By Kit VLADMIROV
St. Petersburg Press
Two notorious St Petersburg mafia bosses were gunned down at point blank range in a bloody gangland execution in Budapest, police have revealed.
A HREF="two2.gif">Andrei Sergeyevand Oleg Kosov, both 32, were shot repeatedly in the head in the living room of their plush apartment in a fashionable district of the city.
Both men were leading members of the Velikiye-Luki gang which was formed in 1988 and now numbers around 300 "boitsi" (the name given to thugs hired by mafia leaders.)
The slaughter may have been the result of a long-running squabble within the mafia over profits from an illegal timber export operation being run across Western Europe, police said.
Hungarian detectives revealed details of the killings after their hunt for the assassins brought them to Russia. They have joined forces with RUOP, St Petersburg's crack anti-organized crime task force.
Police believe the victims knew their killers as there is evidence that they invited them into the two-story detached house.
The bullets found in the bodies discovered on October 27, came from a Russian TT pistol and an Italian Berretta. Sergeyev's head was riddled with five bullets and one was pulled from his shoulder. At least five slugs were removed from Kosov's body.
RUOP chief Major Sergei Podshivalov said, "After our colleagues from Hungary came to St Petersburg and told us about the crime, we immediately realized that we were dealing with a carefully-planned murder and that the dead men almost certainly knew their killers."
He explained that both men were on RUOP's "most-wanted" list and St Petersburg officers had been hunting them ever since they vanished from St Petersburg's organized crime scene more than a year ago.
The Velikiye-Luki gang originally started out operating prostitutes in the Olgino region, charging each call-girl 300 Finnish marks to work on a local camping site.
The gang was given its name by St Petersburg police who have christened all the major mafia cartels operating in the city. Most are named after the birthplace of their founders -- tambovskoye and chechenskoye for example.
Velikiye-Luki amassed a fortune after Sergeyev, who went under the nickname of Anzhey, set up a Russian-Hungarian-German joint venture which exported Russian prostitutes to Western European brothels.
Maj Podshivalov said Sergeyev then extended their activities to set up an extremely lucrative timber export racket.
"Gang leaders have begun to realize that they can make fat profits by selling timber, gas and metals abroad. It's not hard for them to find foreign businesses willing to bend the rules.
"Then the gangsters insinuate themselves into the export chain and extort vast sums of money from the contracts."
According to Maj Podshivalov six mafia bosses in St Petersburg have been attacked by rival gangs over the past ten months.
Two of them have died while others have been treated for their wounds in top private hospitals.
Only one alleged "godfather" has been arrested over the same period: Artur Kzhizhevich, the leader of the Kazanskoye gang, who will be tried on kidnapping charges at the beginning of next year.
Police believe the killings are part of a bloody battle for control of different territories within the city.
According to Maj Podshivalov, the killings have dealt a serious blow to the large mafia cartels in the city but he said violent crime was bound to continue.
"It will be a while before the small-time crooks become as powerful or as feared as these big gangs once were," he said.
"However, all these murders and attempted murders that take place during the year will do little to change St Petersburg's overall crime situation."
