Darkly Witty Web Site Offers Advice to Fledgling Mobsters

Wannabe mafiosi, take note. If you need to discover where to find the sleek Western car, the gun, the mobile phone and the 6-foot-tall microskirted girlfriend that will fit your image as you bust into Russia’s high-rolling underworld, help is at hand on the World Wide Web.

“MAFIA on the Net!”--a Web site set up by Andrei Kuzmin of St. Petersburg--offers a mixture of practical advice, prison gossip and erotica for fledgling mobsters.

“Everything about a businessman must be impeccable: his face, his mobile [phone] . . . and the final shot into his forehead,” reads one pseudo-literary quotation in Russian on the photomontage that first swims into view. It underscores the dark glamour of the image of the businessman in Russia, where the successful are rich beyond the wildest dreams of the average person but need bodyguards and bulletproof cars--and still might die at the wrong end of a gun.

Virtual banditi can surf sections on weapons, cars, mobile phones, financial investment, night life and women. They can also sample prison jokes and letters allegedly written by real-life inmates from Russia’s many prisons. The site is chirpily headed “The Mafia Is Immortal!”

Who are the mystery creators of the Web site: mafiosi or computer-literate middle-class students? Kuzmin’s one enigmatic response, quoted in the newspaper Kommersant Daily, was: “How can people who sit at home with their Pentium computers possibly know about the real life of the brothers?”

But everything about the site looks like a computer buff’s harmless joke. The tongue-in-cheek wit repeatedly refers to James Bond or “Godfather” movies, or to the growing domestic legend of the modern Russian mafioso as the epitome of success and scary chic. And every click of the mouse only takes visitors to companies’ official Web sites.

Clicking on the gun sales heading, for instance, just leads to the site for the ex-government company Izhmash, Russia’s best-known armaments complex, where diagrams of Kalashnikovs flash up accompanied by the rifle’s specifications. Clicking on the investment heading takes visitors to the official Web site for St. Petersburg’s respectable VitaBank. The mafia molls promised at the start turn out to be from the usual Russian porn pages, whose real virtual homes have ho-hum headings such as “Rasputin” or “Andrei’s Sex Page.”

The mobile phone company FORA Communications, also touted at the site, was called for comment in November by Kommersant Daily. FORA’s representative answered with resigned amusement: “We’re pleased that the high quality of our service satisfies even the most demanding of clients.”

But the police take a dimmer view of the irrepressible virtual villains.

In a country whose authorities have only recently, and reluctantly, learned to tolerate a degree of self-expression, and who still live in the grip of fear that capitalism is to blame for a post-Soviet crime wave, the elaborate Mafia Web site joke is too close for comfort.

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“Personally, I believe this Web site is nothing more than some kids’ prank,” said Vladimir Vershkov, head of the Moscow Militia’s press center. “But, to be honest, it might be a prank with far-reaching consequences. Its downside is that it popularizes the criminal lifestyle. It creates a romantic image of the mobster, who is widely considered the hero of our time.”

For the moment, however, the police have not worked out how to pull the plug. Even if it deserves “condemnation, and in principle should be banned,” Vershkov said, any scandal would amount to free publicity. In any event, freedom of speech is guaranteed by Russia’s new constitution.

“Unfortunately, there is no real way we can lay our hands on these jokers. We can’t take them to court or anything like that,” the police spokesman said.

“Of course, if we could only show them being shot dead on the spot, that would be very effective. It would undoubtedly discourage other young people from following suit and becoming mafiosi.”