Alexander 'Superkiller' Solonik

Alexander Solonik was a Russian gangster, known for his reputation as a notorious hitman in the Russian criminal underworld. Also known as Sasha-Macedonian and Superkiller, Solonik admitted to committing 43 contract murders and was involved in Russian Mob activity for much of the 1990s until disappearing after his third escape from prison. Solonik was found dead in Athens, Greece, in 1997.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
This podcast contains adult content. Some of the themes or
topics may include information on murder, kidnapping.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Torture, dismemberment, maybe some demonic content.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
With information on positions and paranormal activity. This podcast will
also include explicit, horrible, and foul, socially unacceptable, totally uninhibited
adult themes language. So if you're easily offended.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
If you're easily triggered.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Then I highly suggest you turn this off now, and
if not, just keep in mind parental discretion is advised.
Today we're going to be talking about Alexander Selonic sometimes
pronounced Solonica, who was a Russian gangster known for his

(01:00):
reputation as a notorious hit man in the Russian criminal underworld.
He was also known as Alexander Maximov, the Macedonian Sasha,
the Macedonian Sasha, the Great Killer, Number One, the Kurgan Rambo,
and most famously, he went by the Superkiller. Before we

(01:24):
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(02:06):
news besides that, so let's go ahead.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
And get on with the episode.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
All right. So Alexander Viktorovich Solonik was born October sixteenth,
nineteen sixty in Kurgan, Soviet Union. There are a lot
of things that are still kind of unclear about his life,
but here is what we do though. He came from
a regular working class family, just like any other kid

(02:44):
in that area at the time. As a teenager, he
really loved and got into sports, especially classic wrestling, guns
and sports shooting, and he was a very ambitious young man.
He was only about five foot five, which is one
hundred and sixty five centimeters tall, like almost all short men,

(03:08):
he had that problem to where he felt, you know,
he had to compensate. So this dude would fucking fight
anybody at any given time. He also grew up in
the same neighborhood as Andre Koligov, who would become one
of the leaders of the Kurgan criminal organization, and they
were friends growing up, and this is one of the

(03:30):
reasons Alexander had joined the group in the future. When
he finished school, he went to construction school and became
a welder, and then Salonik was conscripted into this Soviet army.
Different sources tell different stories about his time in the army.
Story one, which is the most likely story, is that

(03:52):
he was assigned to a tank regiment part of the
group of Soviet forces in Germany, and he became a
squad commander and commanded some tanks. He did a lot
of wrestling and shooting competitions while in the army. Story
number two is that he served in a special unit
of the Central Intelligence Department, which was attached to a

(04:13):
group of Soviet troops in East Germany. They were called
Little Red Devils and it was rumored that the Soviet
Union trained these guys specifically just to kill senior officials
in NATO countries. Story number three is that he served
in the sports company, where he proved himself as an
excellent athlete. He was great at cross country wrestling, but

(04:39):
he was really bad at shooting, which is really weird,
and that's why we don't really believe this story. Because
Alexander Salonik was a very good sports shooter when he
was a teenager, and as we're going to come to
find out, he also was in the future as well.
Alexander Salonik's former lawyer, Valeri Irishev, said, my client served

(05:02):
in Germany, but not in the Central Intelligence Department as
people think now. There was a group of special intelligence
officers trained near the territory of the military unit in
which Alexander Salonik served. He would watch those training programs
for a lot of time. He even became obsessed with
the idea of becoming a superman. He found something romantic

(05:25):
about it. So when he served in the army, he
made up his mind to become a cop. And apparently
he had gone a wall from the army, which is
one source. Others say that he was discharged after serving
his time, but either way, in nineteen eighty, after he
got out, he went to police school and he originally

(05:47):
served as a patrolman, and around this time he got
married and eventually had a daughter with his first wife,
and because of his good work at his job and
his qualities, he got a promotion very quickly and went
for training at the Gorkowsky Higher School of the Ministry
of Internal Affairs, and six months later he was fired.

(06:11):
And there are a few different stories about why he
was fired. Story number one says it's for discrediting the
rank of a police officer. Story number two says he
was dismissed due to his cruelty towards prisoners, and story
number three was that he had assaulted some women. And
we really don't know because the authorities probably didn't want

(06:35):
to make the story public, so they just got rid
of them. And they basically said it was for absenteeism
and skipping classes and immoral behavior because apparently he was
buying prostitutes and also fucking the boss's wife. So sometime

(06:55):
between nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty four him and his
first wife got a Of course, nineteen eighty four, he
got a job in private security with the police. They
were understaffed, and he still was really good at what
he did, and he ended up getting fired again because
he was leaving his post to chase women and go

(07:16):
out on dates. At about this time, his old friend
that he had grown up with, Andre Kohligov, he offered
him a job as a gravedigger in his hometown of Kurgan.
So he ends up going back to Kurgan and he
got a job as a grave digger at the Kirgan
Cemetery with Andre Kohligov and two other guys with names

(07:39):
that I don't think I can pronounce, so we're just
gonna skip over them. But these three guys in the
near future will become the leaders of the Kurgan criminal organization.
And believe it or not, it was really good money
being a grave digger because nobody wanted to do it.
So his status started changing noticeably. Around this time. He

(08:04):
buys a nice car, he starts dressing a lot better,
and he starts being seen with a lot of girls
of easy virtue. And that literally is what they put
in quotations. And I'm just gonna I'll state my sources
at the end of this episode, but I will tell
you right now, like I got most of my information

(08:24):
from Russian sources. A lot of that getting translated was
not the easiest thing I've ever done. This is actually
a super hard episode to research. But anyway, in nineteen
eighty seven, at about the age of twenty six twenty
seven years old, he got married for the second time
and had a son with his second wife, and then

(08:44):
in the fall of nineteen eighty seven, he is unexpectedly
arrested for suspicion of rape. The fairness of the court's
verdict is questioned by a lot of people and is
still questioned to this day, because they said that the
charges were fabricated by a cop whose wife was cheating

(09:07):
on him with Alexander Slonik. So basically, this cop went
and found a woman that Selonik had slept with in
the past, about six months prior, and he got her
to say that Selonik had raped her. And a lot
of people said the investigation didn't even prove his guilt,
and they took into consideration the fact that the victim

