police tell the two to come with them to the station, and Solanek and his buddy, they comply. They don't cause a racket or anything. Solanek or his buddy, one of them, has a gun hidden under a raincoat he's holding. When they get to the station, the police, for whatever reason, they don't search them. I assume if they knew that he was the super killer and they had him in custody, they probably would have.

'Cause the super killer left to his own devices, he's gonna kill. And he does. He takes out the gun promptly, shoots three cops, and a security guard runs out the door.

Makes a big run for it. He's jumping over fences, all that. At one point, he's shot in the kidney and keeps going. He ends up going down, though, while his friend escapes. Some sources say he killed four cops total, others five cops and two security guards. But either way, he's caught, locked up, and has to have surgery right away to remove his kidney. This is in October of 1994. Solonik, after recovering from the shooting, is placed in an infamous Moscow prison, said to be very secure, aptly named Detention Center No. 1.

He soon recovers from surgery to get the bullet out, and he starts working out and learning foreign languages. Yeah, the Victor Boot way. Become a polyglot. Polyglots get, I don't know, polyglots get ingots? Does that work? Some kind of phrase like that. Whatever. Not really, but yeah, what's with these guys, man? The language is good for them, though. I guess you have a lot of time. You might as well go for it.

I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and I hope you'll join us for Season 4 of Dateline Missing in America. In each episode of Dateline's award-winning series, we will focus on one missing persons case and hear from the families, the friends, and the investigators all desperate to find them. You will want to listen closely. Maybe you could help investigators solve a mystery. Dateline Missing in America. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, this is a crazy one. The highly anticipated second season of the hit podcast Proof is finally here. Proof is an investigative true crime podcast co-hosted by Susan Simpson of Undisclosed and Jacinda Davis of Evil Lives Here.

Proof made headlines for its first season in 2022 after proving the innocence of two Georgia men serving life sentences for murdering their friend Brian Bowling when they were just 17 years old. So 25 years later, on December 8th, 2022, both men were freed based on evidence that was unearthed in Proof in the podcast, which again, insane. In the second season of Proof, Murder at the Warehouse, it's called,

Susan and Jacinda, they're back on the case again, this time traveling the streets of Manteca, California, to uncover who really murdered 18-year-old Rene Ramos.

On June 5th, 2000, Ramos' body was found buried under a pile of debris inside the shell of a new Home Depot building. Despite tips hinting at alternate suspects, tips that were ignored until now, Rene's boyfriend, 18-year-old skateboarder Jake Silva, and Tai Lopez, the 33-year-old uncle of one of Jake's close friends, were arrested and convicted of her murder.

Fans of true crime and investigative series won't want to miss this riveting new season. Again, last season, they got someone off. They got two people off of a murder. So follow the case as Susan and Jacinda uncover long overlooked evidence about what really happened to Renee by listening to Proof Murder at the Warehouse wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine unlocking a version of yourself that's unstoppable, where mental barriers no longer hold you back.

Listen to Mentally Stronger with me, Amy Morin, therapist and international bestselling author, here to guide you on a journey to reaching your greatest potential. Every Monday, I bring you into conversations with some of the most fascinating minds, experts, authors, entrepreneurs, athletes, and musicians. They don't just share stories. They reveal the mental strategies that propelled them to the top. But here's the real magic. At the end of each episode, I break down their wisdom into practical therapist-approved advice.

In my solo episodes, I dive deep into the techniques that build mental strength. It's like having your own personal therapy session as you discover how to turn these insights into steps you can take right now. This podcast isn't just for those facing mental health challenges. It's for anyone who wants to push their limits, achieve peak performance, and truly thrive.

Are you ready to unlock your full potential? Then it's time to become mentally stronger. Subscribe to Mentally Stronger with therapist Amy Morin, available wherever you love to listen to podcasts. While in prison, he confesses to a bunch of the murders that we've discussed here, the big time mafioso hits. I think he ends up taking the rap for 20 murders or so.

Some he walks the police through how he did it and the facts line up but there are theories though that he confessed to a bunch he didn't do either for notoriety or to protect other hitmen and his gang since he was already going to go be locked up forever. And another theory that he was trying to avoid being transferred to a regular prison where he'd be in a gen popular with a you know accessible to a bunch of other mafia crews that he had pissed off by you know killing killing their leaders. They're waiting to get him.

And he thought by confessing to all these murders, he'd be put in some special FSB prison or something like that. I mean, that's what they say. Bottom line, though, he did kill a lot of people, some of whom were mob bosses. Writes a Russian publication, quote, his confessions are difficult to cast doubt on, according to officers of the Moscow Department of Criminal Investigations.

When he was taken to spots of crime, the hitman felt confident describing in detail the circumstances of each crime. On the other hand, there are skeptics who believe that Solonik, who is guaranteed capital punishment for having murdered police officers, is trying to delay the inevitable and is assuming other sins. But anyway, while this is happening, he's recovering in prison, he studies, he works out, and then in summer of 1995, he becomes the first person ever to escape from Detention Center 1. Quote,

The official version says that some influential criminal group had their own man in its jail, Sergei Menchikov. He worked there as a guard. It was him who gave a rope, several hooks, and a gun to the super killer. Solonik hid some clothes under his blanket in order to make the guards think that he was sleeping. Menchikov took him to the roof of the jail where the walking grounds were. They got down on a rope and got into a BMW car that was waiting for them there.

