The Underworld Podcast - The Chechen Mafia Goes Global: Ramzan Kadyrov, Car Bombs, Guns-for-hire and The World's Weirdest Reality Show

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

The final show in our Chechen trilogy focuses on the republic's current gangster-in-chief, Ramzan Kadyrov, and his rise to become one of the world's most fearsome—but also bumbling—despots. Kadyrov has cozied up to Vladimir Putin, dispatched hired killers to quell dissent, empowered Chechen mafiosi and even launched his own film studio to create a North Korea-style cult of personality in the Caucasian state. And of course, there's football, boxing with Mike Tyson and Kadyrov's successful forays into MMA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Ambition comes in all shapes and size. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. February 18, 2001, famed Russian reporter and a Polikovskia travels on assignment to the Caucasian Republic of Chechnya. It's two years into Moscow's second war to subdue the embattled state,

and Polikovskia, who worked with the Crusader-Novina, has been a very important war to subdue the invalcitia, has been getting tip-offs about Russian war crimes, bodies in mass graves, torture, civilians starving and threesing to death, brutal, punitive raids on defenseless villages. The kind of information you need to verify in person. Polikovskir doesn't wait long to learn of the horrors. People thrown into shallow pits, defecating and growing sick and being tortured with electrical wire and planks. Prisoners missing fingernails and others dead from days in a flooded hole, the Russians call the bathtub.

Sexual abuse, a junior officer tells Polikovsky the Chechen women have, quote, nice butts, telling intern the Chechen men that they're being punished because, quote, your women wouldn't let us, well, I won't complete the quote. It's getting worse than grim on the front. It's horrifying. I heard dozens of harrowing accounts from people

who had been exposed to torture and maltreatment by Russian troops, stories so horrific that one's hand refurb. used to jot them down, writes Polikovskyer in The Guardian. And then, she adds, I myself was the victim. Minutes after leaving an officer who expresses his regret over the abuses, she's detained and held in a rutted field. Soldiers arrive, accuse her of being a Chechen rebel herself. Young officers say they're getting their orders directly from Vladimir Putin himself. They made it clear to me that freedom was over, she writes. From time to time, Polikovsky ads, the zealous young officers were joined by a senior officer, a lieutenant colonel with a

swarthy face and dark, stupid, bulging eyes. Every now and then, he sent the youngsters out of the tent, switched on what he thought to be romantic music, and hinted that if I behaved right, I could count on a, quote, favorable outcome. After three hours, Polikovsky is marched outside to be shot, a crawl mock execution. Then she's held in a bunker for days. You're one of the bandits, an FSB officer tells her. If you worked for us, you would get everything. But you came here to look at the pits. You're a bitch.

She's released soon after. Far from cowing her, the experience galvanises Polikovsky's energy against the Russian presidency, Putin, and, as vanquished Chechny and leaders give way to terror, guerrilla warfare, and, in his capital, Grozny, the Kremlin-backed Kadaov family. On October 5th, 2006, Polikovskia once again gets on a plane to the Caucasus to meet Ramzan Kadaov, son of slain dictator Ahmad Kadaov, in the Kadaov family's home village of Tensaroy. It's the younger Kadaov's 30th birthday, and he's already been groomed for his state's leadership by his father and Putin.

But Polikovskyer doesn't pull her punches. Tentroy is, she writes, one of the unsightliest states. of Chechen villages, unfriendly, ugly, and swarming with murderous-looking armed men. Polikovskyer calls the young track suit wearing despot in waiting a quote, Stalin of our times, a moniker sure to stink given the Stalinist purges that have, in part, created Chechnya's modern mafia state. It's an old story, she writes, repeated many times in our history. The Kremlin fosters a baby dragon, which then has to keep feeding to stop him from setting everything on fire. Katerov bites back.

Polikovskyer, he says, is a, quote, enemy of the Chechen people. She should have to answer for this. He too understands the language of Soviet-era brutality. Weeks later, Polikovsky is riding the elevator of her Moscow apartment when a gunman shoots her four times, once in the head, with a Soviet-era Makarov pistol. The significance of the date is lost on few of the thousands who march through Moscow protesting Polikovsky's murder. It is Vladimir Putin's birthday.

Welcome to the Underworld podcast. And welcome to the show whose co-host put in the hard yards to write shows, even if it's a public holiday and 80 degrees outside, or maybe I'm just projecting. I'm your host in Wellington, population 212,000 people in New Zealand, Sean Williams. And I'm joined by Danny Gold in New York City, population 8.5 million, which is more interesting. I'm writing this before the Rugby World Cup final, so go the All Blacks, I guess.

But it was very, very fun to see England getting beat in both rugby and cricket within 12 hours this weekend. And I just published a feature about Chinese pensions, which I'm not sure how that is better or worse. Anyway, how are you doing? I mean, you're cheering against England in cricket and rugby. It's just, I don't know, Couldn't be me, man.

