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\u00a0Putin’s Kleptocracy and the Russian Nationalized Mafia<\/strong><\/p>\n As deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, Vladimir Putin spent a lot of time with gangsters.<\/p>\n He collaborated with the infamous Tambov and Malyshev organized crime groups to gain control of St. Petersburg’s gambling industry.<\/p>\n He used his office to help launder mafia money and to arrange foreign travel for known mobsters.<\/p>\n And security for the Ozero dacha cooperative he co-founded with some of his former KGB pals was provided by a company run by the Tambov gang, whom Putin also helped secure a monopoly over the city’s fuel distribution network.<\/p>\n Putin was, in fact, an important liaison between the local government and the criminal underworld, Karen Dawisha writes in her highly acclaimed bookPutin’s Kleptocracy<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n And when he moved into the Kremlin, Putin put his old mafia contacts to use as key tools of Russian statecraft.<\/p>\n “A significant part of Russian organised crime is organised directly from the offices of the Kremlin,” the International Business Times quoted Ben Emmerson<\/a><\/strong>, a prominent British attorney who represents the family of slain Russian defector Aleksandr Litvinenko, as saying.<\/p>\n Likewise, Russian organized crime expert Mark Galeotti noted in a recent lecture<\/a><\/strong> at the Hudson Institute that Putin’s Russia is “not so much a mafia state as a state with a nationalized mafia.”<\/p>\n