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Moscow Writer Searches for Soviet No-Goodniks in L.A.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Glasnost notwithstanding, the Soviet Union isn’t perceived as a mecca for crusading journalists. Still, Yuri Shchekochihin has inspired a new generation of ambitious muckrakers.

Shchekochihin, 40, is an investigative writer who works for Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette), a prestigious weekly newspaper based in Moscow. He was prowling the streets of Los Angeles recently, searching the city’s underbelly for evidence of Soviet organized crime taking root here.

Shchekochihin is a perpetual motion machine with a sharp sense of humor and a slippery understanding of English, which often gets out of control when he becomes excited about his mission.

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“Nobody knows the truth about the Russian Mafia,” Shchekochihin said. “We know about the Sicilian Mafia and the Asian Mafia, but not the Russian Mafia.”

In interviews with Los Angeles Police Department detectives and an FBI official, however, Shchekochihin was assured there is nothing yet approaching a Russian Mafia family operating in Los Angeles.

Still, they told the Soviet journalist, there is a wide range of crimes being committed by Russian emigres in the city’s sizable Russian community.

For his part, Shchekochihin believes Soviet criminals are stepping up their activities in the United States in the wake of more liberal Kremlin emigration policies.

It remains to be seen, however, if America has produced a Soviet Godfather. According to law enforcement officials, the closest thing to a Soviet Mafia has been operating in recent years out of Brooklyn, N.Y.

What is certain is that--as former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky discovered in prison--crooks also view the United States as the land of opportunity.

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Sharansky once recalled an inmate telling him that three of his criminal friends were in the United States, and from what they had written he had concluded that the country was a swindler’s dream.

Although the Soviet mob has not rooted itself in Los Angeles, there are signs that--like their counterparts in other East Coast crimes families--Soviet mobsters frequently fly out here to make an illegal buck.

“We see some of that New York group coming here,” Detective William Pollard told Shchekochihin during a meeting at the LAPD’s Organized Crime Intelligence Division. “There’s a paper trail from coast to coast.” But, he emphasized that the group has no permanent Los Angeles organization.

“There’s nothing on any large scale,” agreed Thomas R. Parker, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office and an organized crime specialist. “In Los Angeles, we have not seen any (Soviet) organized crime element,” he told Shchekochihin during an interview in his office.

Suspected Soviet criminals have been behind a number of crimes committed in Los Angeles, Pollard said, ranging from extortion, robberies, gun-running and counterfeiting to fencing stolen valuables.

The hottest white-collar frauds in Los Angeles’ Russian community involve the use of stolen credit cards--also a big headache for Soviet law enforcement--and insurance schemes such as collecting monetary damages on phony accidents, Pollard said.

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Pollard, 47, a veteran investigator, said it is practically a given that big-time Soviet criminals operating in Los Angeles had rap sheets in Mother Russia.

“If they were a crook there, they’re going to be a crook here,” he told Shchekochihin.

Shchekochihin, who also is a playwright, studied journalism at Moscow State University. Before joining Literaturnaya Gazeta , which he describes as like a Time-New Yorker hybrid, he wrote for the mass-circulation newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda , one of the Soviet Union’s two largest daily newspapers.

He became something of a folk hero a few years ago when he accused the KGB, the powerful Soviet intelligence agency, of framing a police official in the Soviet Black Sea city of Odessa on trumped-up charges that he was aiding the local mob.

While he was in Odessa digging into the story, he says KGB officials “tried to plant a prostitute with me” in an effort to both discredit the journalist and elicit information about his investigation. It didn’t work.

Shchekochihin’s lengthy story resulted in the resignation under fire of the KGB chief for that area and the firing of another KGB official and a local prosecutor.

Then, to Shchekochihin’s astonishment, KGB officials took the rare action of suing him for slander. After a three-month trial two years ago in a Moscow regional court, a judge ruled in favor of Shchekochihin and, additionally, ordered the KGB to pay his court costs.

Immediately, the popular journalist found himself being interviewed on Soviet television. Even in the Gorbachev age of greater political freedom, Soviet writers are few and far between who would take on the KGB.

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The next year--1989--Shchekochihin was persuaded to run for a seat in the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies out of the city of Voroshilovgrad (formerly Lugansk), not far from Moscow. He won by an overwhelming margin. Shortly afterward, he exhibited his reform spirit and quit the Communist Party.

Wearing two hats--as a journalist and a lawmaker--is not considered a conflict of interest in the Soviet Union. In fact, it can turn into a professional plus. Shchekochihin currently sits on a parliamentary committee which oversees a subject close to his heart--organized crime.

In his quest for evidence of Soviet-influenced organized crime in Los Angeles, Shchekochihin did his own research, as he would in Moscow, talking shop with police and touring the Fairfax and West Hollywood areas where thousands of Russian emigres live.

Over breakfast with a Los Angeles police detective, he was told that a number of small Russian-owned shops in these neighborhoods have come under surveillance in recent years because of suspicions that they acted as fronts for stolen gold and jewelry.

(Helping him grapple with English was his translator friend, Leonid Zagalsky, 35, also a Literaturnaya Gazeta writer who is attending Stanford University on a yearlong fellowship.)

Bridging the language and ethnic gaps in the Soviet community were difficult, however, said the detective, who spoke on the basis of anonymity. “And the Russians don’t like to talk about crooks in their midst,” he said. “If they talk, well . . .” The detective pounded his left hand into his right fist three times to underscore fear of retribution for talking to a cop.

Shchekochihin smiled and rolled his eyes. Detectives speak a universal language.

At the LAPD’s organized crime complex, the conversation between the Russian journalist and Pollard turned to one of America’s most vexing problems, narcotics trafficking.

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“I’ve asked myself why we don’t have a big drug distribution system in the Soviet Union,” Shchekochihin said to Pollard. “I say it’s because we have so many other ways to make money illegally.”

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