The “Russian Mafia” that you’re thinking of is a group of gangs with roots that go back to the Soviet prison system. They took advantage of the chaos caused by the fall of the USSR to run rampant in both the former Eastern Bloc and the Russian diaspora for about 20 years, often in collusion with former Soviet security officials and rising Russian oligarchs.
Boris Nayfeld, a Russian mobster from Brooklyn, NY
They were (past tense) feared because when they first burst on the American and European criminal underworlds, they had nothing to lose and didn’t give a f***. They tended to be more aggressive, more reckless, more violent, and didn’t play by the same set of rules that more established mobsters had developed for themselves.
That’s almost always the case with the hungry, desperate “new” ethnic gangs that appear in whatever new diaspora is fleeing from some disaster. In the 80’s, American gangs were under pressure from ultra-violent Vietnamese gangs and Colombians, depending on where you lived. In the 90’s it was Russians. The Russians were displaced as the violent desperadoes by Albanians. Someday in the future North Korean mobsters who were all former NK SOF will be terrorizing the criminal underworld of the Pacific Rim. Around and around we go .
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