(09:29):
went to police several months after the alleged incident happened.
And they also point out that while the investigation was
going on into this, Salonik wasn't even in jail during this.
He was let out and just told not to leave
the area now. The cops said that on August nineteenth,

(09:50):
nineteen eighty seven, Slonik brought a girl named Elena to
his house and raped her three times that night, and
the next day she went to the and a case
was opened against him, and then all of a sudden,
two more victims appeared. One of the other victims said
he raped her seven times in one night and beat her,

(10:12):
and when he wasn't looking, she allegedly broke out a
window in his apartment and took off running. And like
I said, there are a lot of weird little things
going on with this whole case against him, and we'll
actually talk about him a little bit more in the future.
But in February of nineteen eighty eight, he appears in
court for the statements of the victims and legit. The

(10:35):
prosecution had nothing else. They had one victim that provided
a statement and that was it. There was no other
evidence against the guy. So Andrey Kohligov was one of
the witnesses at the trial. That's his friend, and he
testified that Selonik was innocent and said that Selonik was
with him and some other friends that night and no

(10:56):
women were even around. But it did not match. Alexander
Salonik was sentenced to eight years in a maximum security
correctional colony, and when the sentence was announced, he asked
for a last hug from his wife, and his wife
came in to see him, and this is when his

(11:16):
first escape happens, first escape of many. He realized he
had nothing to lose. He knew that if he went
to prison he would die, mainly because he was an
ex cop. And all of a sudden, he pushed the
guards away, he broke out a window in the meeting
room where he was with his wife, and he jumped

(11:36):
off the second story of the building and escaped. And
the cops really didn't even look for him that long.
They were just kind of like, well, you know, he escaped,
We looked for him for a little bit, but whatever.
So Alexander Salonik disappeared for about six weeks and he
had reached the Siberian city of Tmn, and this is

(11:59):
about one hundred twenty miles or one hundred and ninety
kilometers north of Kurgan. While he was there, he decided
to get rid of a mole on his face and
a crown like tattoo on his arm and while he's
in the plastic surgeon's office, he is arrested right there
in the office. So they gave him four more years

(12:20):
for escaping on top of his eight, and he started
serving his time in perm Former police officers are usually
sent to special colonies, but Alexander was sent to a
regular one, and at first he was in solitary confinement,
and this was to protect him from the other prisoners
because he had served in the army, he was a cop,

(12:42):
and he had a conviction for rape. All three of
these are like death sentences in a maximum security prison
in Russia. Eventually, he was later transferred to serve his
sentence with the other inmates in general population, and as
soon as the other prison found out who he was
and what he did, he was marked for death, and

(13:04):
they decided to test this dude's fighting abilities and pretty
much just beat him to death. According to all accounts,
this fight was a long fight, and it was a
brutal one, and it was Alexander Salonik against ten to
twelve well built prisoners, and most accounts did say that
he had a broomstick as a weapon and he won

(13:26):
the fight like he was beaten, really really bad, but
he did not die and ended up winning. And he
was in the hospital for a while after this, and
he ended up getting twenty stitches. I'm not sure where,
but that's what the sources say. Weirdly enough, after that,
the prisoners respected him and they just kind of left

(13:47):
him alone because he had took all of them on,
like he did not back down. It's fucking crazy, right,
and trust me, Like this dude's story just gets crazier
as we go. While he in prison, he was not
like the other prisoners there. He didn't smoke cigarettes, he
didn't do drugs, he didn't get tattoos. He kept away

(14:09):
from other prisoners who were always fighting with the guards
and didn't want to work or do anything like that.
He just separated himself from all of that. One of
the very few things that he did like to do
while he was in prison was workout. Eventually, he was
transferred to a different colony altogether, which was a minimum

(14:29):
security prison which wasn't guarded as well, and he ended
up building a really good relationship with the guards in
the minimum security prison, and in April of nineteen ninety,
after two years in prison, Selonik used that as an
opportunity and escaped again a prison dog and inquiry eventually

(14:52):
determined that Alexander Selonik escaped from a small air vent
hole in the industrial area of the prison and apparently
he had cut a hole with a welding torch. Some
sources say it was a sewer pipe, in that he
dug a hole about two meters deep, which is roughly
six and a half feet and after that he walked

(15:14):
for a little bit over half a mile, which is
about a kilometer, And it wasn't hard for him either,
because he wasn't a big guy. Again, he was only
like five foot five, so he could maneuver around these
little areas. And then he disappears for roughly four and
a half years until the massacre in Moscow Petrowsky Marketplace,

(15:38):
which we will get to here in a little bit.
Andrew Salonik makes his way back to his hometown of Kurrigan,
and the crime family there got him an apartment and
a fake identity right off the bat, and he became
an active member and somewhat of a leader of that
local organization as well. And because he needed money fast,

(16:02):
he started his work as a hit man. Now, according
to his own testimony, which he gave A lot later,
he committed his first serious crime as a member of
that group when the top dogs ordered him to kill
the leader of another criminal group known as the Issum.
I'm not sure if that's how it's pronounced, is isshim

(16:23):
So on July third, nineteen ninety, roughly six weeks after
his escape, the assassination took place in TMN, and another
source does say he didn't do any hits there and
the only trouble that he really got into while he
was there was a bar fight with another gangster. Either way.
After this hit, Salonik goes to Moscow with other members

(16:46):
of the Kurrigan group to seek more work because his
freedom is costing him a lot of money right now.
So he gets to Moscow and his main qualifications for
work as a hired killer are his military service, his
time in prison, outstanding physical health, and his shooting ability.

