Chapter 138 Motive for Murder: It's Not That Simple
Wang Xiao vomited; she vomited into a trash bag in the car.
Moscow winters are so cold. It's just after New Year's Day, and if she gets off the train and vomits, she might get frostbite.
But when she arrived at the police station and saw the body being taken off the car, she couldn't help but vomit again.
Actually, the most serious workplace injuries are probably suffered by police officers.
Because the towing equipment broke down en route, they were unable to even drive the Russian sedan in front to bring back the luxury imported car, which had essentially become a hearse.
They could only send someone to drive this car, full of corpses, all the way back to the police station.
On a cold winter night, shootings occurred repeatedly in the suburbs, and the city was not peaceful either.
Inside the police station, officers were yelling at a teenage boy and girl, around fifteen or sixteen years old: "Hey! Tell me honestly, what exactly did you do?"
Girls would just cover their faces and cry.
The boy hung his head and remained silent.
Nikolai's acquaintance at the police station came and brought his friend, along with his friend's colleagues and boss, into his office.
There's nothing we can do; other places are even more chaotic.
During the Soviet era, even in times of economic recession, there were still laws to govern people.
However, Russia's legal system is clearly lagging behind the times, and the police force is severely understaffed, with crime increasing due to the continued economic downturn.
Let alone prisons, even police stations feel they don't have enough space.
Nikolai's friends went to great lengths to entertain them, even bringing them hot tea.
Perhaps because Russian white sugar is currently in short supply, he didn't add sugar to the tea, and consequently, he used less tea bag. Surprisingly, Wang Xiao was able to drink it.
The noise, footsteps, and cries outside continued incessantly, occasionally accompanied by a policeman's angry roar.
Then the other sounds would be a little quieter, but less than three minutes later, the crying, shouting and yelling started up again, especially the girl's crying, which couldn't be stopped by the office door.
Ivanov noticed Wang Xiao's fixed gaze and instinctively wanted to distract her, so he asked curiously, "What's the deal with those two kids? Did they elope?"
He even laughed as he spoke.
He almost eloped when he was young, but he was too fond of pleasure and quickly realized that life would be very difficult if he eloped; so he gave up the idea soon after.
Even if these two young people aren't caught by the adults, they'll probably regret it soon.
Having nothing is too hard to endure.
Nikolai's friend scoffed, "Elopement? You underestimate kids these days. They killed someone, they strangled that girl's mother."
Ivanov's expression changed drastically. He subconsciously looked at Wang Xiao, realizing that he had really started another, even worse topic.
But Wang Xiao seemed to have calmed down, and she even asked, "Why?"
Surely she didn't kill her parents because the adults objected to her relationship with her boyfriend?
That would be too terrifying.
However, the truth is even more terrifying.
"She wanted to sell her house so she could make a fortune and squander it all. Her mother disagreed, so she found a friend to go home with her and strangled her mother to death."
After killing the person, the 15-year-old girl acted as if nothing had happened and even invited potential buyers to her house to view it.
But a normal person wouldn't sign a contract with a child; the law doesn't recognize its effect.
The buyer insisted on meeting the homeowner, who was her mother.
Unable to find a suitable person to impersonate her, she decided to take the role herself, which resulted in a complete disaster.
The buyer sensed something was wrong and went to the police station to report it.
Police arrived at the door and found the body in the refrigerator.
Yes, that's right, the killer even lived in the same house as the corpse.
After killing her mother, she robbed her of all her money, squandered it all at a bar, and even ran out of money to buy gasoline.
Her plan was to sell the house, use the money to fill up the car with gas, and then drag the body to the cemetery.
Why not bury people in the forest? Moscow itself is a forest, so it should be very convenient.
Oh, she's not stupid.
The forest is frozen solid in winter, making it impossible to dig, so how can you bury someone?
Besides, she had heard that cemeteries were where the Mafia dealt with traitors, and nobody cared about them.