Your hate for the homeland. But how am I doing? I mean, I'm here. You know, I'm recording with you. And there's nowhere else I'd rather be on a beautiful fall afternoon. Well, that's, let's bring that energy to this episode. We got a cool thing I did up in Auckland on the Patreon for subscribers. Thanks, guys, for being there.

I went up to interview this guy about his life in music, weed and cocaine transshipment prison and his pretty weird relationship with his brother who died recently. It's a nutty story. I've been meaning to write it down for years, but I really want to go back to it and you'll get a really good taste of it if you've got the Patreon. But if you can't afford that

or if you don't just fancy it, in which case, right. Then we've got a bunch of stuff on Instagram, YouTube, if you like and subscribe, you'd be doing us all the favor here. Speaking of Patreon, I reckon if we get another, what, like 20 or 30 subscribers

between now and the end of next month, I'm off to Papua New Guinea on assignment and I'll spend a week or I spend a day or two trying to meet armed rascal gangs in Port Moresby if you guys subscribe. So everyone has been absolutely trying to convince me not to do that, so I'll leave it down

to you guys. Yeah, basically everyone has told Sean, if you guys don't know about the rascal gangs, I think we did an episode on them, but they're also exceedingly violent and everyone has told Sean that if he does this, he will 100% get robbed. So I'm of course encouraging him, but all of your

new Patreon money and iTunes subscribers that you guys join up, your money's going to go to replacing everything that Sean loser so it's going it's going to a good cost. I just got rid of that 100 mil that I had him sitting around in my pocket so yeah I don't really have anything worth stealing but yeah I'll do

that I'll go and meet some guy with a homemade gun if you guys sign up to the Patreon anyway so I think it's a month after or month or six weeks after the second episode of this Chechen trilogy and finally we get to the conclusion and of course everyone's favorite pot-bellied

bushy bearded religious cellar gold machine gun wielding IGE influencer and all-round murderous psychopath, Ramzan Kateroff. I guess if there was ever an arched nemesis to our show's tagline, don't Instagram me crimes, it's this boy. And I'm not going to get too deep into Katerov's account in this show because it's about as well trod and ground as the five families. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't head over to our own brilliant account on Instagram or, of course, Twitter with both of us are defending the world against hordes of dummies on a daily basis, except only one of us actually has any followers. I would actually never advise

people to go on Twitter, even if it's to follow us. And even Instagram now, right, which used to be like my happy place, just full of like food and bikini picks and, you know, boots I wanted to buy. But now it's just overtaken by by activists. And I think, you know, I might just have to like get on Pinterest or something because I'm just, I can't do it anymore. Yeah, I was really up for seeing like pizza places around my neighborhood. But now I'm getting feeds of weird villages in New Zealand trying to show solidarity to Palestine. So yeah, keep going, guys. Anyway, first of all, if you haven't listened to our previous two shows on Chechen crime, you might be wondering what's going on a lot in this one. So if that's the case, stop, go back, listen to them, and then just keep everything

else on play so we get more money. But by way of a short catch-up, before we get to Kaderoth and Polikovsky's killing and political assassinations, drug wars, and of course, MMA, I'm going to take you all the way back to 1954 in the mountainous terrains of the northern Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic because that is where and when a hugely influential Chechen gangster by the name of Koz Ahmed Nukayev, I hope I've got that right, or Kozha to his pals, is born. I didn't get into his life in the previous show, but Koja might be the most influential Chechen gang leader of all time. And he's a conduit between the Soviet thieves-in-law and the Chechen mafia that came to dominate in the late 80s and the Chechen independence movement, wars and terror attacks that

characterize the republic later on. Again, if you don't know about that stuff, go back to part two. Where we get into that in a pretty deep way. So Koja is born in the Chui region of the Kyrgyz, I'm going to get all these names wrong, SSR, now the independent nation, of course, of Kyrgyzstan. It's the northernmost province and home to the capital Bishkek, and Kozschek, and Kozha grows up there as one of the hundreds of thousands of Chechens exiled by Stalin's purges during the war, what's commonly known as Operation Lenthal. That's just a terrible name. Like, aren't these things supposed to be named? Isn't it? I don't know, Operation Falcon, Tiger, Eagle, Sword and shit like that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Lendels are so nice. They go into such great curries. And now I've forever

got the idea of Stalin murdering hundreds of thousands of Chechens in my head. But I don't know, man, social media's got my mind on that. So I'm sure I'll just be thinking of dogs and cats in a minute. But anyway, he moves to Moscow in 1971. That's Koja. And he studies law at Moscow State University, one of the greatest buildings in the world. It's there that he has an epiphany as he tells the Dutch filmmakers Yostda Putter in the very, very good 1999 documentary The Making of an Empire, quote, my eyes were opened. When I saw the true face of Soviet reality, my worldview was turned upside down. That's when I became a rebel. I saw that if you have a communist government mafia and you want to fight it, then you need a structure like them. We had to collect money and create

a battalion of Chechens in Moscow. That is how we started. I guess there's a lot of references to some of the stuff you've done as well, right, with the Brighton Beach Mafia. It's like guys coming out of communism and making this crazy life of crime. But Kozsche doesn't really have the sort of enigma

