Mafia and Marriage

By Roy Den Hollander, 2006

The Russian Mafia, once a hierarchical structure under the Soviet Union, diffused with the end of Communist Party power into a confederation of crime groups that includes Chechen, American, Cypriot, Mexican and other nationalities. The smarter members, no longer confined to scheming for rubles, are now chasing hard currency by expanding their criminal operations to the wealthy West. Former F.B.I. Director Louis Freeh said, "Evidence that organized crime activity from Russia is expanding and will continue to expand to the United States is well-documented." Emergency Net News Service, May 3, 1996, Vol. 2-124.

Bringing Russian crime to Western shores requires an ongoing transfer of money-making assets to foreign markets where the successful utilization of those assets employs a strategy of (a) using money from criminal activities to set up and expand Russian Mafia businesses, such as prostitution, pornography, strip clubs and drug smuggling; and (b) protecting those businesses with criminal activities, such as tampering with informants and witnesses, obstructing justice, bribery, intimidation and murder. The Mob uses a complex, intertwined web of racketeering acts to maintain and continue expanding its activities in a drive for new targets and more money that causes widespread and varied harm.

The Mob's expansion to the West has created a vertically integrated business of supply, service, protection, profit maximization and reinvestment with a huge appetite for human capital. Each prostitution asset in the U.S. makes a relatively small amount of $100,000 to $150,000 tax-free a year, but considering the large number of them in the U.S., the syndicate is making substantial sums from the commissions the girls willingly pay. The largest prostitution ring in Los Angeles' history was operated by Russian criminals, a mother and daughter team, that took in $5 million over two years.

The success of the Russian Mafia's objective for one of its human-capital assets requires the following:

Step One: Transplanting a willing member or associate from Russia to the U.S. where she starts working in one or more syndicate businesses-prostitution, stripping, pornography or procuring. This involves the crimes of white slavery, importing an alien for immoral purposes, fraud and the misuse of visas, and eventually unlawfully acquiring naturalization. To keep the customers coming back for more from the new asset often means drugs.

Step Two: Protecting the Mafia's human capital from deportation, arrest or imprisonment, which would ruin her money-making potential, often requires tampering with a witness, victim or informant; threats; bribery; and even conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire.

Step Three: Assuring that the Mob's profits from its asset escape the taxman requires money laundering and failing to file reports on exporting amounts over $10,000.

One common scheme for supplying the syndicate's sex business in America is tricking American men into sponsoring and financing Russian Mafia prostitutes and procurers for U.S. residency and citizenship through, unbeknownst to the American, a put-up marriage. Not all Russian gangsters are gruff, 220-pound weight lifters or arrogant young MBA graduates dressed in black. Many look out on the world through blue eyes set in a pretty face framed with long hair, and it is those mobster molls who are especially adept at exploiting human emotions of the heart for material gain.

The website www.been-scammed.com tells the story of one such Mafia moll and her mobster associates, one string of events and injuries arising out of the Mob's operations of transplanting prostitutes to New York and other states, passing drugs and large sums of money back and forth between countries, and threatening as well as executing reprisals against any person or business that gets in the syndicate's way.