Russians Paying for Protection

It’s a familiar sight in Russia these days: the nervous businessman in his tailored lilac jacket, with a mobile phone over his ear and an emaciated beauty on his arm--and a pack of beefy bodyguards at his back.

Private security has become one of Russia’s biggest growth industries. Menacing men with guns are the brawn behind the brains of these operations. Their job is to protect the people who have made the most out of capitalism from the bombs and bullets threatening entrepreneurs in lawless Russia.

These private armies emerged in the nationwide grab for wealth that followed the Soviet collapse. Turf wars have been so violent that not only does every bank now have an internal security force, but 4,500 security firms have registered 70,000 gun-toting operatives of their own.

But with the outmatched police thoroughly intimidated by the freewheeling private forces, and crime gangs merging with or buying up the hired muscle, the quality of protection that the paying customer gets is in doubt.

The summer’s crop of contract killing stories is proof that having a bodyguard in tow might deter everyday street aggression but is no protection against a determined assassin.

Among the examples: Anatoly Gusev, 39, the former boss of Moscow’s Arlecchino nightclub, was shot dead outside a movie theater in July. His bodyguard died with him.

The public is regularly exposed to danger when such street shoot-outs occur. Of 152 contract killings in Moscow in the first 10 months of 1996, police figures show that just over a third took place on streets or sidewalks.

Interior Ministry officials, however, contend that they cannot recall any recent cases of bystanders caught in cross-fire.

The category of hits that private agencies are most coy about discussing is murders in which the client dies--but the bodyguard survives.

When American businessman Paul Tatum was killed in the entrance to a Moscow subway station in November, a bodyguard sauntered along near him but was too far behind to save his boss from the shots fired from above.

2 Bullets to Spine Despite Bodyguards

A similar end befell Alexander Krutik, 29, a publisher of school textbooks who stepped out of the elevator below his Moscow apartment in August and was killed by two bullets to the spine. His bodyguard fired back eight times but missed. Somehow the assassin escaped past him down the staircase.

“The bodyguard was in deep shock after his boss was killed. He could not target properly as the killer was shooting from above and it was hard to grasp what was going on in those few seconds,” Drofa Publishing spokeswoman Dina Kazachkova said. “The management has no complaints about the way the bodyguard behaved. He will remain in his job after he recovers from shock.”

“We’ve never had a client or an agent killed,” boasted Valentin Kosyakov, boss of Alex, Russia’s first and best-known private security agency, which employs 300. “We are very professional seekers of information. We take the trouble to do our research. We believe in prevention.”

At Alex, the bosses nodded knowingly at the familiar litany of deaths from security failures. “I would say 85% of contract killings arise from the inadequate work of bodyguards,” Kosyakov said. “They’re not all experts.

“In Moscow, 600 police stations out of 1,500 have closed in the last few years--and 700 private firms have opened,” he said. “It’s as fashionable to open an agency as for a businessman to hire a bodyguard. Everyone thinks they can do it, just as everyone who diagnoses his cold thinks he’s a doctor.”

Businesses that cannot afford the lavish full-scale protection Russia’s top banks buy are the main clients for a krysha or “roof” from outside. A few years ago, this was a slang word meaning a criminal protection racket. In today’s Russia, its meaning has expanded--and lost its disapproving undercurrent--to include any private security arrangement, from the mafias who extort protection money to the security agents whose clients seek protection from the “protectors.”

And the line between private security and criminals is increasingly blurry. An operative from one private firm said 90% of the bodyguards who had joined up with him had left--to join mafias and bandit groups. “They make more money,” he said in half-apologetic explanation.

His firm’s managers had realized there was only one way to deal with an approach by a big organized crime group: “Naturally, we stop acting like a respectable security business and go in with them.”

The growth of private security forces was one factor prompting a major American research group to say crime in Russia “presents a threat to U.S. security.”

“Left unchecked, Russia is on the verge of becoming a crime-dominated oligarchy, controlled by shady businessmen, corrupt officials and outright criminals,” said the Sept. 29 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It wants Washington to be more cautious about backing “what is routinely seen as a ‘kleptocratic’ establishment.”

Despite the much-reported dangers of security work, Russians are still lining up to do it. Money is the main lure. Those who once labored with the police, army and KGB--driven to despair by low salaries and apathy in their state jobs--can earn four or five times as much at private firms, said ex-KGB Gen. Alexander Gurov, now in private security.

Like others in his trade who prefer to call the financial side of their work a “commercial secret,” he demurred at giving precise figures. But he said a client wanting proper protection would pay about $7,000 a month per guard. Police earn a fraction of that--up to $500 a month--and their state-sector wages are paid fitfully, if at all.

Discontent with the state draws others to private security work, in a country whose Mercedes-Benz-driving ministers pay state wages months late and where brutality in the armed forces is driving soldiers away even if planned troop cuts aren’t.

‘Fighting Is All I Know How to Do’

The dark glamour of the strongman also helps pull young men in off the street. “Fighting is all I know how to do,” said Misha Spiridonov, 22, who signed up as a rookie private guard after serving with the army in Russia’s 1994-96 war in Chechnya.

