The network included large number of crooked travel companies in Ukraine, allegedly controlled by the Russian mafia, said a Europol statement.
The powerful Russian mafia barons behind this booming illegal business lavish their money on flashy mansions in the region's capital, Dalnerechensk.
The men were both to provide intelligence to the Spanish prosecutor investigating Russian mafia links to the Kremlin and to Putin, he said.
The power and financial muscle has moved closer to the final consumer market, to the Mexican mobs who now control much distribution in the United States, and to the Russian mafia in Europe.
Stumbling across the ruthlessly macho, tribal underworld of the Russian mafia, Watts is forced to put her trust in one of the kingpin's henchmen, Viggo Mortensen -- but it's by no means clear where his true loyalties lie.
There are also the rumbling cases of the flamenco star who refutes charges that she money-laundered for her husband while he was mayor of Marbella, and another ex-mayor who says no he did not take cash off the Russian mafia.
Lawyer Ben Emmerson, acting for Litvinenko's widow Marina, told the hearing that Litvinenko was working for the British intelligence service MI6 and had been tasked by MI6 with working also for the Spanish intelligence service as it investigated Russian mafia activities in Spain.
Klebnikov was the first American reporter to be murdered in Russia, and with his silencing the world lost one of its foremost experts on the vast and murky crossroads of Russian organized crime, Kremlin politics, Chechen terrorists, billionaire oligarchs, and the spread of Russian mafia conglomerates around the world.
FORBES: Did Boris Berezovsky Kill Himself? More Compelling, Did He Kill Forbes Editor Paul Klebnikov
The ranks of the Russian mafia were swelled by such operatives after the USSR collapsed and those "power ministry" veterans who now populate virtually every key position in Putin's regime have found it expedient to use their erstwhile colleagues in the underworld as surrogates in wielding state power in "plausibly deniable" ways.
Malicious hackers wanting to try to identify and exploit flaws in the code in order to blackmail the company are another possibility. (Some reports said the attack originated in St Petersburg, and suggested that the Russian mafia may have been involved.) And there is always the chance that some 15-year-old whizz-kid did it all for fun or to impress his friends.
Born in Soviet Georgia in 1937, he received his first prison sentence in 1957 for resisting arrest and, during his third in the 1960s, became a "thief in law", a Russian term comparable to a Mafia "godfather".
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