Urheilijoitten ympärillä hämärämiehiä

ne soluttautuvat mukaan ja...

The Russian mafia wants money
So why do some Russian mafia figures gravitate towards sports people? Is it some fierce love of hockey which makes them kill the skate sharpener of TSKA Moscow? A passion for a great sport that makes them assassinate the presidents of the biggest clubs in Russia? No, of course not.



There are in fact four main reasons why the Russian mafiya gravitated towards sports figures.



The first reason and one that we have seen is extortion. The salaries of hockey players are published. They are well known and for a country crumbling into economic shambles they are astronomical. The average wage of librarians and teachers at the Moscow State University is around 500US$ a month. The average wage of a National Hockey League hockey player starts at around one million dollars a year.



But actually extortion is not the principal reason for mafia involvement. Although we have seen that 80% of hockey players can expect to be extorted - really that type of extortion comes from low level criminals. Tverdosky, Zhitnik and Mogilny were all threatened by the bottom feeding level of Russian criminals. The big mobsters go after sports figures for other reasons.





The Russian mafia wants to control games
The real money comes from gambling.



Michael Franzese was a Don in the Colombo crime family of New York. He was the top earning Capo of the mafia with an elaborate gas tax refund rebate that brought in over 1-billion dollars a year. I spoke to him. In 1995 he met with members of the Russian mob to try and infiltrate various sports organisations.



And he claimed that in the late seventies he had several members of the New York Yankees - the biggest sports franchise in the world - ready to throw games for him. He claimed that he won hundreds of millions of dollars on fixing a Robert Duran fight.



He talked about his modus operandi. He revealed that if you are a mobster you actually want to be friends - at first -with sports people. The idea is to find their weakness. If it is blondes, you use blondes. If it is drugs, you use drugs. Whatever it is, you use it to get a hold over the sports person. Then you try to get them to throw games.



This is a real danger to sports in the computer age. Because it used to be that in North America you went to a character like Jimmy the Greek - you bet money and he took it. If you won and there was anything suspicious he would know. Now with the internet a mobster can potentially win - or launder - millions of dollars from a sporting event and no one would be the wiser.





The Russian mafia wants to be seen with stars
But possibly the biggest reason why organised crime figures want to hang around sports people is NOT illegal. It is something I call the Kennedy factor.



Top mobsters often don't think of themselves as criminals but as misunderstood businessmen. Their ideal is the Kennedy clan that went from being lowlife, bootleggers on the Boston docks to being the President of the most powerful nation in the world in two generations.



How can they do it? Well, the way you legitimise yourself is to hang around famous people. And who better to do it than sports people? We will see a classic case in a few moments.



But the important point is that the relationship may not be one-sided extortion. The mobsters may be gaining more from the sports people than just money. This is important to recognise because to people in the sports world it seems that their world is an innocent schoolyard where grown children play among the flowers. But to mobsters this is happy hunting ground.



It is a natural marriage. So rather than people being surprised at mobsters hanging around sports people - it should be their first reaction.



The Russian mafia wants part of sport proceeds
There is also a fourth and particular reason why the Russian mob was interested in hockey and actually all sports in Russia.



It starts with Boris Yeltsin's former tennis coach Shamil Tarpischev: a man who Yeltsin - in a fit of imperial grandeur that would make a Tsar cringe - made his Sports Minister. (And Tarpischev - by the way - survived his own mob assassination on the Kremlin tennis grounds.)



The year was 1993 and the Russian economy was in free fall and the once great Soviet sporting machine was crumbling. So Tarpischev proposed to Yeltsin that sports clubs be allowed to import alcohol and tobacco duty free so they could earn extra money.



Now this was a huge concession. Jim Moody, former head of organised crime for the FBI, claimed that one third of all Russian government money came from taxes on alcohol and tobacco. So it took Russian mobsters all of about one fifteenth of a second to figure out they should get into this racket.