vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #162 / Crime watch / Reading article...

Anna Kazachenko’s tenant hadn’t been paying rent for a studio apartment in Academicheskaya, on the north end of Vladivostok, but in December he offered to leave the cash at an office in downtown Vladivostok.

Kazachenko dropped by a building on Mordovtseva, but the tenant wasn’t there. Instead, his friend and a bodyguard locked the door behind her and tortured her for hours.

The renter’s friend beat her, sliced her with a switchblade, smashed a bottle on the tabletop and tried to gouge her face. She shielded herself as best she could with her hands. He demanded that she sell the apartment for $5,000 – less than half its value.

“I kept screaming, but the street was right beneath us,” Kazachenko said. “Nobody could hear me.”

Kazachenko eventually escaped and was hospitalized, but police procrastinated acting on the case, she said. You want justice? they said. Go to the mafia.

Kazachenko’s is not an isolated case. Apartment-related crimes – stealing a home through violence or scams – are on the upswing in Vladivostok, where housing is hard to find and vulnerable victims abound, authorities say.

At least a dozen such crimes have been reported over the last year, including one case in which an old man was killed and six others lost their homes to apartment swindlers. But authorities suspect there are scores of additional cases in which the victims don’t go to the police.

“We suspect there are very many cases like this – people who were thrown out of their apartment and don’t go to the police,” said Yelena Parkhomenko, senior assistant to the krai prosecutor. “In this case, they were only caught because they were trying to burn the body of an invalid they killed when they kicked him out of his apartment.”

Getting someone out of an apartment might seem difficult, but swindlers work through a variety of methods. Often they prey on the elderly or alcoholics, whom courts and police tend not to believe. Swindlers will encourage a lonely old person to move in with a friend and rent out his apartment. But they get the apartment owner to sign over ownership, deceiving him into thinking he is merely subletting his home. And often he is thrown out into the streets.

And one gang specialized in befriending alcoholics, getting them to drink to oblivion and urging them to sign papers swapping apartments. The victim would end up “owning” a home already owned by somebody else.

“There are special gangs dealing with old people and bums,” said Andrei Shalonsky, a Vladivostok real estate agent.

Natalia Chagarova, a Vladivostok resident, said recently that her uncle was kidnapped in an apartment-related case last year. Someone asked her uncle to repair his car, but when he went out of his home, he was kidnapped instead. The swindlers took his passport and demanded that he sign over his apartment. Eventually he did so, in the company of several different notaries, who legalized the deal, Chagarova said. “Two months later my uncle came in in such an awful condition that he could not even speak or untie his shoes,” she said.

Police wouldn’t investigate the case when her uncle disappeared, saying he might be visiting friends, Chagarova said. When she got a prosecutor’s order for an investigation, police ignored it. And afterward, investigators said he had willingly signed the ownership papers.

“I asked him, ‘Why did you sign them?’” Chagarova said. “And he said, ‘I was scared.’”

More ominously, some police have been accused of taking part in apartment crimes, a practice dating back to Soviet times when officers were allowed to occupy some empty apartments they turned up, said Shalonsky, the real estate agent. “A case like that happened on my own floor,” he said.

In some cases, swindlers will rent an apartment for a month or two for a victim while selling his own apartment. And Leninsky District police recently arrested a swindler who had stolen 450,000 rubles ($75,000) from apartment owners in the past three years, the newspaper Novosty reported.

His victims were both the elderly and young people dreaming of moving to the country. In both cases, he showed off a country house, then got people to sign over their city apartments in exchange for the rural property.