(17:07):
In Moscow is where he got the nickname Alexander the
Great or the Macedonian, because of his ability to shoot
in a Macedonian way, which is with two hands, accurately
and simultaneously. As it turned out, there were a lot
of people in Moscow who were willing to pay for
Salonic's talents, as so to speak, this price was upwards

(17:31):
of six figures. Sometimes he was in demand, and it
came at a really good time for Russia in this
period in the nineties, because the redistribution of property took
place at all levels at this time, there's outright criminals
that are just working really closely with serious businessmen. Because

(17:57):
of that, most people knew they were working together. So
high levels of law enforcement were also involved in all this.
They said that sometimes it was impossible to understand where
everything was according to the law and where everything was
according to concepts. In the news, every day you saw
reports of military operations, shootings, explosions, kidnappings, contract killings, murders, everything. Now,

(18:24):
just for reference, when we talk about a thief in law,
that is, by definition a thief with code in the
Soviet Union and the post Soviet States, it's a formal
and special status of criminal authority, a professional criminal who
follows certain criminal traditions and enjoys an elite position among

(18:45):
other members within organized crime and correctional facility environments, and
who has informal authority over lower status members. So essentially,
a thief in law is like a made guy in
the mind. Now at this point in time, the entire
country and Moscow in general is incomplete chaos. There are

(19:08):
killers for hire everywhere, and one source that is the
rbtch dot com Russia Beyond. It's a phenomenal source for
Russian history. During the nineties and especially nineteen nineties, Russian
gangsters they said you could hire somebody to kill anybody
you wanted for like five hundred dollars. Craziest shit. And

(19:30):
at that time Moscow, from nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety five,
the population was right around nine million. The highest level
of murders was registered in Moscow, which was more than
two thousand per year, along with ninety four thousand crimes
that were reported just in nineteen ninety five alone. The

(19:51):
first quarter of nineteen ninety four averaged eighty four murders
a day in the city of Moscow, and most of
these were were contract killings by criminal organizations. In total,
there were eighty seven thousand murders that year among nine
million people, and just for reference, nineteen ninety four in

(20:12):
New York City population was seven point three million and
the entire city was twenty two hundred. Murders that year.
That's how fucking wild nineteen nineties Russia and Moscow was.
It was legit like the wild West out there. So
in the winter of nineteen ninety two, Salonik assassinates Russian

(20:34):
thief in law Victor Nikiforov. On August tenth, nineteen ninety three,
he murders another important Russian mob boss, thief in law,
Valeri Dlugach. His nickname was Globos and he was from
the Bauman criminal group. Globus was shot in the heart
by a sniper rifle from forty four yards away, which

(20:58):
is about forty meters wild. He was walking out of
a crowded nightclub, surrounded by bodyguards and getting into his
armored car. January seventeenth, nineteen ninety four, Selonik eliminated Vladisov Vinner,
who was Globus's replacement, and he was killed the exact
same way. He was described in this time as being

(21:22):
very daring. He was very lively, He was a very
cheerful guy. He was still young. He had spent money easily,
and he knew how to please. So people who knew
him said that Selonik could easily spend several thousand dollars
if he wanted to try to impress a girl. These
women surrounded him constantly everywhere he went in everyday life, restaurants, vacations.

(21:48):
Selonik had a photo album that was just filled with
pictures of him with these extremely beautiful women that a
lot of them were considered models. Other one of his
hobbies was his passion for weapons. He could talk about
this ship for hours. He could talk about rate of fire, reliability,

(22:09):
combat range. He even bought himself a machine which would
probably been like a Miller Lathe to his Moscow apartment
and he put it in there so he could customize
weapons however he wanted them like, he did not fuck
her around. Those weapons are what made him famous. They
made him rich. They also made him a very feared man.

(22:33):
He was known to carry suitcases with him everywhere he went,
and these suitcases are filled with machine guns, pistols, rifles,
and optics for those rifles. At one point, m R
operatives that were following him and trying to bust him,
they raided one of his rented apartments and they found
an entire arsenal. From what one source said, he was

(22:58):
there when they came in, but he disappeared as soon
as they got there, and they said he looked like
an acrobat jumping from balcony to balcony because he just
went out the window and he's just like doing some
Jason Bourne type shit. But in this apartment they found trunks, bags, suitcases,
all filled with guns. All these weapons were delivered to

(23:21):
PETROFCA thirty eight, which I believe is a police precinct.
Not one hundred percent sure on that, but I think
it is. So someone who saw all of his stuff
said this, he occupied an entire office. Look at the
PG grenade launcher, the AKS seventy four U assault rifle,
the French long range rifle with a silencer, the Mosun rifle,

(23:45):
the TT pistols, and the Foreign R sixty one, which
was Salonik's favorite, seventeen round Austrian clock pistol. There's a
Tourus in there. Winchesters were in other trunks. The entire
MU r to look at them because they could not
believe it. And that was a freaking quote. Now, another

(24:06):
thing that they noticed is that each weapon was in
perfect condition. All of them were lubricated, all of them
were in excellent working condition. The man knew how to
take care of his stuff now. By this time in
nineteen ninety four, Selonik had become infamous among the criminal

(24:26):
organizations and law enforcement in Russia. Law enforcement was starting
to get pretty hot on his trail and they tried
to get him so many times, but Moscow police couldn't
stop the guy because, according to them, he had an
uncanny ability to disappear quickly and because he has all
this law enforcement after him. In the early spring of

(24:48):
nineteen ninety four, Selonik left for TMN again to talk
to a guy known as Mammoth or Memoth, and his
real name was Andrea Ruha, and he was the leader
of the most powerful criminal group in TMN. This group
was known as the Ten and Selonik spent a lot
of time talking to Mammoth and he was trying to

(25:11):
get paid for a debt that he was owed to
a Moscow bank, which was like one million dollars. He
needed this money fucking bad because he was trying to
get out of the country, trying to make sure he
could still evade law enforcement. And this debt of a
million dollars was owed to him, and it was owed
to him by a guy named Otari K, and I'm

(25:32):
calling him Otari K because his last name I can
not even pronounce it is ridiculous. So he has Mammoth
called Otari K, and he's trying to extort this money. Well,
Otari is one of the most powerful Russian mobsters as well,
And while Mammoth is on the phone with Otari and

(25:54):
trying to get this money, he's like, hey, Seloni's here.
He wants his million dollars that's owed to him, and
Otari had replied back, and Mammoth just looks at Selonik
and says, you're nobody here. So apparently Selonik was pissed
off enough that he killed him several weeks later as revenge.

