Changing Lifestyles : Russian Thieves, Extortionists Preying on Foreign Visitors : Cash-heavy executives are lucrative targets for common criminals and big-city racketeers.

Miltos Louisides was taking an 8 a.m. shower in his plush room at the Grand Hotel Europe when someone began knocking insistently at the door. Dripping wet, the British businessman opened it to see a bald man of about 40 in the hallway, an idiotic smile on his face and a Snickers bar in his outstretched hand.

Baffled, Louisides accepted the candy and closed the door, but apparently it didn’t lock. He returned to the bathroom to towel off and stepped out a minute later to find his black briefcase gone. Inside were $15,000, 6 million rubles, plane tickets, credit cards and contracts for his company’s cotton deals in Central Asia.

Louisides called hotel security to ask them to seal the exits. But too late; the man was gone.

“I was stupid,” Louisides said. “I should never have opened the door.”

He was also lucky. Not only did his briefcase turn up in a hotel lobby across town, wiped clean of fingerprints and minus everything but the plane tickets and contracts, but he was also unhurt.

As crime rises across Russia, foreigners are becoming the special targets of thieves and extortionists who are better armed, better organized and more violent than ever. According to the Interior Ministry, there were 8,304 crimes against foreigners last year, about 70% more than in 1992.

Most of the crime is concentrated where the foreigners are--in Moscow and St. Petersburg--and police in the two cities say some gangs specialize in preying on innocents abroad. Foreigners are easy and obvious targets, identifiable by the restaurants they frequent, the cars they drive, even by such details as eyeglasses or book bags. And in a country where the average monthly wage is about $80, they are fabulously wealthy.

“In the past, the local belief was that the Mafia restricted their activities to Russians, keeping their hands off the foreign business community,” said a recent report by the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg, using Mafia to describe local gangsters. “If that situation was ever true, it certainly is no longer the case in St. Petersburg.”

Fifteen American employees at the consulate, more than half the staff, have been crime victims in the past six months. One was mugged by a band of street urchins in a populous area where no one came to his aid. Another was beaten and robbed by a cab driver.

Foreign businesses are routinely approached by racketeers demanding protection money, and about one in five pays up, according to Col. Sergei F. Sidorenko of the St. Petersburg police organized crime division.

Attacks on foreigners in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second city, are so alarming that the consuls general of the United States, Germany, Finland, Britain and Sweden complained about them in a letter to Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak last month.

Sobchak has written Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin asking for special crime-fighting powers, including the ability to mobilize army paratroopers based near the city. Soldiers could be used to strengthen patrols, Sobchak said, especially at night--when, according to the U.S. Consulate report, foreigners are in special danger.

“Never, never, venture out at night alone, go to a club and then expect to find a reputable taxi driver,” the report warns. “Virtually guaranteed: You will be robbed. . . . Americans, who may have been observed drinking and dancing earlier in the evening, have been followed home and then robbed, beaten and murdered in their own apartments.”

The report also warns foreigners on the Moscow-St. Petersburg overnight tourist train to secure the doors to their sleeping berths with electrical wire to keep out intruders who routinely break in and spray an odorless gas to drug passengers into deeper sleep before robbing them.

Crime against foreigners may well be worse in Moscow, which is twice the size of St. Petersburg, and is not unusual in other cities.

Last October, 34-year-old Lauren Binklin, a Canadian who worked for a children’s charity in Moscow, was tricked into opening her apartment door by a woman she had befriended a few days earlier. The visitor was accompanied by two men, and police said they killed Binklin for a tape recorder, camera and $100 in cash. The Russian woman was tracked down and charged with the crime.

But St. Petersburg has gained special notoriety in recent months. The year began with a New Year’s Eve explosion at a shoe store partly owned by Italians that blew boots, pumps and spike heels across Stone Island Prospekt. Local TV showed citizens combing the avenue with charred and twisted shoes in hand, searching for matching pairs.

A few weeks later, a fender-bender involving members of two rival Russian gangs set off a shootout that left 10 people dead. The winning gang blithely trucked the corpses in the loser’s van to a wooded area, doused them with gasoline and set them afire.

In February, police pulled over a small Zhiguli--a boxy, Russian car--towing a black Mercedes limousine through early morning streets. Seven corpses wrapped in canvas were packed in the Mercedes. Police later arrested six Russian businessmen, who said the corpses were bodies of racketeers who had demanded $65,000 in protection money from their company.

Many crimes go unreported, as foreigners and Russians alike view police as corrupt and incompetent.

Many are indeed. GAI, the Russian highway patrol, is notorious for pulling over cars with foreign plates to assess whopping fines for imaginary violations. Motorists who refuse to pay are threatened with blood alcohol tests with dirty needles, the U.S Consulate said.

Last summer, five policemen attacked a U.S. Consulate employee in St. Petersburg with fists and truncheons. The American, who had been drinking, said he was beaten after being handcuffed by police officers, who shouted at him that the United States had killed Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan.

Maj. Gen. Arkady G. Kramarev, chief of the St. Petersburg police, said many foreign businessmen in need of help avoid the police because they are afraid to defy the mob or fear further scrutiny of their own dealings.

“I have heard foreign businessmen say that it’s easier to pay the mob than to pay the tax inspector,” Kramarev said.

Yet of 300 Russian and foreign businessmen who turned to police in 1993, none suffered any repercussions, Kramarev said.

St. Petersburg’s grim new look is taking a toll on tourism. Vladimir N. Karpenkov, who heads a police team that investigates crimes against foreigners, says the number of tourists each year has fallen fourfold since the late 1980s.

Despite the alarming anecdotes, the city’s murder rate is lower than that of Los Angeles, New York and many other U.S. cities. St. Petersburg reported 875 murders among its 5 million people last year, compared to 1,058 among the 3.6 million people of Los Angeles. Police said six of the victims were foreigners: citizens of Germany, the United States, Vietnam, Finland, Latvia and Mongolia. Nearly 17,000 people reported being mugged in 1993, 282 of them foreigners.

“You can’t scare Americans with crime,” Mayor Sobchak says, and many Americans doing business here agree.

John and Anna Mahli, developers from La Canada-Flintridge, come frequently to St. Petersburg, looking for Russian partners to help build prefabricated housing.

During the August, 1991, military coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and again during the armed uprising against Yeltsin last October, the Mahlis advised friends in Moscow to come to St. Petersburg, which was quieter during those violent events.

“Americans get a jaundiced version,” said Anna Mahli. “When my neighbors hear that I’m going to St. Petersburg, they say, ‘Oh, Russia, it’s so dangerous!’ And I say: ‘Sweetie, I live in L.A. There’s nothing there to scare me.’ ”