COLUMN ONE : Gangsters Get Rich in Soviet Union : Gorbachev-era Moscow in many ways resembles 1920s America. Protection rackets thrive. Mobsters shoot it out. Organized crime channels money into legitimate businesses.

The swarthy swindlers who work the crowd outside one of the foreign exchange banks here shook Alexei’s hands respectfully and flashed their gold teeth in fawning grins when he strolled up.

This is one of his spots, Alexei said, and “the beasts”--as he calls the con artists from the Caucasus Mountains who bilk bumpkins with sleight-of-hand tricks when exchanging money in the black market--must pay him his “duty.”

“It is a rule of nature,” explained Boris, a towering athlete who works with Alexei in the new Soviet trade known in Russian as a racket. “When someone starts to make money, someone else will appear to take it away.”

To the Soviet police, press and some racketeers, modern Moscow in many ways suddenly resembles the America of the 1920s gangster era. When it comes to organized crime, they say, the mob is growing rich. It is carving out its turf. And it gradually is beginning to shift its dirty money into legitimate businesses.

Indeed, police say that every cafe and restaurant of any size in the capital now pays protection money, as do many joint ventures and almost all cooperatives, the private businesses begun four years ago under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s economic reforms.

Shootouts flare in Moscow parks occasionally. And some couples say they fear to eat out at night because restaurants now are dominated by Soviet mobsters--aggressive, muscular young men in leather jackets or Adidas training suits.

“We don’t have a structure like the Cosa Nostra, but our organized crime has become just as dangerous,” asserted Maj. Gen. Alexander Gurov, chief of the 84 officers in the Soviet Interior Ministry’s new unit for fighting organized crime.

For a country that did not even acknowledge the existence of organized crime until 1988, the Soviet Union has gone Mafia-crazy. The word Mafia itself has moved straight into Russian as a generic term for corruption. Long-suffering consumers accuse the Mafia of causing food shortages and buying up hard-to-get items to sell at inflated prices. A gaggle of politicians have made their names with fire-and-brimstone speeches about the Mafia in the top echelons of the Kremlin. Even the decades-old practice of diverting goods from store counters to sales clerks’ private channels has been dubbed “trade Mafia.”

Popular concern about the Mafia has reached the point that Gorbachev himself issued a special presidential decree last winter on “the fight against organized crime,” bringing the KGB and its intelligence-gathering apparatus more actively into the battle and requiring harsh measures against the new mob.

But the reality behind all the Mafia talk, Alexei and three of his racketeering comrades-in-arms contend, is far from the pumped-up accounts given by the Soviet press and police.

Gurov said that last year alone, authorities arrested and charged members of 1,640 different crime groups. He estimated that there are thousands more, including at least three Soviet crime organizations with more than 5,000 members each. Alexei’s associates, however, said that most mobsters operate in small groups with only loose contacts with their colleagues.

“We don’t have a system--it’s a way of life,” said Ivan, a thin 28-year-old with swept-back wings of black hair and a criminal record. (He, like Alexei, Boris and others who said they are Mafia members and who were interviewed for this story, declined to allow his real name to be used.)

The typical pattern, Boris said, is for athletes “who have been squeezed dry like lemons by the Soviet system” to get together to guard their friends’ cooperatives. (Well-fed and well-paid while at the peak of their performance, Soviet athletes find themselves with virtually no means of supporting themselves when their competitive days end.) They then expand into broader protection services, loan collecting and new types of high-priced private stores. They cross the line into crime as a protest against the brutal life of most Soviet citizens, he said.

In a sense, he noted, the criminals bring some justice to society by imposing their own brand of order in the jungle of Soviet business.

“If you and I sign a contract,” Boris explained, “and I transfer you all the money but then you only keep up your end of the bargain for three months and then stop, what can I do? I send my people who speak with you and say, ‘Pay up the money, and a fine, too.’ ”

“Soviet business is totally wild, and no one keeps his word,” Alexei added. “So you have to base everything on fear. Nothing is decided by the law. Everything has to be decided this way.”

And if a man refuses to pay? “You can hit him a couple of times,” Alexei said. Or bury him in the ground and then dig him out. “But mostly, thank God, we only use words.”

Col. Alexander Kartashev, who heads the unit that battles organized crime in suburban Moscow, described the rackets differently. “A guy opens a cooperative,” he said, “and they come to him and say, ‘Uncle, you’re going to pay us a thousand every month.’ ” If the owner refuses, Kartashev said, a swarm of young men come in and trash the premises.