(26:15):
On April fifth, Otari Kay was killed from a shot
from a sniper rifle, and only five days later, Mammoth
was killed in Timn, also by a sniper, but that
story of Slonik killing him is questioned. There are people
from a different crime family that were convicted in two

(26:35):
thousand and eight for Otari Kay's murder, but those people
were allies of the Kurgan group, which is who Selonik
belonged to. Otari might have been killed by an Orikavskaya
gang hit man known as Alexei. I can't even pronounce
his last name. They called him Laysia Soldot, which was

(26:58):
Leasia Soldier, so Alexi. He confessed to the crime when
he was captured in two thousand and six and eventually
got convicted for it. But it should be noted that Selonik,
after this, had returned back to Moscow shortly after Otari's murder,
and the Special Services recorded negotiations in a nightclub between

(27:23):
three Kurgan gangsters, which was Selonic and two leaders of
the TMN group who were opposed to the Ten. They
were enemies of the Ten. So there's a little bit
of muddy waters there. Some say Selonik didn't do it,
some say he did. But we do know that he
was caught on record under surveillance and recorded, and he

(27:46):
was hanging out with a group that hated, you know,
the Ten, which is the group that the two guys
he had killed were from. That brings us to October sixth,
nineteen ninety four, the day of the massacre. Lonick and
a fellow criminal were apprehended by Moscow police. They were
at the market with bosses of the family who were

(28:07):
there doing business. Him and this other guy were hanging
out by the cars and they were there as backup
in case anything went down. Now, the cops saw them
there and they thought that they were acting suspicious, kind
of hanging around, you know, not really doing shit. So
the cops stopped them for an ID check and he
tells the cops that his name is Maximov. And the

(28:31):
cops in the Petrowsky marketplace asked Salonik and his friend
to go to the police room, and of course they
didn't argue. They're like, all right, we'll go. We'll go
to the little police station here. The cops were really
relaxed with Selonik and this other dude because they said
he was just so calm and chill and confident that

(28:51):
they were like, well, we don't really think he's doing
anything wrong now because of the way he's holding himself.
But they did find out who he was and they
handcuffed him. Unfortunately, the police didn't search Slonik that well.
He was carrying a raincoat on his arm and he
had a glock seventeen underneath it, and in this point

(29:12):
in Alexander Salonik's life, he would rather die than go
back to prison, so he opens fire in the police room.
Another source said that his buddy was the one that
started the shooting, but either way, four policemen were hit
and Selonik goes to run outside, still in handcuffs. And
while running out of the market, Salonik shot two security

(29:35):
guards and one more police officer. So now he's getting
chased by even more cops and security guards. He climbs
over this fence and he was about to reach this
little metro station and a bullet finally got him and
he was seriously wounded in the kidney, but he kept

(29:55):
running away until he eventually got cornered, and witnesses at
this tra station said that he managed to hold back
the cops until he passed out from blood loss. And
here is the special report from the Moscow GUVD. It says,
during a shootout on the territory of the Tias Market

(30:16):
near the Petrovsko Razumovskaya metro station, a criminal who was
wounded in the back and identified himself as Maximov was detained.
During the operational search activities, it was possible to establish
that the detainee was a native of kurgan A. Selonik
wanted for committing the contract murder of a thief in law,

(30:38):
Valerry Delugach Globis. The arrest was preceded by a banal
document check. Later it turned out that Selonik and his
Kurgan accomplice Monin came to Tios to sort out some business.
Now Selonik's friend ended up escaping he got away. All
in all, six people died, Four of them were cops

(30:59):
to a more security guards. But what makes it crazy
is that police officers were astounded with how Alexander Sloonik
could shoot. They said his shooting ability was like nothing
they had ever seen. One other witness said that when
Selonik was running away from the cops, he fired his
gun over his shoulder three times, trying to kill an

(31:21):
officer who was hiding behind a cement pole. All three
of the bullets hit the pole in one spot the
size of an apple. And this is as he's running
away shooting over his shoulder. Pretty crazy shit. So after
he's caught, he is sent to Moscow to the uh
Metroskaya to Shina prison where he has an operation to

(31:45):
remove a bullet from his kidney. One source did say
that they took the entire kidney out. The cops who
detained Selonik said that they were one hundred percent that
he's going to die within a day because the wound
was super bad. He had lost so much blood. They
were like, he's gonna die within twenty four hours. And

(32:06):
he was actually pronounced dead in the hospital after the operation,
and he was being moved to the morgue, and the
doctor who was in charge of moving the bodies, he
was always taught to check for a pulse before they
put him in that fucking morg refrigerator drawer or whatever,

(32:27):
and he felt a fucking pulse and he found out
that Salonik was alive, and he ended up getting transferred
to the ICU instead of getting sealed up in the morgue.
So the day after his arrest he was reported dead
in the papers because technically he did die. He was
on his fucking way to the morgue. The homicide department

(32:48):
of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, this dude named
Vladimir Petukov. He says that we detained a killer, a
specialist in thieves in law. He has already confessed to
the most notorious murders Otari K Kleeina globis this has
never happened before. That was a quote from him. Now,

(33:11):
while Selonik is recovering here, he starts confessing to all
kinds of contract murders. He would even go to the
sites of the crimes and recreate the events of how
these people died. Selonik was confessing to every crime that
he knew about, which was forty three contract killings. He

(33:34):
was confessing to the ones that he had no part of,
just the ones that he knew about too, because he
wanted the FSB to investigate his case. This is actually
when he got the nickname Killer number one.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
Now.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
The FSB is an organization in Russia that takes care
of the security of the country. It is the organization
that came after the KGB relating to internal affairs inside
the country. Its main responsibilities are within the country. It
does counterintelligence, internal and border security, counter terrorism and surveillance.

(34:09):
It also investigates some other types of serious crimes. The
reason he's doing all this confessing and telling about all
these crimes and he wants the FSB to investigate his
case is because he knows that if he is transferred
from an FSB prison to a regular prison he is
going to die. There are inmates in any of those

(34:32):
prisons that were associates with Nikki faroff vennor Globis. He
has killed a lot of like mafia bosses, so alth
he's underlings, and all these people associated with these different families.
They want him dead along with law enforcement. So he's
confessing to all this shit so that he can stay

(34:53):
safe in an FSB prison. One of the reasons that
they don't think he committed a lot of these murders
because he didn't know the weapons that were used in
most of them, but he still knew exactly how they happened,
so he was very valuable and they did keep him
separated and safe while he's in prison. Right now, recovering,

(35:15):
he starts divorce proceedings from his second wife, and also
at this time, which is crazy, his lawyer finds out
that his original rape case was completely fabricated him and
Selonik wanted to go to court so that Selonik could
get his name cleared, because if he can get his
name cleared from those charges that put him in prison

(35:37):
in the first place, then basically a lot of the
other shit might be kind of an all and void.
I don't see how that is even a possibility after
he's admitted to forty three contract fucking murders at this
point in time, but Andre Koligov his friend from childhood.

