Before Red Mafiya ... before Pulp Fiction ... there was ... and we are happy to present to you...
Red Heat (1988)Red Heat is a 1988 buddy cop film directed by Walter Hill. The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Moscow narc Ivan Danko, and James Belushi, as Chicago detective Art Ridžić. Finding themselves on the same case, Danko and Ridžić work as partners to catch a cunning and deadly Soviet Georgian drug kingpin, Viktor Rostavili (Ed O'Ross), who also happens to be the killer of Danko's previous partner back in Soviet Russia. .....
On a serious note, the Soviet Union's original security agency Cheka and its numerous offsprings like GRU , GPU , NKVD/KGB and Spetsnaz were known for sponsoring and fostering similar self-financing loose cells inside and outside of Soviet block.
One of the early famous spectacular successes of Soviet counter-intelligence work was a long-running sting operation known as Operation Trust which snared many counter-revolutionaries, their exiled / expats financiers and foreign spies, including British agent Sidney Reilly, aka Ace of Spies (a prototype for Ian Fleming's James Bond).
There is a Polish movie (with English subtitles) which is well worth watching, about some GRU activities (specifically in Europe) Aquarium / Akwarium (1996), based on the book Inside the Aquarium by/about Vladimir Surokov, a sentenced to death in absentia defector from GRU to Britain. "Aquarium" is the code name for GRU HQ.
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CIRCA 2008---MORTGAGE CONS GOT ATL. CITY COMPS (27-member massive mortgage swindle)
NY POST, BRUCE GOLDING
EXCERPT Garri Zhigun and his cohorts were treated like kings in Atlantic City casinos, including the Borgata. The ringleaders of a massive mortgage scam got comped as high rollers in Atlantic City by gambling with more than $400,000 in cash that they swindled from slipshod sub-prime lenders tied to the current financial crisis.
Garri Zhigun, 31, and Aleksander "Shorty" Lipkin, 30, used their ill-gotten gains to score free rooms, drinks, meals and show tickets at the Tropicana and Borgata casinos, a law-enforcement source said.
The Brooklyn men took 29 trips to the plush gambling dens in 2005 and 2006, playing with cash conned from lenders like Countrywide and Washington Mutual - whose now-worthless subprime mortgages were a key cause of the stock-market meltdown.
MONEY-LAUNDERING An investigation of casino records revealed that Zhigun bought a total of $434,850 in chips and cashed out only $135,000, the source said. Zhigun apparently shared the chips with Lipkin, according to the source.
At the time of their betting binge, Zhigun was on supervised release after serving two years' prison for faking injury records in a long-running insurance scam involving staged car accidents that the feds broke up in 2001.
After getting sprung, Zhigun told probation officials that he was making only $400 a week as a "real-estate development researcher." But in reality, he was helping Lipkin run a crooked loan operation out of a Brooklyn-based brokerage owned by Zhigun's mom, Galina Zhigun.
SOURCE
http://www.nypost.com/seven/10202008/news/regionalnews/its_on_the_house_134417.htm