of some of those other guys. Doesn't have the oratory style. But he's definitely dead-eyed and he definitely knows his way around a pistol. And this structure he creates, this is what's called Obshina. It's a Russian network of Chechens committed, loosely, to the liberation of their homeland, but it's also kind of a mafia and it becomes known as one,

and the foundation for the modern Chechen Mafia we've mentioned in episodes 1 and 2. By the late 80s, these gangsters plans to push out the other major clans of the Russian mafia largely succeeds, and they turn their focus back on Chechnya itself, again, as we've gotten into in the previous shows, forging ever-close tires between organized crime and the Chechen political and military resistance to Russian occupation. According to a review of the movie, the Russians, not surprisingly, regard New Kiev as a criminal, whereas most of the Chechens consider him a hero. Okay, wait for it, drumroll guys.

Modern day, Robin. I honestly didn't know that story traveled all the way to Grozny, but the R.H. Fortex knows no borders. Yeah, I mean, it's really something, right? It's up there with the idea of, like, gangsters getting involved in real estate, like, as real estate investors. It's just everywhere. Yeah. I think we could probably do a modern day Robin Hood t-shirt. It's pretty good. If you remember in our previous two shows, we get into the local concept of the Abrek,

which is similar to a Robin Hood, I guess, maybe like a, basically a noble rebel, a scoundrel, a criminal. Well, Chechen's no cozier as something a little different. It's called, and I'm going to completely ruin this phrase, my Chechen's well, Rusty, a jigatee, a traditional godfather-like character who looks after the village and vanquishes enemies as one guy in the film says quote good boys i might be wrong but this word appears to come from the caucasian term jigget which describes a skilled horseman or a brave person generally basically coming from turkic languages and you think related to the famous mongolian equestions who took over half the planet um anyway you're all for etymology on this show i know that

people like this guy in the movie they are backing kosher That's what you need to know anyway. And as communism begins to crumble, he's sitting pretty, he's very rich, and he's getting deep into the Chechen arms struggle against Russia. In 1991, however, authorities arrest all of the main leaders of the Chechen mob in Moscow, including him. Now, upon the outbreak of the Second Chechen War, that's in 1999, Koja moves around the Turkic Caucasus from Baku, out to Istanbul, and he gets more and more into hardline Islamism that's turned a generation of Czechos. Chechen guerrillas into al-Qaeda-backed child killers. See again the second episode and the harrowing

accounts from the 2004 school siege in Bezlan. Amid all this, Kozha allegedly sneaks back into Chechnya from abroad, but he's allegedly surrounded in the Dagestani mountains with other allies, and they wind up dead even though Kozha's own body is never recovered. Still to this day, he's known as the godfather of the Chechen mafia, and somebody whose life was bound up in this symbiosis between rebelhood and criminality. In 2003, with the Chechen leadership dead or in disarray, Ahmad Kaderov turns coat and becomes its Kremlin-backed leader, crushing opposition, and supporting the inclusion of Chechnya into the Russian Federation with massive kickbacks from Daddy Putin and the protection of Russian agents. Of course, that doesn't endear him to the thousands

who have been fighting a year's long dirty war for independence, and the following year, Kadaov is killed by a bomb blast at a Grodhny Stadium while he's watching soldiers on parade. It's later that very same day that Ramzan Kaderov aged as 27 whose interests include boxing, weightlifting, and just generally beating people up as a leader of his father's personal militia, is summoned to meet with Putin. I'll let Josh Yaffa recently on the show if you expect will you, Danny, take it from here in his 2016 New Yorker feature called Putin's Dragon. Quote, in the meeting with Putin, which was televised nationally, Kaderov's blue nylon tracksuit set him apart amid the Kremlin's pompous formality. Alexei Chesnikov, who worked in Putin's administration at the time, said that a bond

seemed to form between the two men that night. Quote, Putin thought of Kaderov the father as a person with whom he reached a particular political agreement. Their relations were honest and businesslike, but ultimately political, Chesnikov said. But he relates to the son with a certain wants. Where is Daredevil? I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next?

We're going to take this city back. In an all-new season, now streaming only on Disney Plus. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with that. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again, now streaming. Only on Disney Plus.

