Vol. 9 No. 6 (June 1999) pp. 275-277.

RUSSIAN MAFIA IN AMERICA: IMMIGRATION, CULTURE, AND CRIME, by James O. Finckenauer and Elin J. Waring. Massachusetts: Northeastern University Press, 1998. 303 pp.

Reviewed by Gerald J. Russello, New York, New York.

The advent of new forms of organized criminal activity has raised a number of new challenges for the law enforcement community. The hopes that, with the much-publicized attrition of the traditional, Sicilian-based crime "families," both in the United States and Italy, organized crime would diminish in importance and damage seem to have been exaggerated. In the place of these older forms of organized crime, new groups have arisen that may differ, sometimes markedly, from their older counterparts. Unlike the Sicilian "families," these other forms of organized crime have been little studied, and what little data is available on their forms, structure or numbers varies in reliability and completeness. The one significant similarity between these groups and their antecedents is that the membership of these new crime groups is based in large part on ethnicity. New York City alone, for example, is the host to crime groups of at least a dozen different ethnic or immigrant groups, including Chinese, Jamaican, and Russian, a characteristic that makes them, at least superficially, similar to the standard view of the "Mafia."

It is this last group that is the subject of the current study. Although Russian organized crime has in some ways established a reputation and a mystique almost as large as that of the Sicilian La Cosa Nostra, there exists remarkably little information about its membership and activities here in the United States. Russian Mafia in America represents the first major sustained academic examination of the available data. Finckenauer and Waring collate a sizeable amount of information from legal and other documents, as well as interviews with Russian and American law enforcement figures, persons involved with organized crime, and individual case studies. Most importantly, perhaps, the authors have had access to the files of the Tri-State Soviet Emigré Organized Crime Project, a partnership created to share information among the law enforcement communities of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where much of the Russian organized crime activity is located. The authors do an excellent job of examining the data and of weaving together the sometimes fragmentary and sensationalistic accounts of Russian crime into a coherent picture.

The data collected by the authors is displayed in narrative as well as graphical and tabular forms. Of particular interest is an appendix dealing with network analysis, a technique for determining contacts between individuals. It has been used by law enforcement to connect individuals who may be associated with one another in a criminal enterprise. The authors state that theirs is the first academic work to use this type of analytic method in relation to criminal networks (xi).

The introductory chapters deal with the definition and application of the terms "organized crime" and "mafia." The authors canvass the literature in order to develop definitions of these two terms that can be applied consistently to different kinds of criminal enterprises. Every instance of "organized" crime is not an example of a "mafia," and the authors correctly note that use of the latter term will often have policy consequences - resources spent in looking for a "family"-type structure, for example, that may not in fact exist (19). The discussion focuses on the characteristics of organized crime - sophistication, structure, reputation, and so forth - as well as the ethnic component, which has historically been strong.

The Russian form of this phenomenon, the authors conclude, bears only some of these characteristics, and calling Russian crime in America a "mafia" is likely to lead to a misdiagnosis of the problem, and a resulting misdirection of resources to combat it. There is no formal organized structure among Russian criminal individuals and groups, organized hierarchically, as the word "mafia" may suggest. Rather, the form Russian emigré crime has taken is a mix of opportunistic groupings of individuals, with a small number of networks that are loosely organized and that lack the organizational supports to establish themselves as permanent entities (198-99).

The authors conclude that there is a significant amount of criminal activity that is attributable to those originating from the states of the former Soviet Union. However, they also find that that criminal activity is rarely organized, and certainly does not rise to the level of a "mafia," as that term is popularly understood (8). Further, when examined from an ethnic standpoint, the authors determine that most of the "Russian" criminal figures are not ethnic Russians at all, and the criminal activity, both among ethnic groups here in the United States as well as those remaining in the former Soviet Union, is composed of members of differing ethnic groups, who may, on occasion, work with one another.

Organized crime within the states of the former Soviet Union itself, however, is another matter. There the authors find the criminal activity so pervasive and well-organized that it cannot really be compared to anything experienced in the United States. It extends anything attempted either by the "Russians" or more established organized crime networks in the United States. One chapter devoted to "The New Russian Mobs" details the extensive and sophisticated criminal operations of these groups in Russia. The prevalence of such criminal activity is the legacy of two related characteristics of the former Communist regime: the distrust of government that it engendered, which in turn lead to a cynicism among the populace and a conviction that dishonesty was justifiable to survive.

The second characteristic leading to the rise of Russian organized crime was the structure of Soviet prison camps, which created a class of professional criminals who now are found throughout Russian society. Indeed, the authors devote a separate chapter to the "Russian Criminal Tradition" to explain the culture of these VORY V ZAKONE, a Russian phrase loosely translated as "thieves professing the code." The "vory" are probably the closest analogue to a Russian "mafia," though they are not all of Russian ethnicity, and the evidence about their organization and operations with one another is inconclusive. These professional criminals have not, by and large, infiltrated into the United States, with the significant exception of Vyacheslav "Yaponchik" Ivankov. Ivankov, who had a long criminal career in Russia, is now serving a sentence in a federal prison for extortion. He is reputedly the highest-ranking member of Russian organized crime to have entered the United States. Some have contended that Ivankov came to America in order to direct Russian organized crime in the United States; however, the evidence that Yaponchik, although clearly a criminal, is a "crime boss" is not overwhelming (113-14).

In all, Russian Mafia in America is a noteworthy attempt to analyze rigorously the available evidence concerning what some perceive is a growing crisis. Without proper analysis, it will be difficult to determine the legal and policy implications of different approaches to the problem of Russian organized crime. With the financial and social collapse of Russia continuing to be a problem no only for Russia but for other nations as well, this study is a necessary guide to an important consequence of that collapse.