Meyer Lansky, known as the "Mob's Accountant", was an American organized crime figure who, along with his associate Charles "Lucky" Luciano, was instrumental in the development of the National Crime Syndicate in the United States.
The Russian mafia, otherwise referred to as Bratva, is a collective of various organized crime related elements originating in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Any of the mafia's groups may be referred to as an "Organized Criminal Group" (OPG). This is sometimes modified to include a specific name, such as the Orekhovskaya OPG. The "P" in the initialism comes from the Russian word for criminal: prestupnaya. Sometimes, the Russian word is dropped in favour of a full translation, and OCG is used instead of OPG.
"Mafia" is an informal term that is used to describe criminal organizations that bear a strong similarity to the organized crime groups from Italy. The central activity of such an organization would be the arbitration of disputes between criminals as well as the organization and enforcement of illicit agreements between criminals through the use of or threat of violence. Mafias often engage in secondary activities such as gambling, loan sharking, drug-trafficking, prostitution, and fraud.
A protection racket is a type of racket and a scheme of organized crime perpetrated by a potentially hazardous organized crime group that generally guarantees protection outside the sanction of the law to another entity or individual from violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, and other such threats, in exchange for payments at regular intervals. Each payment is called "protection money" or a "protection fee". An organized crime group determines an affordable or reasonable fee by negotiating with each of its payers, to ensure that each payer can pay the fee on a regular basis and on time. Protections rackets can vary in terms of their levels of sophistication or organization; it is not uncommon for their operations to emulate the structures or methods used by tax authorities within legitimate governments to collect taxes from taxpayers.
Little Odessa is a 1994 American crime drama film directed and written by James Gray, in his directorial debut, and starring Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Moira Kelly, Maximilian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave. The title is a reference to Brighton Beach, a community in Brooklyn nicknamed "Little Odessa".
A "thief in law" in the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet states, and their respective diasporas is a formal and special status of "criminal authority", a professional criminal who follows certain criminal traditions and enjoys an elite position among other members within organized crime and correctional facility environments and who has informal authority over lower-status members.
Brigada, also known as Law of the Lawless, is a Russian 15-episode crime television miniseries that debuted in 2002. It became very popular in Russia and ex-Soviet countries as well as Eastern Europe, but received criticism for positive portrayal of criminals and aestheticization of violence. The miniseries follows the story of four best friends from 1989 to 2000, and follows their rise in the world of crime from a local gang of petty thugs to a true mafia, mainly concentrating on the leader of the group, Sasha Belov, played by Sergei Bezrukov. The fifteen-part miniseries were written by Igor Porublyov and Aleksei Sidorov and were directed by Aleksei Sidorov.
The Chechen Mafia is one of the largest ethnic organized crime groups operating in the former Soviet Union next to established Russian mafia groups.
Michael V. E. "Misha" Glenny is a British journalist and broadcaster, specialising in southeast Europe, global organised crime, and cybersecurity. He is multilingual. He is also the writer and producer of the BBC Radio 4 series, How to Invent a Country.
Jewish-American organized crime initially emerged within the American Jewish community during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In media and popular culture, it has variously been referred to as the Jewish Mob, the Jewish Mafia, the Kosher Mob, the Kosher Mafia, the Yiddish Connection, and Kosher Nostra or Undzer Shtik. The last two of these terms are direct references to the Italian cosa nostra; the former is a play on the word for kosher, referring to Jewish dietary laws, while the latter is a calque of the Italian phrase 'cosa nostra' into Yiddish, which was at the time the predominant language of the Jewish diaspora in the United States.
Weather Is Good on Deribasovskaya, or It Rains Again on Brighton Beach is a 1992 joint Russian–American production comedy film directed by Leonid Gaidai as his last film. Its title used in the plot as a password for secret agents and refers to Derybasivska Street and Brighton Beach.
The Solntsevskaya Organized Crime Group, also known as the Solntsevskaya Bratva, is a Russian crime syndicate group.
Liquidation (2007) is a highly popular Russian television series, which parallels the famous The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed with notable ethical shift. In the "Meeting Place", chief of criminal investigations Gleb Zheglov had a modus operandi "Thief must go to prison, no matter how I put him there".
Crime in Germany is handled by the German police forces and other agencies.
Georgian mafia is regarded as one of the biggest, most powerful, dangerous and influential criminal networks in Europe, which has produced the largest number of "thieves in law" in all former USSR countries and controls and regulates most of the Russian-speaking and fully controls Russia and Georgia mafia groups. They are very active in Russia and Europe. The Georgian mafia has two major criminal clans from Tbilisi and Kutaisi. Georgia always had a disproportionately high number of crime bosses and still has a majority of the 700 or so still operating in the post-Soviet space and western Georgia is particularly well represented.
The Ukrainian mafia is a type of criminal organization with origins in Ukraine. Such organizations are regarded as one of the most influential types of organized crime coming out of the former USSR, including also the Russian mafia, the Georgian mafia, the Chechen mafia, the Armenian mafia and the Azerbaijani mafia. Ukrainian criminal organizations are involved in a significant number of illegal activities. Although Ukrainian criminal organizations are for the most part independently operating enterprises, they are sometimes connected with Russian mafia organizations, such as the case with Semyon Mogilevich.
Blatnaya pesnya or blatnyak is a genre of Russian song characterized by depictions of criminal subculture and the urban underworld which are often romanticized and have criminally-perverted humor in nature.
The Russian mafia has frequently been a subject of works in popular culture.
Vladimir Burlakov is a German actor of Russian descent, known for his portrayal of Thomas Posimski in Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86.
