The organised crime has changed markedly since the “troubled 90s”, but the essence of its activity has remained the same. Individual officials of different ranks maintain relations with members of the organised crime groups and even have joint businesses instead of fighting against them.
“Destroy them until they are gone”
In March 2021, the National Security Committee (KNB) reported on the special operation carried out to liquidate the organised crime group (OPG) “Zolotoye” in Nur-Sultan, Almaty, Pavlodar and Semei, which was involved in gold smuggling.
“The 16 detained members of the group are charged with kidnapping, extortion, attempted murder, theft of gold-containing raw materials at one of the enterprises in East Kazakhstan region and its smuggling outside the Republic of Kazakhstan, as well as the creation and running of a transnational crime group. The crime group consisted of current and former law enforcement officers,” according to the agency. Some of the detainees later complained of severe torture, and one of them committed suicide, according to the relatives.
In September of the same year, the group was identified in the Ministry of Agriculture, inspectors ensured the unhindered export of livestock abroad for monetary reward on a regular basis.
An interesting history is related to the customs station “Khorgos”, where, according to the 2013 official investigation, the crime group operated under the cover of high-ranking employees of the National Security Committee. The persons involved were arrested, as well as the so-called leader Talgat Kairbayev also known as “Auliye Talgat”. The media added that, for example, according to the testimony of colleagues, deputy chairman of the National Security Committee, Gosman Amrin, was also guilty, but there was no punishment or public investigation. Back then, he became head of the customs service, and now he is the deputy chairman of the state revenue committee. Amrin’s 2012 statement requesting immunity for the KNB officers, namely administrative detention, personal search and car searching, was ignored.
At various times, members of the KNB, akimats, ministries and colonies were accused of forming organised crime groups, and this is only a small part of what was revealed.
In the past, the leadership of the country, some of which is now suspected of creation of criminal schemes, stressed out that it “knows” that everyone knows where and what organised crime groups operate, but do nothing about it.
For example, in 2009, the then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev when discussing the increase of the penalty for creation of a crime group to 20 years (now the maximum term is 13 years) instructed to liquidate all organised crime groups by saying that he was aware of the police awareness.
“Organised crime groups are known to the police. I know that. Destroy them until they are gone! Otherwise, I will assume that you are connected with them,” the ex-president said at one of the meetings.
In 2019, the Department for Combating Organised Crime was dissolved. Back then, they said that it was created when there was an increase in crime rate, and now “there is no such need.”
When speaking about crime groups, many people think of crowned thieves and criminal kingpins wearing tattoos. Meanwhile, the kind of crime that we are used to has changed a lot. In Kazakhstan, according to experts, many criminal kingpins rent offices and wear classic jackets.
One of the researchers in the article “Characteristics of organised crime” called it a mixed form “at the intersection of common criminal, economic and corruption crime.”
“A particular part of gambling, commercial and entertainment business, prostitution, trafficking in persons, drugs and weapons are now controlled by criminals jointly with mala fide businessmen and corrupt officials of the state machinery,” according to the publication.
Human rights activist Evgeny Zhovtis calls it a fusion of the state and criminal sectors.
“Our organised crime gained an extra dimension in the 90s because back then there was, as we all remember, a transition from the state-planned soviet economy to the market economy based on private property,” the human rights activist said.
“This process was accompanied by privatisation,” Zhovtis said. “The key beneficiaries of this process in almost the entire Soviet space were the ruling elites at that time. These processes were clearly, to put it mildly, not very legal, if not quite lawless, and not very legitimate in terms of perception. And that’s when there was a certain fusion of crime and the authorities.”
According to him, fusion takes place once corruption becomes systemic.
“Corruption has become systemic in the post-Soviet space because those people who became rich in the early 90s had access to licensing, finance markets, capitals, banks and so on,” he said.
Evgeny Zhovtis recalls the crime of the 90s, mostly in the grassroots, when people were racketeering and wearing raspberry-red blazers, and emphasised that not all these people became law-abiding or were punished.