(35:57):
At this point, Kologov is super huge, and if you remember,
he was an original witness that testified on behalf of
Selonik in the first trial. He said he would never
go to court for testimony ever again because of two reasons.
One Kologov himself had just had an investigation opened up
on him. Another reason is because Selonik's name is all

(36:22):
over the country right now, because this dude is just
wild as shit. He's all over the news across the
entire country. So Kologov is like, listen, our names cannot
be fucking seen. In the same sentence, this is not
gonna be good man. So Kologov gives Selonik's lawyer the

(36:44):
order to not ask him any more questions, meaning the
lawyer can't talk to Kologov anymore. And so the lawyer
goes back to Selonik to be like, hey, Kologov said, basically,
you're on your own, dude. He's not going to testify
in court because of all all the other shit that's
going on right now, and Selonic at this time, he's

(37:05):
already pissed because Valeri, his lawyer, wasn't visiting him as
much as he should have. He wasn't representing him the
way that Slonik thought he should. Now because Kologoff wouldn't
testify to help Selonik, that meant that the deal between
the prosecution and the defense was immediately terminated, which sucks

(37:28):
for Slonk. He's got all this other shit going on,
but I will say eventually, Selonik's lawyer did get the
absolute ship beat out of him by members of the
Kurgan group, probably because of that. So Selonik's recovering in
prison from his whole kidney thing taking the bullet, and
he keeps working out. He starts studying more foreign languages

(37:51):
and computers. He's just biting his time and he's learning
as much as he can while he's in there, and
he's essentially waiting for all of his friends on the
outside to break him out of prison. And that's exactly
what happens on June fifth, nineteen ninety five. Some sources
say July fifth, nineteen ninety five, eight months after his capture,

(38:13):
the thing is is the investigation into Slonic's confessions is
almost done. He knows that there's a trial coming real, real,
real soon. And while he's been in prison this eight months,
you know, he starts thinking about his life. He's like,
you know what, maybe I should just get the fuck
out of Russia, get a new identity, start over somewhere, whatever,

(38:36):
just quit this shit. So after a supposed forty three hits,
the contract killer kind of decides that he's just you know,
might be done with the mob. And keep in mind too,
he's also injured at this point, he's still recovering. One day,
Slonik asks for a catalog and he orders himself a
Versace suit, a shirt and tie, and glasses. And he

(38:59):
didn't even need he had twenty twenty vision, but he
thought glasses made him look more professional and impressive, which
you know, probably partially true. Shortly after that, he became
the only person to escape from Moscow's Mantraskaya to Shina
Penitentiary pre trial detention Center One. This place had alarms,

(39:21):
video cameras, bugs, listening devices everywhere. There's no square inch
of that prison that is unmonitored at any given time.
Selonik hid some clothes under his blanket to make the
guards think that he was sleeping, and one of the guards,
a guy named Sergei Menshikov, He supplied Selonik with a rope,

(39:41):
climbing gear and guns, and Menschikov took him to the
roof of the jail, where Selonik repelled down on a
rope and got into a BMW car that was waiting
for him there. His escape was supposedly funded by the
Russian mafia, so the late Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs

(40:01):
detective named Vladimir Tishke He explained off the record the
theoretical hype around climbing equipment and repelling from the roof
is nonsense. Both Selonik and the prison guard Menshikov, who
was helping him, calmly walked out through the vestibule of
the prison entrance. For that kind of money, they not

(40:22):
only open the doors, but can, if desired, to carry
them in their arms to the car. But this is
the official report from the criminal case. It says in
pre trial detention center I Prison Matroskeaya Tishina Selonik was
registered as prone to escape. He was kept in solitary

(40:44):
confinement cell number nine thirty eight of Special Block number nine.
When inspecting the floor of building number nine, Sergeant s
found the passage doors leading to the roof open. There
was a broken door lock on the floor on the
roof at the edge of the exercise yards, a cord
was found, the end of which about twenty meters long,

(41:05):
hung from the roof of the building along the outside
the pre Trial Detention Center one on Tashina Street. So
one thing we do know is that the guard Menshikov,
by himself could not have organized all this all right.
It is now known that Orikovski crime family, who were
the allies of the Kurrigan group, they allocated a million

(41:29):
dollars for Salonik's escape. Five hundred thousand dollars was spent
on safe houses and about two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars to the guard and helping him get out of
the country. Selonik knew he had pissed off a lot
of crime families at this point, and he fucking knew
too much. And they knew that if he decided to

(41:52):
talk at any given time, everybody is gonna be fucked.
And that's why the group paid so much to get
him out of They're like, listen, we'll pay a million
dollars to get him out of there so he can
be our worry and we know he's not gonna talk
or at least gonna turn us in or whatever. So

(42:12):
the government was also looking for Selonik. He knows that
if he gets caught, he's getting the death penalty for
killing the cops at that marketplace. So he is in
a really really bad spot right now, as which he
would be, as which he should be. I'm not trying
to glorify anything this guy is doing, obviously, but law

(42:35):
enforcement ended up blocking off train stations, airports, any exit
from the city that there was, and they even detained
people that looked like him, but his whereabouts were absolutely unknown.
Selonic does not have very many hiding places in Russia.
He's known to law enforcement, he's known to the general public.

(42:57):
So there ends up being an apartment rented him at
one point in the Vladimir region. And this is while
he's still he's still recovering from his wounds. Man taking
that bullet to the kidneys or having his kidney removed,
whichever source is correct, and his neighbors would eventually testify
that Kirgan leaders from the criminal group would come to

(43:21):
visit him at this apartment, and one of them was
an intelligence officer by the name of Alexander Litvinenko, which
if you do not know that name, look that up
real quick. I'll describe him here in a minute. But
Litvinenko actually helped put together the Kurgan crime family. Now

(43:42):
Litvinenko had died on November twenty third, two thousand and six.
He was a British naturalized Russian defector and former officer
of the Russian Federal Security Service which was the FSB,
who specialized in tackling organized crime. Now, at one point,
the Kurgan Brigade, which is what they were known as,

(44:05):
visited him with Litvinenko and they were asking for his
help with a businessman by the name of Andre Lukashev.
Lukashev was the general director of the Saint Petersburg company
called Socrates, and they traded in food products and the
company was doing really, really good. He was the director
and he wants to sell the company and move to Spain.

