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The Moscow Times

I've been trying all day to confirm this little item that I saw this morning on a heretofore unknown (to me) web site called PrimeCrime.ru.

The web site details the legal tribulations faced by Russia's colorful crime bosses known as vory-v-zakone, or "thieves-in-law," a notorious fraternity that has its own behavior code, laws, courts, leaders, initiation rites and bitchin' tattoos.

According to PrimeCrime.ru, 30-year-old thief-in-law Dzhemal Mamoyan, known in the criminal underworld by the nickname "Jacko Tbilisi," was detained by Moscow police early in the morning on Feb. 27 on Ulitsa Udaltsova, near the Prospekt Vernadskogo metro station in western Moscow.

Police patted Jacko down, discovered 33.4 grams of hash on him and hauled him into the Prospekt Vernadskogo police precinct, the web site said. After the police report was written up, a couple of officers escorted Jacko to the bathroom.

After the officers left him alone in the bathroom to tend to his business, Jacko pulled out a pocket knife and, in an apparent crude attempt at Seppuku, jammed it into his abdomen, PrimeCrime.ru reported.

He was hospitalized at Moscow's Sklifisovsky clinic, where he is in stable condition.

Jacko Tbilisi is, unsurprisingly, a native of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. According to PrimeCrime, he was initiated into the thieves-in-law brotherhood last November, on the eve of Police Day, the nationwide holiday for Russia's Finest. He became a thief-in-law thanks to a personal recommendation from purported mafia don Aslan Usoyan, an ethnic Kurd also known as "Grandpa Khasan."

Attentive readers may recall that Grandpa Khasan was one of dozens of suspected crime bosses detained on a yacht on the Pirogovskoye Reservoir, several kilometers northeast of Moscow, in a dramatic July 2008 helicopter raid by police.

A city police spokeswoman said Monday she knew nothing of Jacko Tbilisi's supposed ritual suicide attempt, nor did a spokesman for the Moscow police's criminal investigations department, whose officers, PrimeCrime reported, detained Jacko.

Repeated calls to the Moscow police's western district branch went unanswered Monday.

For those of you interested in news on thieves-in-law, I highly recommend PrimeCrime.ru. Also, for a fun list of colorful thief-in-law nicknames, check out this old list of crime bosses from Compromat.ru.

A few of my favorites:

- Alexander "The Boar" Zagorodnikov

- Yevgeny "Zhenya the Asian" Dmitryev

- Yevgeny "The Pawn" Pershin

- Pavel "Bonzai" Romanov

- Soslanbek "The Mexican" Apayev

- Ruslan "Ruslan the Gray" Gulariya

- Rostan "Ronny-Boy" Iyubidze

And, finally, this guy from a recent PrimeCrime report:

- Gennady Romanov, a.k.a. "The Elephant" or "Chamomile". (The Moscow Times, 02.03.2009, Carl Schreck)

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