- ST PETERSBURG -- Russian
police have uncovered an Oliver Twist-style training camp for teenage thieves
run by elderly criminals on a remote Siberian island which was once a haunt
of the playwright Anton Chekhov.
-
- The camp, on the island of Sakhalin near Japan, was masquerading
as an innocent Soviet-style holiday experience for young people, complete
with apparently wholesome camp fires, guitar strumming and improvement
"lessons".
-
- But the camp was anything but innocent. Police, who were
tipped off about the camp's existence by an anonymous phone call, found
dozens of trainee teenage thieves determined to make a successful life
in crime with a little help from a couple of modern-day Fagins.
-
- Thirty of the adolescents, who came from poor or broken
homes, already had criminal records but wanted to fine-tune their skills.
Police seized tents, dozens of field kitchens, a power generator and handwritten
crime manuals which covered burglary, robbery and swindling in elaborate
detail. One was dedicated to "dealing with the police" while
another was devoted to "winning over your cell-mates" once behind
bars.
-
- The camp was on the outskirts of an obscure town called
Uglegorsk and filled with "students" between 12 and 18.
-
- Two "teachers" with extensive criminal records
were instructing the camp's youths apparently for free in the hope of getting
a slice of the young thieves' takings later on.
-
- A police spokesman told the Russian service of the BBC:
"Thieves who ran the camp obviously wanted to pass their knowledge
on to the young: they were all close to retirement age, and in the Russian
tradition, the younger criminals always share their takings with the veterans.
-
- "Most of the students at the camp had chosen to
take the criminal route long before classes started, anyway - it was just
a matter of fine-tuning their skills." The criminal minds behind the
training camp had gone to extraordinary lengths to make it look like an
ordinary camping holiday.
-
- "They really put a lot of effort into making the
camp look as innocent as possible. And if you read the 'crime manuals'
these people distributed, you would not even blink an eyelid - they were
all written in the language of the underworld, in which usual Russian words
always have a second meaning."
-
- The authorities have said that they they were taken aback
at how well organised the camp was and have not ruled out finding similar
"schools" elsewhere in Russia.
-
- The island of Sakhalin must have seemed like a perfect
place to train tomorrow's generation of thieves. Sparsely populated with
only 700,000 people, it is about as far from the capital as you can get.
-
- The island has always been associated with crime, and
has consistently had much higher crime rates than the rest of Russia. When
Anton Chekhov visited the island in 1890, it housed a tsarist penal colony
of 10,000 convicts which the playwright described in great detail in his
book, unimaginatively named Sakhalin Island. In fact the island, despite
its natural beauty, seems dogged by misfortune.
-
- In 1983, the Soviet Union shot down the Korean civilian
airliner KAL-007 over the island, leading to a Cold War stand-off and in
1995 a massive earthquake erupted on Sakhalin, killing about 2,000 people.
-
- More recently, the oil giant Shell has become involved
in a consortium building a pipeline in the island's vicinity which has
infuriated environmentalists who claim it risks wiping out the last Asian
grey whales.
-
- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=544114
|