(44:27):
He's like, hey, I created a successful company. I'm going
to take my money go live my days off in Spain.
So one of the Kurgan guys wanted to buy this
company and he wanted to get it for a really
good price. And apparently Lukashev refused this guy's offer. And
we know that because the deal just never happened, because

(44:49):
on September twentieth, nineteen ninety six, Lukashev was shot in
Saint Petersburg. He did end up surviving. Now, after recovering,
the businessman went to Moscow with his wife and they
were going to finalize selling the business to someone else
and then leave for Spain. And this is when he dies.
Apparently Slonik saw him walking and basically it was a

(45:13):
drive by shooting in a Volkswagen. He had hit Lukashov
in the back and he fell down and then they
shot him more while he was on the ground. And
this car never even stopped, it never even came. They
just kept on going and witnesses called an ambulance and
some cops and got him to the hospital for surgery.

(45:35):
He died soon after he arrived at the hospital. So
we do know that Selonik had lived for some time
in Kiev after this. He was also seen in Spain,
Italy and Cyprus, and he was still seen around in
Moscow as well. Apparently he was seen a couple of
times in the State building, so they were looking for him,

(45:58):
but he didn't really hide. He had plastic surgery that
basically changed the shape of his face. And then more
and more stories start coming out in the press. For example,
it said that after his escape, Slonik allegedly moved to
his native Kirgan, where he lived for some time under
the protection of special forces, and only then, after waiting

(46:23):
to receive a Greek passport under the name Vladimir Kessov,
left for Athens, Greece. Now there are some questions we
have here. He had passport's IDs of an employee of
the military prosecutor's office and other fake documents. Where did
these come from? Who helped him? The Kurgan group rented

(46:45):
a villaforum in Athens and the guard Menschikov was with
him this entire time. And to be honest, the only
reason Menshikov is even probably alive right now is because
he's with Slonik. But how does a criminal group get
him ideas of an employee of the military prosecutor's office, Like,

(47:07):
that's crazy shit, right, So we're about at the halfway point.
I'm gonna stop play some commercials here for a minute,
and you can either hit the fast forward button, stop,
take a break, grab a beer. I will meet you
back here in a few so about four to six

(47:27):
weeks after his escape, he arrives in Greece. When he
gets to Greece, Alexander Salonik set up his own organization
of around fifty men. They were suspected of drug trafficking
and more contract killings. His reputation grew to legendary status
with the public, and he was featured in Russia's top

(47:49):
ten most wanted list. His mansion had a basketball court,
golf course, and a garden filled with sculptures. As luck
would have it, there were a lot of Russian girls
in Greece. They would go there from all over the
former USSR. They would work in nightclubs, cheap stores, and
according to a guy nam Kostia Grek, not a week

(48:13):
passed without another dancer or waitress appearing at Villa Salonica.
But Sasha was also a romantic. He was looking for
a princess. Around September October nineteen ninety six, people from
Moscow and the Kurgan group started going to see him
a lot. They were also members of the Orikovskaya group

(48:37):
and other allied groups as well going to visit him.
The Kurgan crime family had the whole place wired. They
were the one paying for this fucking mansion, so they
totally laced it with bugs everywhere, and they knew what
everyone was saying about everyone no matter where they were
in this place. Salonik's friends kept telling him that he

(49:00):
needs to leave because of all the shit that he knew,
like he was gonna eventually get killed. But selonic also
had no money at this time. The Kurgan group was
paying for everything and Selonik was in debt to them.
On top of that, a colonel in the ruof wanted
Slonik to die because one of the cops that was

(49:22):
killed in the marketplace shootout was a friend of his.
Selonik had bought some maps of some European countries at
this time, mainly Germany, Spain, and Italy, and he studied
them for a long time. His Greek passport gave him
free entry to almost any of these countries. There were
lots of recordings from the wiretaps about murders basically all

(49:46):
sides of all these criminal groups were working together to
get rid of Alexander Slonik. Most often Selonic would go
away to Italy. The Kurgan group would invite him there
and talk to him, and he was more than likely
doing some work there for him as well. He usually

(50:06):
returned back home to Greece in a good mood. Sometimes
he would throw a small friendly party while he was
drinking only expensive dry wine. Now, while he's taking these trips,
headlines would appear in the newspapers. For example, Chakra Senior
was killed in Germany, another major authority was killed in Italy.

(50:27):
I tried looking up some of this information.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
And I could not find anything.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
I'm not saying that the info isn't out there, but
it was hard enough finding Russian information on Alexander Salonik,
let alone diving into other countries and doing those translations
as well. So the big question is did he have
enough time for each one of these contract killings? Though,

(50:55):
because Selonik always prepared each operation painstakingly and carefully, he
was very meticulous. He would track each of his victims
for a very long period of time, and he would
try to collect as much information as possible about his target.
He would study the person's working day, their habits, their weaknesses.

(51:17):
Along with that in most cases he did not work alone.
Solonik had a certain cover and someone always was there
to back them up. Many of the operations were planned
by completely different people as well, and sometimes he would
receive an order and then it would get canceled, for example,
when he was ordered to kill otari K, but then

(51:38):
the hit was given to someone else at the last minute.
In November December nineteen ninety six, he went to Moscow
under somebody else's name, either at a presentation or in
a nightclub. Is when he first saw, apparently the woman
of his dreams. Her name was Svetlana Kotova. She was
known as Sveta. He had found out that she was

(52:01):
a fashion model for the Red Star agency. He ended
up getting her phone number because he wanted her bad
and according to neighbors, at this time, Selonik lived with
a woman named Natasha, who was considered his wife. She
worked in a fur shop in the center of Athens.
He often would come to pick her up after work

(52:21):
and give her expensive gifts, which earrings and rings, which
she would be shown off to her friends and shit
and journalists. Believe these neighbors were talking about the famous
fashion model Natalia Leona. She was also in Greece at
this time and surprisingly enough, allegedly returned to Russia in