The testosterone-charged security forces have a subduing effect at clubs, casinos, stores and hotels. Muscle-bound giants with unsmiling faces not only remove drunks, break up fights and prevent thefts but also bar the way of would-be guests and make curt demands to search their bags and jackets. Some Moscow casinos have metal detectors, apparently to flush out the guns any undesirables may be carrying, a further deterrent to more timid visitors.

Most bodyguards are trained in wrestling, boxing or martial arts, learned either in a growing number of private courses since the Soviet collapse, or as part of military service. Many are armed, either with weapons bought from the police or with more sophisticated guns that the law requires them to register with the police.

Alex trains its recruits for three months in gun use and what senior officer Nikolai Malakhov called a “most effective” ex-KGB unarmed combat technique that mixes wrestling, kicks and punches.

Further up the pecking order, ex-KGB operatives have turned their more academic talents to sophisticated economic espionage and counterespionage.

The private firms’ existence is testimony to Russia’s failure to establish the rule of law as it abandoned communism for capitalism.

“You know the old Russian saying? If you’re strong enough, you don’t have to be smart,” Gurov said. The truth of this maxim can be seen on any road around Moscow, where the Mercedes 600s favored by Russia’s super-rich are always followed by Japanese jeeps containing up to half a dozen guards, armed with guns and muttering walkie-talkies. The gleaming convoys roar off at twice the speed limit, sirens screaming, lights flashing, to mysterious destinations behind barbed-wire fences. As lesser cars hastily move over to let them pass, traffic cops can do nothing but stare.

Down-at-the-heels state police have no idea how to deal with the armies of the super-rich.

“Some private guards are ex-officers and know how and when to use the weapons they now legally possess. But many others are just thugs and gangsters who like being able to carry guns legally while they do their criminal business,” said Moscow police spokesman Andrei Kiselev. “This is a qualitatively new situation for us, compared to Soviet times. We can’t do much to reverse it, so we are trying our best simply to control it. But we find even that an increasingly hard task.”

The contempt is mutual. Private security men, like much of the public, blame the police for the chaotic state of law enforcement. Police trained in Soviet times, when it was a crime to make a profit, have never caught up with the idea that they should be looking after--rather than arresting--entrepreneurs.

Police stations here are places of low-rent hopelessness. There are old plastic dial phones; cheap, fake-teak finish peels off melancholy desks; the orange nylon curtains never quite meet across windows. Scrawny detectives smoke and joke inside. Victims of robberies and assaults, meantime, stand in timid, dispirited lines in the corridor, waiting to fill out long forms and make statements that they don’t believe will help them.

All this is a far cry from the get-up-and-go machismo of private firms--expensively carpeted places with gleaming furniture, tanks of exotic fish, the high-tech bleeping of mobile phones, computers and electronic devices, and a perpetual muscle-bustle in the corridors.

It’s easy to see why someone with a business to run would come here, not to the police.

Gurov, who now runs a private security team working for Tyson Foods in Moscow, was harsher, sniffing: “Look at the policemen you get now. They go about in dirty leather jackets, filthy pants and they gabble at you over a gun. They don’t look like the law; it’s hard to tell them apart from bandits.”

In the shooting gallery where Alex operatives train for deadly James Bond-style combat--aiming for the neck and chest of cardboard “enemies”--Malakhov put the anti-police case in plain supply-and-demand terms: “At least 90% of our clients specifically ask for their security detail not to include ex-police. So we don’t recruit ex-police. We find it easier to train people from scratch than to break them of ingrained bad habits.”

A few guidelines do govern the uneasy co-existence of state and private law-and-order operations, drawn from a weak 1992 law legalizing private firms. But private agencies say police corruption stops the law from working properly.

‘We Pay and Pay and Pay’

To operate legally, a private agency must pay the police. It must pay to register itself, to register each operative and license him to carry a gun, to buy guns and to have police patrols of its weapons dump. “We pay and pay and pay--licenses, bribes, registrations; they drag their heels about registering us, but it’s in the police’s financial interests to have us around,” Alex’s Kosyakov said.

For their part, said Kiselev, police are often told by city and state officials to register unknown people as private security men, without knowing what their qualifications are. Although in theory Russian law should regulate this process, in practice the system that has emerged is more like a simple form of registration that draws money into official, and sometimes not so official, police pockets.

Perhaps it is no surprise that this anarchy in the law-and-order business preys on the minds of the security bosses now that the wild scramble for Soviet state wealth is ending. Some wonder what the future holds as this country recovers from a decade of capitalism.

“It’s obvious that the need for our sector was created by the atmosphere of chaos a few years ago, and that we can only exist until there’s peace and quiet in Russia again,” Malakhov said. “If the state reorganized the police now, who knows how long private security would exist at all?”

Gurov, 52, believes there’s a way out: He wants all private post-Soviet agencies and kryshas to unite in a single state-run security super-police. Like other former senior Soviet officials, Gurov moved into private security in despair at the mess inside the Russian state--but still hankers for the ordered glory of the past.

“Business has been turning criminal because the state hasn’t bothered to protect it,” he said. “Why do we need these dangerous, expensive, unnatural, rival kryshas? There are thousands of highly professional people from the old security services working in them, people thrown away by the state but who deserve recognition. What the state should do now is to create a national directorate for protecting business--an all-Russian krysha.”