Russia’s reputed top criminal boss killed

MOSCOW--Aslan Usoyan, Russia’s top criminal boss was shot dead by a sniper in broad daylight in the center of Moscow on Wednesday, in what law enforcement officials said was a dispute with a rival Georgian gang.

Usoyan, who went by the nickname “Grandpa Hasan”, was leaving the Karetniy dvor (Carriage House) - which he used as his "office" - when an assassin opened fire with a rifle from a stairwell of a building across the street. He was hit with a single shot to the head, dying a few minutes later at the same hospital where his life was saved after he was shot in a similar 2010 attack.

Usoyan was an ethnic Kurd of the Yezidi faith who hailed from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. He was the highest-ranking vor v zakone – literally “thief in law” or code-bound criminal – in Russia. The vory are a caste of professional criminals formed in the Soviet gulags of the 1930s. The highest rank is given to men of respect who sit at the top of Russia’s criminal hierarchy, follow the thieves’ common code of ‘law’, and act as unofficial adjudicators of disputes.

“They are dinosaurs, the old Soviet gulag-era crime lords,” says Mark Galeotti, professor at New York University - and expert on the Russian underworld - adding the vory had been steadily giving way to more agile and less principled criminal “authorities” since the fall of Communism.

In 2006, in the only television interview Usoyan ever gave, he said: “I am a pensioner, I live on a pension. I live modestly, I don’t touch anyone, I just mind my own business.”

SOURCE: Charles Clover, Financial Times; January 16, 2013.