“Our organised crime has taken on very peculiar forms, it has remained in some criminal spheres such as trafficking in persons and drugs, but at the same time, it has become a part of both low-level crime and the bureaucracy, which has commercialised together with the security agencies and the legal system of power,” the human rights activist said.
“So, when we speak about organised crime groups or organised crime community, we imagine some lords, dons, godfathers and all that. In reality, we have almost nothing on the outside, everything is inside of the state machinery and the state system. And given the authoritarian system, it exists in the mode of protection of its assets, its status, where most of the assets emerged in the 90s. It controls the power, while some of its representatives in one way or another control the crime, especially at the regional level,” he said.
“Words of edification” from crowned thieves
There are also typical criminal kingpins in Kazakhstan, as well as known organised crime groups, which, according to official data, are not backed by officials.
One such criminal kingpin is Arman Dzhumageldiev, also known as Wild Arman. Many people learned about him after his participation in the multi-thousand protest held in Kazakhstan in January 2022. Now he and 14 members of his group are detained and charged with kidnappings, looting, destruction of property, assault against a police officer.
The biography of Wild Arman causes some kind of cognitive dissonance, it is a flamboyant pan-Turkic, an athlete with tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and at the same time a person with many violations of the Kazakh legislation.
His first known crime dates back to 2003. Then, 10 people, including Dzhumageldiev, attacked two men and shot one of them in the stomach. No punishment followed. In 2005, Wild Arman organised a mass affray in the hotel “Tourist”, which hosted the meeting of the opposition party “For a just Kazakhstan”, which was founded by parties DPK “Nastoyashchi Ak Zhol”, DVK and KPK. There, he tried to thrash presidential candidate Zharmakhan Tuiakbai, who was rescued by bodyguards. Wild Arman did not get the real punishment for that but only probation for “disorderly conduct”. In 2008, he clashed with businessman Tokhtar Tuleshov, who was called the “beer king”. Two friends of Wild Arman died during the clash. Later, Dzhumageldiev, who was found to be in possession of ammunition and drugs, was sentenced to three years in prison.
In 2011, at the age of 27, he moved to Turkey, joined the inner circle of the leader of Azerbaijani, Russian and Ukrainian organised crime group, crowned thief Nadir Salifov, known as Lotu Guli. Wild Arman was doing very well – he actively ran his social network account, travelled on yachts, photographed with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey, the President of the International Judo Federation, Kazakhstani singers, gave money to Kazakhstani boxers (Wild Arman is also linked with arrested nephew of Nazarbayev Kairat Satybaldy, who headed sport federations of Kazakhstan). When he was internationally wanted, he distributed medicines during the pandemic, and even received a certificate from the akim of Kerbulak district of Almaty region.
One can only guess what Wild Arman was involved in. For example, he is said to control smuggling across the border from Kazakhstan via Ural.
The discord in affairs can be tied to the murder of his patron thief Lotu Guli, when the media reported that Wild Arman lost his “protection”. Now the Instagram account fully dedicated to Dzhumageldiev publishes posts tagged “freearmandzhumageldiev”. One of the posts contains the statement signed by deputy of city maslikhat of Almaty Kairat Kudaibergen, where he wrote that he was under pressure from some officers “who wanted him to give false evidence.”
Key crowned thief Aitkali Maimushev, also known as Lekha Semipalatinsky or Lekha Maimysh, was arrested later. He emphasises that “crowned thief” is his name not the status every time he is arrested. He was given this name in the 90s. Like Wild Arman, he moved to Turkey, where they became close friends. One can tell about his biography for a long time as many things happened during his 63 years of his life, 20 of which he spent in prison.