The racketeers scoffed at press accounts that make it sound as if Moscow’s parks should be littered with corpses left over from mob turf battles. But they acknowledged that they had often attended showdowns involving dozens of mob soldiers, all fully armed. Although some Russian groups have clashed with the Chechens, a mountain people who reportedly run much of Moscow’s prostitution and some black marketeering, most often the disputes can be solved without violence, Alexei said.

“It’s not profitable to fight,” he said, adding, that “Moscow is basically all divided up already.”

Oleg Utitsin, a reporter for the weekly Commersant newspaper, created a sensation this winter by mapping, in detail, Moscow mob life. Utitsin said the most popular points for organized crime are train and bus stations and parks and markets because they all have constantly moving throngs of people. The other mob hot spots? Car and furniture stores where buyers come with wads of money. (The Soviets, unlike Americans, maintain a cash-and-carry economy because they haven’t really developed consumer niceties such as personal checks, credit cards and credit accounts.)

According to Utitsin, much of Moscow’s mob life coalesced around “thimblers,” those who run the Soviet version of the rigged shell game. Then there are the sleight-of-hand swindlers near banks, con men at used car markets, traders in black market auto parts at garages and “soldiers” Utitsin pointed out sitting in kiosks next to saleswomen who sell expensive liqueurs and imported T-shirts. Racketeers also often provide full-time guard services to trouble spots like beer bars, protecting them from what otherwise might be daily attacks from drunken young thugs, he said.

Utitsin estimated that there are 15,000 organized crime “soldiers” in Moscow, a city of more than 9 million. Kartashev said the gangs he deals with in suburban Moscow number about 5,000 members in all. But they are still growing, jockeying for position.

“You can’t stop it because the economy is collapsing,” Kartashev said of organized crime. “People are living very badly, and they are pushed into crime.”

Stop into most any restaurant at night, Kartashev said, and the criminals are plain to see: “They sit there with arrogant, full faces, and their muscles are all pumped up.” They wear leather or jean jackets and expensive running shoes; they drive Volvos or Mercedes that put the slow-moving police Volga cruisers to shame. “Generally you only see the fighters,” Kartashev said. “The leaders hide in the shadows.”

Moscow mobsters--known by colorful nicknames such as Sylvester, the Dentist, the Lawyer, the Cat, the Elephant and Sevastian--are a new breed. Before Gorbachev’s reforms, said Sergei, a member of Alexei’s team who served eight years in prison, “there was robbing and swindling, but rackets just didn’t occur to anyone.” There were almost no private businesses, and no one had enough money to pay for protection.

Pre-revolutionary Russia, however, had a long, rich tradition of robber clans with their own honor codes and even an extensive language, reportedly consisting of about 10,000 words. Under Josef Stalin’s dictatorship, with millions of people imprisoned and in labor camps, underworld leaders with the honorific title vor v zakone --the Russian equivalent of Mafia don--became the ultimate authorities in many prisons; they continued their criminal way of life once released.

Their strict code of behavior, however, forbade them to work or engage in violence, so it was mainly disillusioned athletes and petty crooks who moved into the racket boom that fed off the profitable cooperatives created under Gorbachev.

But the lines between the old and new criminals have gradually worn away, Sergei said.

Although they violate the old robber codes, the racketeers have their own, Alexei said. They support the families of those in prison and their own relatives and friends; they will never abandon a comrade in a fight; they never turn to the police for help. There is also an element of “Robin-Hood-ism” among current racketeers, Gurov acknowledged, noting that the Soviet public actually seems to take some satisfaction from hearing that a rich cooperative owner had been caught in a swindle or given in to extortion. But those moments of glee do little to offset the widespread fear of crime that was largely unknown under the old totalitarian regime.

The next step for Soviet mobsters? Utitsin and police said it is the massive shift of organized crime capital into legitimate business. “In the last year or so, there’s been a very noticeable tendency,” Utitsin said. “They see no choice but to go into official business.”

Mobsters find it easy to launder money through cooperatives and joint ventures, he said, and “a bandit just reaches a certain level of consciousness where he wants to be not a bandit but a businessman.”

As the Soviet government gears up to sell off much of its state property to private owners, hard-line Communists charge that organized crime has so much dirty money it could soon own great chunks of the country, controlling it with experienced “bandits.” Utitsin agreed that a mobster who turns businessman generally “becomes respectable but leaves beneath him his structure of bandits.”

Alexei’s group confirmed that it would like to go legitimate to some extent, if Soviet law will allow privately owned businesses to flourish.

“Now that it’s possible, we’ll try to live doing normal commerce,” Sergei said. “But if they don’t let us, we’ll turn to other methods.”