Let alone law-abiding citizens like Wang Xiao, even seasoned KGB veterans like Lyuba couldn't help but exclaim, "How old is she?!"
Nikolai's friend looked dejected: "There have been murders at 15 years old, and even younger. Last summer, an 8-year-old was kidnapped and murdered by a 14-year-old high school student for 300,000 rubles."
To avoid misunderstandings, the perpetrator committed the retaliatory killing only after the kidnapped child's parents reported the incident to the police. The police emphasized that "after he found out the child's parents' names and home address, he strangled them to death before writing the ransom note."
In other words, from beginning to end, he wanted both money and life, and never intended for the child to live.
This is a major characteristic of juvenile delinquency: because of their ignorance, they become all the more cruel.
An adult might consider that parents would only pay the ransom if the child was still alive; to ensure the ransom is received smoothly, they would be more likely to keep the hostage alive for a few more days.
Of course, it's also possible that juvenile delinquents are more likely to gain the trust of children, making it easier for them to commit crimes.
If one hostage fails, you can look for another.
Therefore, they are indifferent to a single failure and always look forward to the next one.
Perhaps because it was getting later and later, Wang Xiao felt that the heating in the police station was not enough, and he couldn't help but shiver all over.
Nikolai's friend was still complaining: "Summer camps, so many summer camps closed last summer. The kids have nowhere to go, and the crime rate has skyrocketed."
That sounds like a way of shifting blame.
But in Russia today, there is also a reason for this.
Soviet people grew up under collectivism, especially during a time when divorce rates soared, and most children from single-parent families relied on the collective for warmth and support.
With summer camps no longer an option during summer vacation, the likelihood of children being led astray and going astray will indeed increase.
Nikolai retorted, "Come on, let's not talk about the children, the responsibility lies with the adults. They just follow the adults' example."
The office door opened.
A young man wearing a down jacket uniform with the restaurant's logo walked in carrying pizzas and milk tea. He greeted the owner first and then handed out the fast food meals one by one.
This is a restaurant owned by Huaxia Commercial Street, specializing in pizza, hamburgers, and milk tea.
The ingredients used, whether it's flour, milk, cheese, tomato sauce, pickles, chicken, or pork, are mostly produced on the farm, and business is pretty good.
They've recently started considering opening more chain stores.
Ivanov asked, "Have the people outside received theirs?"
"Yes, they've all been sent," the young man explained. "We drove over in one car."
Nikolai's friend glanced at Ivanov before saying thank you, "Thank you."
Wang Xiao had just vomited and didn't want to eat anything.
She didn't take the pizza from the box, but instead took a cup of red bean milk tea and drank it sip by sip.
“My Chinese friends,” Nikolai’s policeman friend said suddenly after taking a big bite of pizza and swallowing it, “how did you all improve? I mean, everyone says that Russia today is like China 10 years ago. So how did your security improve?”
Xiao Gao and Xiao Zhao wanted to boast a little, but they had to be honest, so they couldn't bring themselves to exaggerate. They could only tell the truth: "The public security in China isn't good either. After the crackdown, the security will improve a bit. But it won't be long before it gets worse again."
He added a bunch of descriptive phrases to the word "crackdown" before he could finally express its meaning in Russian, albeit haltingly.
The policeman looked disappointed and muttered to himself, "Is it really going to get better? Yes, with rampant materialism, how can things possibly get better?"
"Actually, there is a way," Wang Xiao said slowly, taking a sip of milk tea. "In the end, it's all because of the lack of a stable job and a decent income."
If all businesses were operating normally and everyone could earn $100 a month, do you think the Mafia would still be able to recruit people?
Those who make the most money in any industry are all at the top. Those at the bottom, especially in shady sectors, are lucky if they can even put food on the table.
If they could get a job, work a normal job, and earn a stable income, why would they want to join a gang?
"And a leader can't survive without a large following of underlings."
Simply put, any industry will naturally decline and die out if the number of practitioners decreases.