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And the winner, by knockout, is Padaday. With Putin's blessing, Kadov claimed the throne that had been granted to his father. No wonder then that when Katov does assume his father's title in 2007, he's already accustomed to taking whichever law exists in Chechnya into his own hands. And Chechens, once kings of the Russian underworld, get a rep as hired muscle and contract killers. In 2004, for example, Paul Klemnikov, the New York-born Russian editor of Forbes magazine, and we quoted in the last show about his work on Boris Berezovsky, he's gunned down in Moscow walking between his home and his office. He just published a less than flattering

book about none other than Kozha himself, and everybody points the fingers at his and Katerov's goons, but nobody's sentenced. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Like, obviously Karov can do whatever he wants in Chechnya, but having impunity, like all over Russia, right? In Moscow, I wonder if Putin ever kind of pushes back about stuff like that, obviously quietly. that's done so openly and it kind of makes him look weak or whether he just doesn't care about these people getting gun down or whatever headlines can come out of it. I think it helps him. I think it helps Putin a lot because, I mean, as we'll see with other sort of political assassinations, the idea that there's this kind of almost orc-like group of people who can just take you out any

minute and they've got the backing of Putin, that kind of keeps this, installs this fear basically in the Russian people. and it goes all the way up to today in Ukraine. But we'll get into that too. So the idea that he's impugn kind of helps everyone. It's pretty dark. Anyway, soon after this killing, Polikovsky, of course, she is shot dead in the Russian capital two.

Ten people are arrested, and Russia's chief prosecutor blames the Chechen mafia boss and rogue security officials. And the assassinations continue. In 2009, Kaderov's former bodyguard, his alleged torture at the hands of his former boss is shot dead in Vienna. Yeah, I mean, I assume you'll probably get to this because I think it happens a lot, right? But even now there's like Chechen dissidents, dodging assassins all over Europe. I don't remember exactly.

Oh, yeah. Maybe it was Scandinavia or the Baltics, but that video, that guy a few years back who got his Chechen dissent and he got attacked and he turned the tables and like beat his attacker with a hammer. You know what I'm talking about? Wow. I didn't come across that one. No. Yeah.

I was pitching a story a while ago about just, yeah, about finding all these Chechennavich. I had a connection with these Chechen dissidents in Europe who were like essentially dodging assassins. I like every corner. But yeah, it's wild. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. No, no, good. I mean, I had a similar thing. I think I'm going to mention that further down the show as well. But I mean, it's pretty nuts. Like that same year, a Chechen opposition politician is killed all the way in Dubai. I guess there are no laws in Dubai. Half a dozen prominent Chechens are shot dead in Turkey, where compatriot gangster has become increasingly active. In 2015, Chechensler, Boris Nemtsov, a vocal critic of Vladimir.

Emir Putin on a bridge opposite the Kremlin. I mean, that is nuts. And in August 2019, a former Chechen rebel named Zelin Khan Kangosvili, love the Georgian names, he's walking from his home through Berlin's Tiergarten Park to a mosque when a man approaches him and shoots him twice in the head before discarding a wig and running along one of the city's canals. A Russian named Vadim Krasikov is jailed for life and Germany expels to Russian diplomats over the death, prosecutor Lars Malikis tells the court that Vadim quote liquidated a political

opponent as an act of retaliation so that's kind of turning the tables a bit there's a Russian I think he was an FSB agent essentially doing the job or a GRU agent doing the job for the Chechens behalf of Kadaov so they're kind of working hand and glove now more recently

Chechen killers have been active on the battlefields of Ukraine with Kallov desperate to show his loyalty there to Vladimir Putin in fact until the recent killing of Yevgeny Pragojin, which you got into with Josh, I think what, two or three weeks ago, that was a great show. There's been a rivalry between Chechens under Kaderov and Progosin's Wagner military group, or mercenary group rather. Last year, the Russian gangster Grisha Moskowski warned that two new gangs were forming in the country, and it could prove disastrous to the

Kremlin, which, well, he wasn't kind of wrong. Quote, now two gangs are forming in Russia, two gangs. One gang is the Wagner's and the other gang is Kedorovs. Now there is a change of power in Russia who is a scoundrel and who will come to power. You know, by all accounts I've seen, the Chechens have sort of lost their mystique, I think, at least as war fighters, right? Then Ukrainians and their supporters, they all call them TikTok fighters because they film themselves, like recklessly shooting machine guns or firing grenades at apartment blocks without anyone there. And it just kind of looks like they're not actually getting anything done. And I don't know.

I've heard theories that, like, you know, Karav has taken them from these sort of proud guerrilla fighters into just these guys who haven't been tested in a long time and might have kind of forgotten the hard scrabble origin stories of what they've done. Yeah, for sure. I think that there's definitely a lot of truth in that. Like, IH. Fake it till you make it doesn't really work

when you're in, like, back mud or something. Yeah. But, yeah, I think that everything has basically coalesced around Kadaov and it's become a little, I guess, lazier in terms of sort of, sort of organized military stuff, but there's this long, long track record of hits. So we're going on to like contract killings now, carried out by Chechen gangsters who, it's alleged, are working on the orders of Ramzan Kederov himself, of course. But who is Kadarov the man?

Well, as you may have guessed, I mean, I can't do mass, but he's born in 1976. He's a former anti-Russian rebel, of course, before his dad's change of heart. He becomes de facto leader of Chechnya in 2005 and he takes over proper in 2007. And very quickly, of course, he cozes up to Putin even more than his father, which is useful on more than one front. By the middle of the 2010s, for example, the Kremlin is backing Kalarov's dictatorship to the tune of $1.6 billion a year as gas subsidies. The lot, same stuff you get in Transnistrate essentially. So according to a New York Times piece from 2016, quote, Moscow is propping up its most chinty regional leaders' habits at a huge cost to the taxpayer.