(52:42):
a hurry after the death of Alexander Salonik, and in
later interview with Selonik's lawyer backs up what these journalists
said as well. Now, towards the end of January nineteen
ninety seven, Moscow fashion model multiple winner of pristin didigious
beauty contests, Svetlana Kotova arrived in Athens to go to

(53:05):
a beauty pageant in Italy. According to her relatives, Sveta,
as she was known, was promised a high paying job
and participation in advertising photo shoots by a certain Valera
who called from Greece and the Special Services knew that
Selonik was hiding under the name Valera. Sveta called home

(53:26):
several times and said that she had settled in the
suburbs of the capitol Langonisi, and this is where Selonik
had lived. At this point, it didn't matter because Selonik
he really didn't have much time left, police found out.
One of the last calls before she disappeared was made
by her to Slonik's villa. The night before he was killed,

(53:50):
Sveta called Moscow and said that she was leaving for
filming the next morning, and then she was not seen
for a while. After that. She completely did disappeared. Now
from the testimony of Laysia Soldier or Laysia Soldat, here's
what he said happened. That night we met Selonik in Greece.

(54:13):
A trusting relationship had developed between us. During the conversation,
Selonik told me about some of the crimes he had committed.
The murder of thief in law Callina, a murder with
a sniper rifle near the Globus Entertainment Center, an attempt
on Boban's life the authority of the rival Bamban group.
Bobon and his bodyguard Globin were shot in a jeep

(54:36):
when they arrived at the shooting range on a highway.
Selonik explained that after the arrest, he was placed in
a single cell and thought that he would die. He
didn't care, and he took upon himself everything that was
tried on to him. When he began to recover, he
became withdrawn and refused to give evidence. Apparently he had

(54:59):
been electing info on Slonik for a while on behalf
of a few different criminal groups. A bunch of different
crime families who also had surveillance in the villas, wanted
to take him out as well. His every single move
was tracked, and the villas where Salonik spent time, like
I said earlier, were full of bugs. The leaders knew

(55:22):
everything that Sasha the Great was doing, so from the
info on the criminal case, it is known that the
command for his death was given by the leaders of
the Empire, the mafia structure, which was one of the
organized crime groups, and it was given by two guys,

(55:42):
Sergei Butturin and Oleg Pilev. They did not like Alexander
Salonik at all. He was independent and knew too much
about too many things. And to be honest with you,
these two guys, looking back, probably should have been scared
of Sloni because later on, in the basement of one

(56:04):
of the villas he rented, Selonik had hung their pictures
of these two separate leaders in his basement, which was
adapted for a shooting range, and he was using them
as targets. So I'm pretty sure Selonik was planning on
taking these dudes out before they took him out. Now,
Butorin was a Russian gangster suspected of at least twenty murders.

(56:26):
He rose to power in the wild West of nineteen
nineties Russia. He would run protection rackets with the extremely
violent or Akovo gang, which they were allies with the
Kurgan group. His best known victim is known as Alexander's
superkiller Slonik. Facing a crackdown from authorities, but Tourin fled

(56:49):
the country. He got arrested for illegal weapons trafficking in
Spain in two thousand and one. He had allegedly undergone
plastic surgery and organized his own feuneral in Russia to
fake his own death. He was eventually sentenced to life
in prison by a Moscow court, And that was a
report from the Associated Press. Now, at this point, gangsters

(57:12):
are after Selonic. Special services are after Slonic. You have
cops that are after him. The FSB is after him.
As messed up as his sounds. It was easier for
the leaders of the empire to kill him because they
wanted him gone, and a lot of these law enforcement
agencies figured that the Russian mafia would get to him first,

(57:34):
So they're just kind of like, well, you know, we're
not really going to stop them, you know, if they
do go after him, or if they decide to go
after him sometime soon, because that's going to solve our problem.
But Alexander Salonik was not an easy person to get
a hold of. He was known as the superkiller for
a reason. He escaped from prison three times. Selonik knew

(57:57):
all these people were after him, but what could he
do about He understood the fact that the Russian mafia
wanted him dead, you know, there was nothing he could
do about that except try to kill them first. And
as a side fact, the murder of Selonik was actually
the starting point of the investigation into the Medvedkovsky family,
which it was kind of like a Rico case, like

(58:21):
the Rico Act type shit had never really been done
in USSR or in Russia before this, So he was
actually the guy who started that shit. That's kind of shitty.
Fuck him, right. So because of law enforcement and other
gangsters working against Selonik, they had started to get all
the info on Andrei Koligov as well as old childhood friend,

(58:45):
and they all realized that if Selonik was taken alive
by law enforcement, he would be able to talk and
he would probably bring down half a dozen crime families
just on his own from what he knew. And that's
why they sent Sasha a soldier or Lasia soldier and
a group of guys from Orokovski crime family to Greece

(59:08):
to kill Selonik because they were allies with the Kurgan
group and they were friendly with Slonik. He kind of
trusted them. They knew that they had to get there
first and kill him before the RUP or law enforcement
got to him. Now let's talk a little bit about
his death. So again, Selonik made a lot of enemies,
and on January thirty first, nineteen ninety seven, Russian hitman

(59:32):
and ex marine Alexander Gustavolov, who was known as Sasha Soldat,
he strangled Alexander Slonik to death in Slonix Villa. Selonik
had welcomed Soldat with open arms and started to talk
to him with his back turned to his buddy. Soldot
wrapped a thin cord around his neck and strangled him

(59:52):
to death. Soldot and his men from the Kurgan syndicate
killed Selonik's girlfriend too. They all most didn't kill him
that night because she was with him, but both of
them got offed. In two thousand and five, Pustavolov was
sentenced to twenty three years in prison for gang activity,
committing five murders and one attempted murder. In twenty sixteen,

(01:00:16):
he got twenty four more years for another murder. Investigators
believe that the Orikovo gang committed no less than fifty
murders and murder attempts in Moscow City, Moscow and Vladimir regions,
Greece and Ukraine. The most notorious hits include the murder
of the head of the Foundation for Social Support to Athletes,

(01:00:39):
who was Otari K in nineteen ninety four, the murder
in Greece of infamous hit man Alexander Salonik and his
girlfriends Vetlana Kotova, and the murder of major crimes police
investigator Yuri Kerez in nineteen ninety eight. So like, these
motherfuckers were no joke, dude, They would kill fucking any

