IN RUSSIA, murder and mayhem have long been among the accepted tools of business. The killing of entrepreneurs has become so commonplace that hardly an eyebrow is raised, but the gangland execution of Ms Larisa Nechayeva, financial controller of the Spartak football club, marks another unwelcome milestone in what experts see as a trend towards the criminalisation of the entire economy of the largest country on earth.
Under Soviet power, criminal gangs restricted themselves to local and regional activities. The Russian criminal fraternity, like the honest citizenry, was hampered by severe restrictions on freedom of movement, the absence of a convertible currency and, to put it mildly, a shortage of victims worthy of exploiting. The criminals, the thieves within the law" as they were known, had to become efficient to operate within such strict confines.
When the old order ended, they moved quickly. Suddenly private commercial activity of all sorts was allowed without any regulatory legislation. All sorts of sharp practice were allowed simply because there was no law to be broken.
New banks sprang up overnight and new bankers were shot dead with such frequency that their demise merited little more than a paragraph in the press. The killing of Mr Ivan Kivelidi, one of the country's leading businessmen, made headlines not because of his status but because, instead of being shot in the usual way, his vodka, at a business lunch, was spiked with poison.
When Mr Paul Tatum, who claimed he owned 40 per cent of a plush Moscow hotel, stepped into a hail of automatic fire at the Kievskaya metro station he grabbed media attention, not because he was a murdered businessman but because he was a murdered American businessman and, until then, westerners had been regarded as "safe".
New ground is being broken all the time. Among the items stolen in the past week, by criminal gangs far too close to the surface of society to be described as an underworld, has been a three-engined, 150-seater Yak-42 jet liner. The hoods are even bold enough to advertise their occupations by the types of tattoos they sport: a spider's web for a drug dealer, a heart split in two for a regional boss, and a stylised eagle for an important chieftain.
The mafia is now moving into the sporting arena, as instanced by Ms Nechayeva's murder. Increasingly sport is a business and where there is money to be made the mafia is to be found. Rivalry over sponsorship deals has been cited as the most likely reason why what was planned as a quiet weekend in the country ended in a bloodbath which killed Ms Nechayeva and her friend Yelena Rudzate and left her brother Grigory Sorokin badly wounded.
When Valentin Sych, president of the Russian Ice Hockey Federation, was murdered recently it was claimed he died because he would not share out the proceeds of fees gained from the transfer of Russian players to the lucrative leagues in North America. Russian stars in American and Canadian teams now frequently ask for official protection when visiting Moscow.
Even amateur boxing has been tainted. Sports journalists at international tournaments have recently witnessed a new breed of boxing "official", including glamorous young women in ankle-length sable coats who appear inextricably linked to the new and conspicuously wealthy male "officials" who have replaced the old-style boxing types.
Among the old hands who have left the scene are referee Vladimir Dadiev, who was found shot dead in the bath of his Moscow apartment last December following rumours that he was about to expose a fight-fixing scandal. Dadiev's son had earlier been gunned down in a Moscow restaurant in what may have been a mistaken attempt to kill the son of Vladimir Ivanchenko, the president of the Russian Amateur Boxing Federation.
Sport and crime became linked for the first time almost exactly a year ago when, during President Yeltsin's reelection campaign, a bizarre chain of events led to the dismissal of Mr Yeltsin's close confidant, Gen Alexander Korzhakov, a former KGB officer who led the presidential bodyguard of 16,000. One of Korzhakov's men, Col Valery Streletsky, ordered the detention of two members of Mr Yeltsin's campaign team who were found to be leaving government buildings with a suitcase containing $500,000.
Streletsky had just taken over as deputy head of the National Sports Fund (NSF) from Mr Boris Fyodorov, who retired for health reasons after he had sustained bullet and stab wounds in a Moscow laneway. The NSF had been making large sums of money due to a special dispensation which allowed it to import alcohol and tobacco tax free. This privilege has been withdrawn and the fund's then-head, Mr Yeltsin's tennis coach, Mr Sham il Tarpishchev, has since been removed.
The detention of the men with the bag of money was immediately interpreted as an "attempted coup" by a compliant Russian media. As a result Gen Korzhakov lost his job. Following his subsequent election to parliament he has promised to make "startling revelations". As yet, the promise is unfulfilled.
