http://russianmafiacards.com/



A deck of cards has been produced in the US featuring the faces of key figures in the Russian mafia. Decks of cards displaying the likely key figures of the Russian criminal world will be sent to the FBI, to police departments of cities with large Russian-speaking communities and to the US Congress. The publisher of the deck of cards, the Institute for Russian Research, intends to use this deck to raise awareness among law enforcers, legislators, and the media, of the fact that the Russian mafia is playing a very significant role in crime in the US as well as the rest of the world, and is significance is very likely to grow as the capital flight from Russia (comprising proceeds of crime, embezzlement, and corruption) intensifies. The deck of cards will be updated and reprinted annually, the deck publishers say.

The Russian Mafia deck of cards includes both criminals well known to police and the public and those who have been able to keep a low profile. For example, the ace of diamonds – Semion Mogilevich, a former leader of the Solntsevo Organized Crime Group, one of Russia’s most infamous, a citizen of three nations on police wanted lists in four different countries. Mogilevich is on the FBI list of ten most wanted criminals and is believed to be the main leader of the Russian mafia globally. The deck also includes Tevfik Arif as the queen of clubs, a former official with the Soviet Trade Ministry who has moved to the US to become a construction magnate and, according to the media, might be an underground head of a money laundering network involved in financing terrorist groups in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. Arif was arrested in 2010 for organizing a prostitution ring and holding sex parties with underage girls on a yacht that once belonged to Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of modern Turkey. The deck also includes characters like illegal arms trader Viktor Bout, notorious Russian-American Mafioso Monya Elson, and others. More than half of those featured on the cards (48 people total) are in the US, around 15% are based in Spain.

“Russian mafia has become an international phenomenon, a significant player in the criminal world, and we believe that the US have to recognize the fact of Russian mafia’s presence in the United States. We believe that the deck of cards should shine a spotlight on this problem,” Timothy Wooster, an expert with the Institute for Russian Studies, the deck publisher, says. “The Russian mafia performs most of its transactions in US dollars, for historical reasons, as well as because of its active involvement with South American cartels, which also rely on USD as their main transaction currency. So it is only natural for the Russian mafia to expand its presence in the US, where it can most easily put their USD assets to work,” Wooster adds.

“The deck doesn’t include sixes,” the publishers point out. “This is intentional: a “six” is one of the worst insults among the Russian mafia, and we wanted to avoid smearing anyone with a pariah status.”
<footer id="footer">This is the project of the Institute for Russian Research, a research group that studies the effects of Russian culture and society on the world and how Russian citizens and immigrants affect societies and cultures around the world.





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