So in addition to getting on his knees and kissing Putin's shoes, Kalarov has to at least show he's trying to earn money beyond Instagram ads. Even Kaderof himself has admitted that his state wouldn't survive without Moscow's largesse. And Ramzan does this not only via brutality, which will return to soon, but by promoting a so-called path of Ahmad, this is a kind of duchet-style personality cult, where Kaderov Sr. is portrayed absolutely everywhere as a savior, not just of Chechnya, but of Russian unity. Ramzan goes in hard on promoting this Neo-C Chechen vision through culture, media, and sport,

writes O.C. Media, quote, on visiting any museum or cultural center in Chechnya, the visitor is greeted by the quote, without culture, there is no nation. This reminds the visitor that Ahmad Kaderof considered, quote, the main factor in the successful revival of the Republic to be raising the level of culture, as declared in the Republic's official histories. The most famous example of this, of course, is an intense program of sports washing.

Continues the OC article, quote, whether rubbing shoulders with athletes or sending his sons out into the ring, head of Chechnya and Ramzan Kadaov uses training and competitive sports to bolster his public image, construct a national identity that suits his aims, and secure the future of his regime. Now, to do this, Kadaov has something called the Ahmad Kadarov Regional Public Fund, a state charity that's essentially his own slush fund, and it helps him not only to build lavish complexes like Grogni's gigantic Ottoman-style mosque, but also to stage elaborate, PR events, such as football matches, MMA tournaments, or just birthday parties and other luxury events, which the likes of Mike Tyson, John Claude Van Dam, and weirdly Hillary Swank, I guess

she played a boxer once, right, have all attended. Public sector workers are expected to donate 10% of their earnings to the fund, which, of course, isn't taxed, and it's rumoured to bring the dictator between $50 and $70 million a year. And I think I got that figure from like 10 years ago as well, so it's probably a lot, lot more in today's cash. Kadaov has helped put the local Russian Premier League football team Terek Grozny on the map, handing at a 30,000 seat of stadium, elite players like Brazilian National Everton, Czech star Martin Yerenek, and a couple of Kadaov's nephews, one of whom only played a single game, of course, such a promising career cut tragically short.

Most notably the side gets Dutch legend Rude Hullet to manage, although he lasts less than a year. That was in 2011. Oh, and in 2017, the team was a team. is renamed. Yep, FC Ahmad Grodhny, still playing in the top league. Kadaof hasn't been busy sportswashing anywhere more than MMA, however. He's groomed some of the best fighters in UFC, and he's even created his own promotion, absolute championship, Ahmed, of course, which this year has announced plans to hold Grand Prix tournaments across a whole bunch of weight divisions with a total prize fund of 10 million bucks, and that's not nothing. And for Patreon subscribers, I spoke to the brilliant Karim Zedan of Bloody Elbow magazine.

I think it was back at the start of this year about MMA's queasy relationship with Kadaof's regime. So go and check that out because Karim is 100% the world's expert on this stuff. But the speed with which Chechny has churned out champion fighters and the breadth of Kadares' influence within the sport is pretty crazy. For his own gym called, yep, Akmad Fight Club, Kadaov has developed the likes of Magamad Ankalayev, Abdul Karim, Edelov, Albert Doreyev, Adlan,

Ahmadinev, Zubayetatat, Tu Kukov, Isabelnaudiev, and Magamad Biputov. I mean, that was just like, like your pronunciation scales. I mean, you could have gotten those all wrong, but it sounds, it sounds right to me, and your confidence is admirable. Seriously. Oh, my God.

Oh, thank you so much. Anyway, among the fighters to visit Kadarov, on the other hand. Here we go. again, former champions, Kabib Nirmagomadov, Kamaru Usman, Chris Wildman, Henry Cayudo, and Fabrizio Verdom. Of course, Fabrizio. He's one of the biggest celebrities in the game is Kadov, which doesn't say a lot for it. Yeah, you know, we got to give some respect right now to the OG Brian Gumble, who, have you ever seen that real sports PC for HBO a couple years ago where he...

No, no. I don't... I mean, I assume that's how they got Katov to... sit down for an interview, but they pretended they were doing one about his support for MMA. And like the growth of MMA. I'm not sure it was exactly that, but that's kind of how they got their way to get him to sit down with them in Chechnya.

And then Gumble started asking questions about repression of like LGBT, of gays being tortured and killed. Like it was balzy, man. And started and Ketarov just like froze. Like he didn't understand what was going on and like had no response. He was like

asking his like, what is this guy asking me about? But it was, I mean, it is a ballsy piece of journalism right there. Wow. I saw a piece for the BBC that was done a few years ago by Steve Rosenberg, of course, like brilliant rapport. And honestly, Kaderov is terrifying. When he like gets his teeth into an interview, he's really, really fucking scary. Not to Brian Gumble.

