Russia | The Russian Mafia Is a Serious Threat to the United States

I The director of a small, lucrative Moscow real estate brokerage firm once explained to me why he avoided paying taxes. It wasn’t just the high rates, then approaching 40%, he said. What particularly worried him was the requirement to provide a statement of income to state bureaucrats, whom he feared would pass on the information to local Mafia lords. He knew what would happen then—a demand for an increase in the protection rate he was already paying to the same armed groups in order to remain alive in the city’s Wild West economy.

That was in 1993, less than a year after...

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