Crime Archive

Over the last month, Russia has experienced a surge of contract killings, with five high-profile murders — a potent reminder that the country is far from the stable democracy its leaders say it is. The Oct. 7 murder of the anti-Kremlin journalist and human rights advocate Anna Politkovskaya is the most prominent of these, and the latest of 11 murders of Russian journalists in the last six years. Sadly, however, Politkoskaya’s is not the most recent such killing. Aleksandr Plokhin, manager of the Moscow branch of the state-owned Vneshtorgbank, was shot dead on Oct. 10. And Anatoly Voronin, an executive […]

Like a scene from a Hollywood gangster film, two masked gunmen burst into the Amedic bar in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, and opened fire on patrons watching a Bulgaria-Netherlands soccer game. Seconds later, their target, Nikolai Ivanov — a.k.a the Beaver — lay dead from 9 bullets; two of his associates lay bleeding on the floor next to him. The slaying on Oct. 7 in the small Balkan nation was the latest bloody salvo in an organized crime turf war that has seen over four dozen mob hits in the past five years and, in the last decade, 120 contract-style killings […]

HONG KONG — The arrest of the most high-profile public figure in China in a decade may be a shocking example of endemic corruption in the world’s biggest out-of-control economy, but the question on the lips of some financial investigators in the West is: Will the trail of Chen Liangyu’s ill-gotten loot lead to the United States? The shadow economy in China, a combination of embezzlement, bribery, tax avoidance and underground banking of both legal and illegal money, is huge, and growing. Much of this money is laundered abroad, mostly via Hong Kong, say investigators, and there is growing evidence […]

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A “black year,” is how the local press has described the series of scandals battering the Colombian army in recent months. In an unprecedented address to the nation last month, Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe, urged citizens to restore their faith in the country’s armed forces after the head of the army issued a public statement tentatively accusing his own troops of staging terrorist attacks in Bogotá days before the May presidential elections. The attacks were originally blamed on guerrilla groups. General Mario Montoya, head of the army, said that there was evidence to suggest that soldiers and […]