Not to Brian Gumble. Brian Gumble doesn't scare easily. No, man. Wow. Yeah, kudos. Anyway, of course, Katerov. he loves little more than to post videos of him boxing and fighting in Grodhny himself, including with Mike Tyson. Writes Bloody Elbow quote,

In sharing videos and images of himself training, Kadaov is pursuing two main aims, nation building by encouraging Chechen men to aspire to the ideal of virility that he wants to represent, and nation branding and sports washing, by projecting an image of a man in good health, strong and close to his people, and so offering an alternative image of Kaderov to the west, which I guess makes sense, but they weren't exactly known as sort of international pussies before.

Anyway, part of this has been to cement a sort of Miami aesthetic conservative Islam parading around and pimped out G-wagons and sports cars in Chechnya, Dubai, keeping big cats. Check out our show about that from the summer, if you haven't already, while lauding so-called traditional family values, subjugating women and banning alcohol. Did you coin? Yeah, yeah, I think I did actually.

Kadawuf himself is a Sufi, which if you know anything about religion, doesn't lend itself to conservatism. Anyway, he claims his 15-year-old son, Adam is Chechnya's youngest, Hafiz. That is somebody who's memorized and recited the entire Quran from cover to cover, something that takes most people years or even decades to perfect. I'm not saying he didn't do it, just saying he didn't do it. Last September, Adam Kaderof was filmed beating up an activist, who his claim had burned the Quran, quote, he beat him and he did the right thing, said Kaderov, elder.

Without exaggeration, yes, I am proud of Adam's actions, he said, adding that he respected the boy for acquiring, quote, adult ideals of honour, dignity and defence of his religion. That's beating the shit out of someone, in case you didn't know. A 2007 edict bans women from interstate buildings without a head. covering and Kadaof has continually tabled a local version of Sharia law, which Moscow, despite its fair share of religious wingnuts in power, has batted back citing secularism. I mean, if you go back to our first episode, Moscow is absolutely terrified of Islam, basically everywhere, especially

the Caucasian region. That hasn't stopped Kadaov, carrying out a pogrom of LGBT Chechens, which began in 2017 and continued in ways through 2018 and 2019. I read a particularly harrowing account in Time magazine from Armin Jabrilov in 2017, who is snatched from the Grosjny salon where he works, handcuffed and thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. Then these goons take his phone and scow through photos and contacts threatening to out him to his family all the way. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. As the time, journalist quote, Jabrilov says the violence escalated when he refuses to name other gay men. The men took out a black box that Jabriloff presumed was a lie detector, but it turned out to be a machine

that delivered electric shocks. They attached wires to his fingers and put water on his body to help the current travel more effectively. Quote, it's so painful, you're just screaming. That's all you could do, he says. Eventually, one of the men pulled out a gun, put it into Jabalov's mouth and threatened to kill him if he didn't give up names. At this moment, I myself died, he says.

Now, this pogrom affects dozens, if not hundreds of mostly men, and it's forced many into exile across Europe. Quite a few escaped to Berlin at the time, I remember, which if I'm being a tiny bit conspiratorial, I think plays into some of the other Chechen-organized crime. We're going to discuss in that country soon. But to close out this Chechen-Juche cult of personality thing, Kadaov has also turned attentions on film and TV. And the results have been, shall we say, a little less successful than grooming MMA fighters.

Here's the Moscow Times back in 2015. Quote, Ramzan Kadarov, the feared head of Russia's Republic of Chechnya, decided to make a movie. In Chechnya, that might seem like a far-fetched idea. Then, the Republic only had two movie theatres for a population of 1.4 million. There is no local filmmaking tradition whatsoever. So Kaderov turned to Bezlan Terekbaev. Soon, Terekbeyev's Chechen Film Studio, that's Chechen film, one word, like a crappy start-up name, had produced, Whoever doesn't understand will get it, an action movie

starring the Chechen Strongman himself. Now, I've watched the 33-second trailer, and you all should too. It's on the reading list. Dale, can you rip the music and play it here? It's awesome. It's on YouTube. Caddo off flanked by a bunch of tacticals in the mountains, firing a host of long-range weapons.

He's jogging very, very slowly, like late stage to go, like really late stage to go. Essential viewing, five stars, no notes whatsoever. It's awesome. Here's the Moscow times again, quote, the film has never been released publicly. That is a tragedy. But Katterov did publish a few clips to his famous Instagram account. One shows him surrounded my military vehicles firing a machine gun into the air.

Another depicts him meeting an actress dressed as Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth the second. We got to get that tape, man. We got to watch the whole thing. Yeah, like everyone was focused on the P-t tape, but no one ever speaks about the Kada-Rov tape. We'd need it. We need it. Anyway, it continues. Quote, Chechen Film would like to expand well, beyond the North Caucasus.

Quote, Our plan is to seize the world through cinema, said Teribayev. Okay. We're building our turnover and growing our muscles. In five years, the whole world will know Chechen film.