The police were even more desperate: "When will that day come?"
Xiao Gao couldn't stand it anymore and offered a suggestion: "You guys should at least do something about it. For example, guns. If guns were controlled, even if there were a shootout, it wouldn't be this serious."
Nikolai sneered, "It's not that easy to manage. You'd be lucky to control it."
Do you know what Victor, the assassin, does for a living? He doesn't take on assassination jobs; he deals in arms.
Where did his weapons come from? Of course, from the Ministry of the Interior, where he came from.
But it's unrealistic to expect the Ministry of the Interior to stop selling weapons.
Aside from oil and natural gas, Russia's increasingly depressed industry has very little to export to generate foreign exchange, making arms a very good option.
However, according to the agreement between the Russian government and the West, what they are supposed to do is to destroy large quantities of weapons, not to export them.
This has led to the federal government being able to barely fulfill contracts signed during the Soviet era, and finding it difficult to sell arms openly and legitimately through official channels.
But the government needs money, and every department is asking for funding.
Where will the money come from? Well, everyone will have to use their own unique methods.
Before transmigrating into the book, Wang Xiao always thought that the Russian Federation government was too incompetent, so it was unable to control the large outflow of arms.
But having spent more time in this world, she is more inclined to believe that this is actually tacitly approved by the government.
Since the weapons have already been manufactured, if you don't sell them for money, storing them will incur a lot of expenses.
If something can't be done or is inconvenient to do at the official level, and it's done privately, then there's nothing the government can do about it.
If the Western world has any objections, then hand over the money.
It is precisely because we lack money that we lack manpower and are unable to control the outflow of weapons.
However, when the federal government resorts to such underhanded tactics, the consequences are borne by the citizens.
The official tacit approval and tolerance of private arms deals has led to the flow of various firearms not only abroad, but also made it easy for domestic criminal groups to obtain large quantities of firearms and ammunition.
Even more critically, Russia suffers from a severe imbalance between physical and mental development.
For example, when a university professor's monthly salary was 4,000 rubles, a subway driver's salary had already risen to 25,000 rubles.
Many highly intelligent professionals, such as researchers, teachers, and doctors, have had to change careers to make a living because their income is insufficient to support their families.
Many of them also joined criminal groups, serving as strategists within the gangs.
Russians themselves joke that there's one statistic in which Russia absolutely ranks among the world's best.
That's the educational level of the Mafia. There's probably no other country in the world like the Russian Federation that has so many Mafia members with doctoral and master's degrees.
These highly educated gangsters, along with elites flowing out of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB, caused the Russian mafia groups to shock the world as soon as they appeared.
How can Russia's problems be solved? No other country can provide a template for it; it is destined to explore its own path.
The police officer ate the pizza in large bites, as if venting his anger.
In fact, this was quite a luxury for him.
With his salary, the only thing he could afford to eat was a 400-ruble loaf of black bread.
Outside the office, the lawyer had finally completed all the procedures at the police station and could leave with Sergei.
Wang Xiao and the others quickly stood up and said goodbye to Nikolai's friends.
The policeman, who was not yet thirty, looked extremely tired.
As he embraced Nikolai goodbye, he sighed and said, "Maybe you're right. It's meaningless. Everything we did was meaningless."
Nikolai pounded his shoulder, repeatedly denying, "No, no, no, what you did was meaningful. I just, you know me, I can't take hardship."
The police station lobby was still noisy.
The girl who was crying earlier was still crying, but she was eating pizza and complaining as she cried, "I haven't had pizza in a long time. I told her that if we sold the house, we could live a comfortable life, but she just wouldn't agree."
The policeman banged on the table and said impatiently, "Where will you live after you sell the house?"
“A villa, we can live in a villa in the suburbs.”
Anyone who doesn't know the situation would definitely assume that her family is extremely wealthy and owns a villa in the suburbs.
However, Russians have a very broad concept of villas.
