CRIME : Moscow’s Kidnaping Rings Mean Business

Your trading partners failed to deliver? Business associates backed out of a deal? Debtors refused to pay?

A growing number of Russians have developed their own remedy for such behavior: Kidnap the culprit.

It may sound extreme, but in Russia it’s becoming trendy. Not to mention lucrative.

In fact, kidnaping is now the crime of choice among some biznessmeni out to make a quick buck (or a trunkful of rubles) in Russia’s anarchic transition to capitalism.

Moscow police have recorded more than 40 kidnapings so far this year, up from 12 in all of 1991 and only two in 1990. In addition, they say, dozens of cases may have gone unreported.

At least half originate in disputes between “commercial structures,” the Russian term for private businesses operating with various degrees of legality, according to Gennady N. Labanov, chief investigator for the Moscow police’s organized crime unit.

“If two firms fight with one another, maybe about debt or failure to fulfill a contract, one will often hire thugs to kidnap employees of the other and force them to pay up,” Labanov said.

“Going to court to retrieve the money would take a year or two,” he said. “Kidnaping is much quicker.”

For a 5%-10% cut of the ransom, hoodlums will carry out contract kidnapings, snatching victims from homes, offices or city streets and whisking them away to safehouses hidden in a labyrinth of look-alike Moscow apartment buildings.

Neither the masterminds nor their thugs risk much. The maximum prison sentence for “holding someone against his will” is only three years if the kidnaping was designed to squeeze money out of a business partner. Oddly, kidnaping a stranger is considered a worse offense; a conviction can mean up to 10 years in jail.

Even when police catch kidnapers, their victims, fearful of reprisals, often refuse to help convict them.

“Witnesses go to testify and see 30 or 40 mafioso types in leather jackets watching the trial, and of course they begin to hem and haw,” Labanov said.

Surprisingly, the kidnaping rings have targeted foreigners only once, although their access to hard currency makes even visiting students richer than many Russian businessmen.

In that case--solved with help from the FBI--Australian executive Daniel Weinstock and his wife were abducted and held for more than a week last January, reportedly by Russians disgruntled over the progress of an electronics venture they had set up with Weinstock.

Although kidnaping to avenge soured business deals has become increasingly common, the hoodlums who carry out such capers and demand ransoms of up to $1.5 million have plenty to learn.

Only felons deprived of a lifetime of Western cops-and-robbers movies could make gaffes such as phoning in ransom demands from a hide-out, where police could trace the call; failing to wear disguises when meeting a victim’s relatives, or giving a plainclothes policeman a chance to videotape a ransom payment.

“Our criminals feel rather invincible, so they haven’t yet gotten to the level of (American) kidnapers,” Labanov said.

The surge in kidnaping comes amid a general crime boom--the Moscow crime rate, fed by a spate of robberies, jumped 30% this year, Interior Ministry statistics indicate.

Taking advantage of widespread reports about how dangerous city life has become, some failing businessmen have faked kidnapings, hoping to pocket the ransoms.

One middle-age manager, in Moscow last summer on a business trip, found himself broke after a spree of drinking, gambling and womanizing. Shrewdly, he called his wife and announced that he had been kidnaped and was being held in a Moscow hotel.

He almost pulled it off--until police came to his room and found him, alone.