“It was him who was one the originators of drug trafficking through Uralsk and Siberia. Also, the crowned thief organised deliveries of rolled metal products to China, which are sold there, and spirit is bought there instead and smuggled into the territory of the former CIS countries. The turnover of the criminal empire is huge. Lekha Maimysh never frittered away his energy. His interests can be tracked down in the gold and coal mining industries. We can say that Aitkali Maimushev is an oligarch of the criminal world of Kazakhstan because the crowned thief controls the supplies of Russian oil, among other things, and recently has begun an intervention into agribusiness,” according to the information published on the website “Criminal World” in 2018.
One of the most notorious deeds was the order given in 2004 to prisoners of several colonies to slash their wrists. They did so. This is how he supposedly supported his “authority”.
Recently, he has run a Facebook account, a YouTube account and even started his own website. The content he filled the platforms with concerned the interpretation of religious texts, for example, the Holy Scripture and the translation of the «Words of edification» by Abai Kunanbayev.
The arrest of Lekha Semipalatinsky is connected with the arrest of Wild Arman.
In Kazakhstan, there are two crowned thieves – members of the thief community, and the procedure of joining the community is called “crowning”. The second thief, Serik Dzhamanaev, known as Serik Golova, was sentenced in 2021 to 19 years in prison. He was accused of taking a hostage; acquiring or selling property known to be obtained by illegal means; intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm that resulted in the death of a person through negligence. Serik Golova also confessed to the murder of journalist Oralgaisha Omarshanova, who disappeared 14 years ago.
Crowned thieves, criminal kingpins are representatives of the huge criminal part of Kazakhstan, where it is not a problem to murder a person or systematically kill people for drug trafficking. And this part can be used as appropriate.
“Throwback to the 90s”
Human rights defenders, activists and community workers in Kazakhstan often claim that articles of the Criminal Code may be used by the authorities for their own purposes. Such articles, for example, include “incitement of social, national, tribal, racial, class or religious discord”, which can refer to many actions, and “creation and control of organised group, criminal organisation”.
For example, the akim of Atyrau region was accused of the latter after the riots in Zhanaozen in 2011 and the subsequent shooting of civilians. Akim of the region Bergei Ryskaliyev, who received political asylum, denies the accusations and calls the ex-president of Kazakhstan a “dictator”.
The protests of 2022, where, according to eyewitnesses, provocateurs operated, also involved these articles. Thus, organised crime group “Aishuak Zhantugel” was one of the twelve organised crime groups, which was accused by the General Prosecutor’s Office of participation in or organisation of protests. One year earlier, KNB had reported the arrest of all active members of the group. The public did not know anything, even the name of “Kazakhstanskiye” organised crime group, whose detention was widely broadcasted until the January events. Even the names of the leaders, spoken about by the government, are unknown. The only thing known is that group is composed of “former athletes and previously convicted”. Nothing is said about whether the arrested chairman of the KNB, Karim Massimov, has anything to do with these organised crime groups.
Given that the general public is calling for the most transparent investigation of the January events when civilians were killed, such broad statements are doubtful.
According to Evgeny Zhovtis, this is a reflection of the political intra-clan struggle.
“There have been so many people involved in criminal groups – the son-in-law of [ex] president, Mr. Aliyev, ex-akim of Almaty, i.e. a person who either moved to the opposition, or who does not have enough influence, or guarantees of security, which are guaranteed by the state for many years. Once your personal guarantees disappear for political or other reasons, you and your group, your business partners can easily be declared an organised crime group, respectively,” Zhovtis said.
The activist said that “both the judicial system and the security agencies are not as much guided by the law as by the political interest of those in power and those who believe that they are the state themselves”.
Evgeny Zhovtis sees the only way out of the situation, when some officials join crime groups, and an akim is willing to reward a criminal kingpin with a certificate, in the transition to the system of rule of law and democratic governance through the separation of powers, costs and balances, opposition, free media outlets and a strong civil society.
“But we always feel the throwback to the 90s in our country. Our problem is that the initial capitals of many families in the 90s, of many industrial financial groups and oligarchic clans were formed illegally. And that makes them badly vulnerable. Anyone who wants to doubt someone’s capital can easily do so, as practice shows,” he said.