There's a wooden house in the countryside, the kind of log cabin found in collective farms, which is also called a villa.
The police officer was furious: "You live in the suburbs, doesn't your mother have to work and you have to go to school? The best option is to rent out an empty room, just like before."
"Nobody wants to rent it!" The girl's voice suddenly rose eight octaves, filled with intense hatred. "It's all that damned Chinese man's fault, he refused to rent it."
Otherwise, if she had earned an extra $20 a month as before, perhaps she wouldn't have argued with her mother and then strangled her to death in order to sell the house smoothly.
Why can't it be rented out?
"He refuses to raise the price, he says it's too expensive." The girl, sobbing with snot and tears streaming down her face, was furious. "He's clearly so rich, yet he raised it to forty dollars. He earns more in half a day than that."
Well, after listening for so long, Wang Xiao and the others ended up getting the gossip themselves.
Last November, the Chinese businesswoman was forced to move to a military barracks to open a wholesale warehouse after her landlord collectively raised her rent.
Later, Ivanov found several more buildings, and basically all the Chinese businessmen with some scale of business moved in.
As for the remaining people, the vast majority are international students who do part-time business, so they can naturally live in the school dormitories.
This is actually a significant blow to Moscow's rental housing market.
In 1992, Russia's foreign investment attraction efforts were already hampered, with few new foreign investors entering the market.
It's normal for landlords who have lost their Chinese business owners to have properties that are difficult to rent out for a while.
The police officer was furious, slamming his fist on the table and emphatically saying, "What does it matter to you whether someone earns more or less? How can you arbitrarily raise rents? They're not beggars, are they? Do you think they can just reach out and ask for money?"
The girl started crying again.
The most amazing thing is that she didn't forget to keep eating pizza even while she was crying.
Ivanov frowned, feeling that the pizza was really worse than feeding it to the dogs.
The lawyer led Sergei over, and the two met up and walked towards the police station entrance.
There were people guarding outside; as soon as they came out, the car lights came on.
The sudden discovery of seven more corpses had caused quite a stir, and the playboys at the Doll Club were terrified. They didn't bother to see how things would unfold and parted ways with the police as soon as they got to the city.
Perhaps driven by curiosity, they actually turned back and waited outside the police station for news.
Now that they saw Ivanov and the others come out, they naturally couldn't wait to ask, "What exactly happened?"
Ivanov wanted to roll his eyes. You ask me? I ask who?
If the police were this efficient, Moscow wouldn't be in such a chaotic state.
This time, he really underestimated the police. The policeman who accompanied Nikolai's friend to see them out actually spoke up: "Who else among you is laundering money for the gang? You'd better hire more security. Maybe God will bless you."
Several onlookers' expressions changed.
Currently, money laundering is a very serious problem in private banks in Russia, or even in the CIS countries as a whole.
Firstly, the country's legislative work is lagging behind, and there are no specific legal provisions to restrict money laundering.
After all, during the planned economy era, there was simply no room for money laundering.
Secondly, newly established private banks are focused on attracting more deposits and don't care where the money comes from, or more specifically, they don't think it's necessary to care about such issues.
It's all money, money that can be spent to buy things, so what's the difference between clean and unclean?
Against this backdrop, almost all gangs would put their money into banks and try to launder it.
It is estimated that no private bank, or even the national bank, would dare to claim that it is innocent.
Ivanov frowned, looking very suspicious: "He was killed because of this? What about the others? And why did they target our sanatorium?"
Without any subjective bias, a sanatorium is really not a suitable location for an assassination, especially in full view of many people.
As an experienced assassin, Victor shouldn't be so arrogant.
And those seven corpses, were they just a coincidence?
“Warning,” the police officer stated bluntly. “This is a warning, a warning for refusing to pay protection money to the gang.”
Such words coming from a policeman seem very strange and inappropriate.
However, the Moscow police force's view on gang extortion is not as abhorrent as the outside world imagines.