It will be releasing more films than any other Russian film studio. So I think 2021 came and went and I don't know about you, but I've not really heard of any more Chechen film movies. So, as you can guess, Grodhny Wood never really materialized.

Gajny Wood. Yeah, that's also one of mine. I need to like, T.M. this stuff. Anyway, in 2016, the year after this, Kadov tries his hand at Tully. And this actually goes a bit better. Here's the New York Times to introduce what must be one of the maddest TV shows of recent times. Quote, borrowing from Donald J. Trump's playbook, Mr. Kadov, the leader of Chechnya, is starring this fall in a reality TV competition called, quote, The Team, in a format that echoes the approach. The show that enhanced Mr. Trump's fame, Mr. Kadarov, is winnow in a group of 16 telegenic young Russians down to one who will become his assistant.

Yeah, it's like, you know, the reality show thing, stabbing someone in the back, except you literally stab them in the back, you know? Yeah. Got to be great to watch. I mean, like photocopying, like taking calls, and shooting distance out of the back. It's pretty nuts. Anyway, Kateroff addresses the show and can't help sounding like a total psychopath doing so. Quote, people believe my image that was created by the Liberals, that I am frightening, that I will kill whoever says anything about me, that I will put them in a dungeon and stab them, Mr. Caterallos says, steering his sports utility vehicle for a breathtaking landscape of jagged peaks. That's good journalism. Anyway, this continues. That was invented by enemies of the people, enemies of our state, who know that as long as I am in the Caucasus, the Western European Special Services,

will not manage to change the situation here, he says. That is why they want to make the Russian people have a bad attitude towards me. They want to make an enemy of the people out of me. On the contrary, people run to me. They hug me. I mean, I guess if you're stabbing their relatives in a dungeon, they probably would run and hug you as much as possible. Anyway, the show's name is Commander.

And I can't find the winner anywhere. So I really need you guys to kick into gear and let me know. Says the blurb quote, you will see how Chechen women lay out a table and how they observe traditions here. Contestants will have to prove every day and every hour that they can fulfill assigned tasks on time and accurately, be ready to work 24 hours a day, overcome any obstacles and bring to life the most interesting products, along with the team of the head of the republic. Sorry, that quote was terrible. Anyway, it basically sounds like a kind of Alabama the real world. Definitely would watch.

Dude, it sounds fucking terrifying. I mean, I bet if you got the mystery, Science of Earth 3,000 sort of gave it that element. It could make great dark comedy, but it sounds terrifying. Yeah, it really, really does. I mean, like, those quotes by him, he is some cold motherfucker. Okay, so his PR is, to quote the brilliant Janaro Gattuso. Sometimes may be good, sometimes maybe shit. But something he definitely is good at is using Chechnya's reputation as a feared,

Abrekfield, Republic of Noble Gangsters and Drug Lords to good effect. Remember Koja, who topped up the underworld charts in the late 1980s Moscow? As you know from the previous two shows on Chechnya, the Chechenya the Chechen Mafia moths and melds with the

independence movement. And while Kadarov seems to have leveraged it into his own personal militia, repressive regime, hit men and battalion of nutcases he sent to Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, he's also calcified the power of the mob. This is according to paper called traditional justice prospects for Chechnya, but I guess they're not too good.

Quote, Ramzan Kadaof must balance the desires of Moscow with those of powerful local backers. He has managed to continue a system of patronage established by his father, where illegal activity is tolerated, provided the government can filter a percentage of the profits, and the total level does not exceed what is tolerable to Moscow. In other words, Chechen gangsters can loot and smuggle all they want as long as they pay Kadaov, their gangster in chief is cut, and they don't disturb the fausty impact with Putin. The base of operations is, of course, Russia. And as I mentioned earlier, they capitalise on clout with other goons and real estate in Moscow.

But the Chechen mafia doesn't end there. These days, Chechen gangsters aren't just powerful in Russia, but deep into Western Europe, particularly Germany. And that's not too surprising when you see how big the Italian gangsters are there, too. There are some 150,000 Chechen expats living in the EU, most are apolitical, of course, but some pro-cala of elements have grown pretty powerful, especially in Germany. A few years ago, after the assassination of that former Chechen rebel, Zeline Khan Kangoshev, in Berlin's Moabit district,

I tried working a piece on a guy named Timur Deguzev, a member of the centre-right CDU, that's the German Tories, basically, a boxing promoter and a zealous charyovite. But yeah, what can I say? The media industry doesn't respect a good story. Yeah, it's probably a good thing you're in New Zealand when you did this little series instead of doing these episodes from Berlin. Yeah, I was slightly worried about that one.

He was pictured shaking Angela Merkel's hand as well. It's pretty fucking embarrassing. Anyway, Chechens have become a fixture of Berlin's clan crime, which we covered way back in like 2020 when we kicked this show off. In 2016, they detonate a car bomb in central Berlin, killing a drug dealer. According to a 2019, Der Spiegel report, German justice officials become increasingly worried about something they call the quote, North Caucasus organized crime structure.

