Powerful Russian mob boss killed by sniper in Moscow

Police officers and investigators crowd at the site of a killing of Aslan Usoyan outside the Karetny Dvor restaurant in central Moscow, on January 16, 2013. / Getty Images

MOSCOW One of Russia's top crime lords was gunned down Wednesday in Moscow in what police described as a war between two powerful mobs over lucrative construction projects, allegedly including ones for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Police said an unidentified gunman fired seven shots from a sniper gun at Aslan Usoyan near a restaurant in central Moscow — the third assassination attempt on him since the late 1990s.

Usoyan, also known as Grandpa Khasan, was a 75-year-old ethnic Kurd born in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Police say for the past two decades he headed one of the region's most powerful criminal groups, which trafficked in drugs and weapons and controlled underground casinos as well as many legal businesses, including those in the construction industry.

Police said Usoyan was hit in the jaw, hospitalized in a coma and then died. Police said the gunman, who used a state-of-the-art automatic rifle issued to Russian special forces, also injured a passerby, who was hospitalized.

• Undercover Look Inside The Russian Mob

Usoyan came from a caste of professional criminals who sport elaborate tattoos, follow unwritten prison laws codified in Stalinist-era Gulags and have been romanticized in countless popular songs.

He was first convicted in 1956 in Georgia and soon became a professional criminal. Like other members of his caste, he was strictly forbidden from befriending men in uniform, avoided luxurious lifestyles, never got married and considered prison his only true home.

Having survived the totalitarian system that spawned them, Russian criminals enjoyed a heyday in the decade after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. Usoyan opened a chain of casinos in Moscow and became the keeper of an emergency fund for jailed Russian criminals — a position that gave him immense authority in the criminal underworld of the vast former Soviet Union.

By the early 2000s, he had consolidated control over criminal groups in southern Russia that united natives of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as ethnic Russians. He feuded with mobsters who became more like Italian mafia and often disregarded Soviet-era prison norms.

Since 2006, Usoyan had been at war with a criminal group headed by another Georgian, Tariel Oniani, according to organized crime experts.

Russian media said the battle between the two clans had intensified in recent years as they vied for control over construction projects in southern Russia, including the huge sports facilities being built for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

[mtracy99]

These AP writers are such lying propagandists. Gangsterism wasn't a problem in Russia until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the re-institution of capitalism there.

[askagain]

mtracy99 - Consider this. Instead of capitalism being the culprit, perhaps crime increased as the result of more liberal behavior and greater freedoms. Fascist governments tend to have far greater control over virtually every activity in a country. That is not to say that crime and corruption doesn't exist. Can you imagine any society without crime and corruption. Personal greed exist with any political or economic system. Just look at China where the death penalty doesn't deter greed, crime, and corruption.

[nativecc]

Was that a legal rifle?

[jeffinpa1234]

The quality of snipers seems to be slipping over there. 7 shots 1 kill - pathetic!

[marandalaw]

Well..Well..Well..No More Mob Boss.Yippee!