Even the previous Moscow police chief, Morakov, who was dismissed last November, made a public statement in a media interview.
He believes that those extortionists who blackmail stores are, in fact, protecting the victims they are blackmailing and preventing other blackmailers from harming them further.
Therefore, both sides benefited, and in the long run, this extortionist industry should be legalized.
It sounds unbelievable, but this is the reality for Russian businessmen right now.
Almost every businessman has to pay protection money to the Mafia, otherwise they'll be in big trouble.
Cedarnko angered the mob by refusing to be blackmailed indefinitely; so the mob decided to teach him a lesson and placed an order to kill him.
This order is quite expensive, reportedly costing as much as five thousand US dollars.
Don't underestimate this number; the assassin community in the CIS countries is in complete chaos.
Killing someone only costs two or three hundred US dollars.
In Moscow today, a good-quality Pekingese dog might cost more than three hundred US dollars.
They are truly worse off than dogs.
Of course, the reason why Pekingese dogs are so expensive is because they are currently very popular in China.
Especially in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, it's as if newly rich women are losing face if they don't carry a Pekingese dog in their arms.
Wang Xiao remembers that around this time last year, Pekingese dogs in Moscow cost between one hundred and one hundred and fifty US dollars.
It is evident that in just one year, many new elites have emerged in China.
She continued listening to the policeman while her thoughts were in turmoil.
Why did Victor choose to strike at the entrance of the sanatorium? It was at the employer's request.
The $5,000 reward was not only to buy Cedarenko's life, but also to serve as a warning to the members of the doll club.
Don't think that just because you've banded together, you can refuse to pay protection money.
If they don't obey, it's hard to say who the next bullet will be aimed at.
Oh, right, the situation with those seven corpses was similar.
Among them were bar owners who didn't cooperate, and distributors who concealed the import amount. The latter imported $1 million worth of goods and should have paid $150,000 in protection fees, but he hid the actual amount.
So even though he hired a security company, he still couldn't escape being shot.
Even the security guards from the security company were shot.
This was a coordinated operation by several mafia organizations, who were trying to force Moscow businessmen to abandon their illusions and obediently pay protection money every month.
The policeman shrugged and mumbled, "You'd better watch yourselves."
One member of the doll club cursed, "This is your responsibility. Do we pay taxes because we think the amount is too heavy?"
The policeman turned his head and gave him a cold, indifferent look.
As it turns out, there are virtually no ordinary people who can withstand the scrutiny of a police officer.
The playboy who had been so boastful immediately shut up, meekly pulled his head back, and quickly started the car to leave.
Wang Xiao and the others also got into the car and left.
After driving for a while, when they reached a traffic light, the Desert Storm, which had been following behind, moved to the side of the road.
The car window rolled down, and Ovechkin, who had first suggested forming the "children's gang," poked his head out slightly and greeted him: "My dear Ivanov, I think we need to talk."
In the freezing cold of a Moscow night, rolling down the car window takes a lot of courage.
Amidst the howling wind, Wang Xiao heard a voice say, "You know, things aren't that simple. I suspect it's related to privatization. They want to monopolize all the national assets, which is why they've resorted to such drastic measures."
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Yes, the police chief who was dismissed did say that collecting protection money was reasonable.
Arkady Morakov, 38, a staunch democrat and former member of the Soviet parliament, was appointed head of the Moscow police force a year earlier. He was dismissed on November 10, 1992. Morakov was of impeccable character, a civilian official, and unsuitable for the position of police chief. He was earnestly preparing for a radical overhaul of the conservative and stagnant police force, and his relationship with Moscow Mayor Ruykov was strained.
Morakov also has a unique perspective on extortion: "Those who extort stores, big and small, today also serve a protective function, preventing other potential extortionists from doing so so that everyone benefits, including the victims. From a long-term perspective, this kind of profession should be legalized."
The article mentions two juvenile delinquency cases, which were real cases at the time and can be seen as a microcosm of social unrest.
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