That's from Pravda, I believe. And shortly after the guard is killed and his body is found in a river, he was paid 500k for what he did, according to reports. Wow, is there a worse job than 1990s Russian prison guard? That's not good. Probably not. So now Solonik is on the run, he's being hunted by the Russian police, Interpol, and a lot of powerful Russian mobsters who all want him dead. Some of whom are working with corrupt police who also want him dead. There's a rumored $10 million bounty on his head.

There's also rumors that other gangs paid off his gang to turn on him, and another that the Rambo hit wasn't sanctioned, or maybe it was the Mammoth hit wasn't sanctioned. That Solonik had tried to extort the guy without the proper permission, which is a big no-no. He ends up somehow in the suburbs of Athens where he rents a big mansion or a villa. I don't really know the difference between a villa and a mansion. We might not have the means to actually have to worry about it. Well, I'll let you know after the record.

There's two rumors about Sonik having shady contacts with Greek intel. One involves him getting a fake passport at the Greek consulate in Moscow, and the other is that he was recruited by Greek counterintelligence to get information on Russian mobsters operating in Greece. Those kind of form, those come from two different sources, but I guess they kind of feed one into the other, no?

Yeah. While in Athens, Solonik might have started his own organized crime group there that was heavy in drug trafficking and contract killings, though not too much is known about his time there. He's spotted at times in Cyprus and Italy and Spain, and surprisingly, he sometimes pops into Russia on the sly, which is where he meets Svetlana Kotova, a 21-year-old Miss Russia, 1996. And gentlemen, it pays to be that bad boy, because they instantly fall in love, and she moves with him to Greece.

But unfortunately, it does not pay to date the bad boy because she is about to be murdered only a few weeks after she moves to Greece. And so is the super killer. Around that time, another hitman, a super killer himself, and a buddy of Solonik, a one-time buddy, by the name of Alexander Pustolovov, or Sasha Soldat, pops up in Athens. He's been hired to take out Solonik. He tracks him down to his villa and rings the doorbell to greet the guy like the old buddy that he is.

So neck though must not have been suspicious to let his guard down because Sasha sold that promptly strangles him with a wire and then kills Svetlana Yes, so that is the German word for soldier, which is probably gonna be the same in Russian I bet I bet thinking about this that Sasha sold art is something that the Germans called the Russians, you know Like a bit like Tommy's or Fritz's or G eyes or whatever. I bet it's that yeah GI Joe same same sort of thing for sure, but

Just like that, the super killer has gotten super killed. Live by the Russian mafia hit contract, die by the Russian mafia contract. It's a tale as old as time.

The next day, word gets out that the super killer has been murdered. A Greek newspaper reports that someone called the police and let them know where a body was hidden in a sack in the forest. They find it strangled, I think chopped up a bit and burned with acid. Svetlana's body isn't found till months later. There's another story floating around that Moscow police learned that another Russian mafioso had just met with Solonik in Athens.

alerting them to his location. Remember, he killed a whole bunch of cops, so they obviously want revenge. The following day, a bunch of Moscow officers head to Athens under the radar. And shortly after, someone in Moscow alerts the Greek police to a package left for them, which contains a map to Solonik's body. I don't know if I buy this because why wouldn't they just kill him for those eight months he was locked up?

but it seems easy enough for the Moscow police to kill a guy locked in prison, you know? Like, that just makes more sense. Either way, rumors soon spread that the body wasn't actually a super killer, that it had different fingerprints, that it didn't look like him, but he does not pop up again on anyone's radar. Sasha sold that, though. The man who allegedly took him out gets arrested in Greece years later, and in 2016 is sentenced to 24 years in prison for killing six people, among them Solonik and his girl, which seems like kind of...

no laws dude like six and and i just read that he was actually released in 2023 so he served like eight years on the show murdering sick we should get him on the show for murdering six people

But just a few years ago, 2022, Greek media report, quote, the main authorities believe masterminded the murder of Russian hitman Alexander Solonik and his girlfriend in Athens in 1997 has been arrested at Thessaloniki's International Airport is reported Tuesday. The suspect is a 48 year old Greek national from Georgia with a pending arrest warrant in connection with the murders. He was stopped by Greek police at the airport on Monday afternoon after flying from Cyprus to

But a few days later, typical Greek fashion, they say they have the wrong guy. And it was just someone with the same name and birthday and dad's name, which like what? But yeah, that's all we know. And that's the magical, whimsical life of a Russian mafia super killer.

Geez, yeah, I think we're gonna need some listeners to get in touch at this point because that I don't know I feel like some Russian speaking listeners could get on the on the weird forums and like websites and teach us a bit more about this guy also how many Georgian guys How many guys with the same Georgian surname are gonna be swilling around in northern Greece? That's a that's an interesting final bit some powerful organized crime groups though so I mean that adds up but uh

Who knows, man? Who knows? But yeah, guys. That was crazy. Patreon.com slash Underworld Podcast. Sign up on Spotify. Sign up on iTunes. You can even just support us for $3 a month. And the Underworld Podcast at gmail.com. So holler at us. Let us know how it goes. Send us sunglasses if you can. It's just what we're doing now. I guess that's it, right? That's it.

so