Sorry, a lot of this might be wordy because I'm translating from the original, but it's basically the Chechen Mafia. It's focused on a biker gang-like group called Regime 95, which has members all over the north and east of Germany, which is the Germans way of saying former East Germany and Hamburg. In fact, as the Berliner Zeitem reports in 2020, Chechen and Arab clans have been fighting each other on the streets, escalating a gang war over the city's lucrative drug scene.

That year, a conflict is sparked by a fight outside of Shpiti, as a corner shop or a bodega, where members of the prominent Rhemo clan fought Chechens with fists, knives, and what else, hooker pipes, on a street just down from where I actually used to live in the district of Nykern. Writes the bit Zed, quote,

Police reportedly feel that Chechen criminals no longer act as henchmen for the criminal drug gangs, but has now built up their own criminal structures. Many gang members have combat experience from the two Chechen wars. They have also been known to be quick to take up firearms. The Politya are terrified of these guys. They're blowing cars up.

In 2018, police linked Chechen gangsters in Berlin to the financing of Islamist terror. In 2021, cops carry out raids on 20 properties a year into this turf war between the Remos and the Chechens. It's all pretty nuts. Writes the Konrad Adnau Stifton in December last year, quote, The tendency towards isolation that can be observed in parts of the Chechen communities is a growing challenge. The driving factor of this development is a survival strategy, reserved in some of these communities as a result of a series of collective experiences of persecution.

It continues, In the face of the growing isolation of significant parts of the Chechen communities in Germany, the riots of Salafist actors and Catarro's violent diaspora policy, both security policy and integration policy countermeasures are necessary. I am terribly sorry for the translation of that horrible Denglish. Anyway, in 2020, riots break out in the French city of, Dijon. Yeah, that's the mustard place. Where Chechen gangsters issue a social media quote

Call for Vengeance after an assault on a 16-year-old Chechen kid. They publish videos of armed hooded men and promised to sell scores with rival mobsters. God, European police are just useless, huh? Yep. I mean, the French don't actually do any police work and then, actually, in this case, is the same. They send military police in to quality unrest.

so it's either nothing or batons and shields. But many point the finger directly at Kaderov, who's keen to stir trouble in anywhere that's turning against Moscow and Putin. Similar to the way the Chechens use their gang ties to smuggle weapons and soldiers in during the wars against Russia, Kaderov now appears to use Chechens to scare the shit out of the EU, so discord and make sure nobody topples him at home. There's an interesting op-ed in Al Jazeera by Harold Chambers recently,

and it said that even if Kaderov dies, which has been predicted and even reported in recent months, nothing is going to really change. Not only has his eldest son named What Else, Ahmed, recently gone to meet Putin in what most believes is a symbolic clearing of the stage for his own accession, but, writes Chambers, while there is indeed a lot of personalisation of power in Chechnya, he alone does not represent the entirety of the regime. He sits atop the regime hierarchy, but he's not solely responsible for its function. There are a number of powerful men who manage various aspects of government. Chambers notes that the regime has grown increasingly repressive, even by Kaderov's lofty standards.

In September last year, after Moscow announced partial mobilization in Ukraine, Chechen women protested in Grodgni. Then they were rounded up, beaten and frog march to the city's mayor's office, and their male relatives were shipped out forcibly to the front lines. Last December, a fight between two Chechen officials was followed by a large-scale security campaign which detained any residents who'd seen and recorded the incident. Katov can wield the threat of conscription to Ukraine against anybody who defies him, and others have been exiled, tortured or summarily executed. I guess this would be why they're not really renowned in Ukraine.

Apparently some weapons caches from the war still exist out in the Chechen woods and mountains, but Kaderos regime has cracked down on weapons possession and gunsmiths. So you want good news? I guess you've got to go somewhere else. But that is Ramzan Kateroff for you. And there is the history of Chechen crime from ancient Abrax to modern murderers. You're here for the blood and misery, aren't you guys? Glutland Jalazites. Yeah, I mean, that was just an incredible series you've done, man. Three episodes right there. Something else. Amazing research, great writing. Way better stuff than stuff you hear from people who like have a team of 10 or 15. I mean, I don't even know.

But yeah, I feel like I know a lot about Chechny after the last three episodes of this. And you should too go out there and pretend you're an expert. You know, get involved on other people's social media. You know everything now. So don't hesitate to speak your mind with like 100% conviction. Even if it's some professor who studies this stuff, who cares. Sean did three episodes on this.

And if you listen to all of them, you know more than anyone else. What else? Patreon.com, the Underworld podcast, iTunes, subscriptions, YouTube, TikTok.

Yeah, Netflix. I don't even know. Do you think it actually matters like saying this stuff over and over and over? Do you think like somebody

maybe has heard like eight episodes but like they're like, it like finally clicks after I say it for like the third time? I think you got to do it once an episode, but do you think if like, is there any, I guess repetition where it's supposed to be a thing in advertising? I don't know,

man. Who knows? All right, guys. We'll see you next week. If you know the answer to these questions, please let us know.