(01:01:01):
And yes, I do realize that I keep going back
between Ourkowski and Orikovo. Depending on the publication and the translation,
there are a lot of words that are spelled differently,
and I did the best I could. It is what
it is, so I'm just reading it as the information

(01:01:21):
is presented, and some of the translations are a little
bit off. So on February second, nineteen ninety seven, is
when the entire world learned about the death of superkiller
Alexander Solonik. The Greek press reported that the dead body
of the head of the Russian mafia was found twenty
kilometers from Athens. Selonic died of choking, as usual. There

(01:01:45):
are several different versions that talk about how he died
and all that shit, But it's believed that someone called
the police and said that there was a dead body
of an unknown man found in that forest, and it
was said that the body was hidden in that bag
and police determined that the man was choked with an
electrical cord. Now, although he was wearing clothes, no identification

(01:02:10):
was found in the dead man's pockets. His fingerprints and
other data were put into the computer and because he
was on the federal wanted list, that's when they found
out that it was the man known as Kurgan Rambo
or Killer Number one. One news agency reported later that
the prison guard that helped him escape Sergei Menshikov that

(01:02:34):
his dead body was found in the Yaozer River, but
the next day the same news agency totally retracted that information.
Here's what the wire service report said. Selonik, thirty seven,
accused of murdering four Moscow policemen two years ago, was
found Sundays, strangled and wrapped in plastic bags twenty kilometers

(01:02:56):
north of Athens. Selonik, known as Sasha Makadonsky Alexander the
Great of Macedonia, because of his reputed skill with weapons,
has been accused of numerous contract killings of Russian criminal bosses.
A source in Russia's Interior Ministry said Tuesday, Selonik escaped

(01:03:16):
from Matraskaya Tishina prison while under investigation for his involvement
in a shooting at the Petrovsko market in nineteen ninety
five in which four policemen were killed. The escape was
set up by a guard sergeant, Sergei Menshikov, who was
still at large. Antenna, a private Athens television station, said

(01:03:39):
Selonik was connected to the KGB before the collapse of
the Soviet Union. Russian police denied reports that the body
found in Greece has already been identified positively as Alexander
Slonik by Russian experts. Mikhail Doronin of the Interior Ministry
Press Office said that so far Russian police are relying

(01:04:00):
only on information coming from Greece. He denied published reports
that a team of Russian police had gone to Greece
to conduct an investigation and said it was far too
early to comment on the exact cause of death. He
said the body will have to be brought to Russia
and be examined first. Interfacts reported that authorities could try

(01:04:23):
to identify the body by searching for a syringe that
was left in Slonik's body by a surgeon in nineteen
ninety five when the gunman's kidney was removed to save
him from a wound suffered in the Petrovsco shootout. Fucking
left a fucking syringe on them, could you imagine anyway?

(01:04:44):
Moscow Internal Affairs Department said that the story was a
little bit different. They said a plane from Frankfurt, Germany
landed in one of Moscow's airports. Greek citizen mister Kalindopolis
arrived on board that plane in Moscow. This person was
also known as Andrei Koligov, a leader of Kurgan based

(01:05:05):
criminal group. The police were waiting for him at the
mentioned airport and he was questioned and didn't say anything,
but they did find out that Koligov recently had a
meeting with Selonik in Athens. So a group of police
officers left for Athens right away. In the Greek airport,
the chief of the police group learned from a phone

(01:05:26):
conversation with Moscow that a parcel was waiting for them
at the nearest gas station. The parcel was found there.
It was opened the next day by Interpol agents. The
package contained the handmade map.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
Of some place.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
On the paper, written in Russian, it said you wanted Selonik,
go get them, And this is because Sasha Soldier was
told to draw a map of where his body was
for the RP. An international group of police officers arrived
at the place which was shown on the map, not
far from the Greek town of very Bobe. A police

(01:06:02):
officer who saw selonic before recognized his body. It just
so happened that Slonik had choked right after the police
officers left for Greece, and this was based on the
time of death after he died. Police found three villas
in Langanisi which were rented by Salonik and his people.
During a search, an AK forty seven assault rifle ammunition,

(01:06:26):
a bunch of money, bank checks, and fake identification were
found in one of them. So, because of all this information,
a lot of people are like, Okay, so what about
his fucking girlfriend Seveda? So her name didn't appear in
any police reports, it didn't appear on the news, and
there were people who reportedly saw her leaving the country,

(01:06:48):
but nobody knew where she went. Law enforcement at the
time said Seveda was one hundred percent alive, but was
probably very scared and therefore in hiding. So here are
some of the rumors about his death. So it was
rumored his double was actually killed in Greece and not him,

(01:07:10):
and they took into consideration the fact that his face
could not be recognized after he had plastic surgery, which
would make sense because if he was seen at the
one of the state buildings in Moscow and nobody had
arrested him or recognized him, then apparently the plastic surgery
might have been good or he had really, really really

(01:07:31):
good connections outside of the criminal organizations. It was also
said that Salonik's fingerprints in the Interpol data base were
not actually his fingerprints, but they were his doubles fingerprints.
So when they say that his body double was the
dead body that was found, yeah, if they run his fingerprints,

(01:07:53):
those are what's going to show up as him now.
Salonik's lawyer, Valeri Kryshev, who attended the police identification and burial,
said that the dead man had little similarity to his
former client. Selonik's mother, who identified the corpse as her
son's body, did not attend the funeral. The detective, who

(01:08:15):
knew more than others about Slonik's fate and his ins
and outs, discovered his body in Athens and organized the
examination to identify the body. This guy was an operative
of the Capitol's Rubop and his name was Andrea Saratov.
Oddly enough, he unexpectedly died in a car accident not

(01:08:37):
long after he was the one who identified the body. Now.
In the weeks after Slonic's body was found, when the
Greek authorities rated the villas belonging to Slonik's group, they
found arsenals of weapons. They also discovered that Slonik had
recently been hired to carry out a hit in Italy

(01:08:58):
before his death. And here is from the testimony of
a man known as the Liquidator, and he was Sasha soldier.
He says, let me explain that Peelev is the leader
and leader of the Medvedkovo or a cove group. It
was he who decided who should live and who should die.

(01:09:19):
Oleg Pilev explained that there would be work in Greece.
You need to go on a business trip and deal
with Selonk work with a rope. I understood that Pilev
meant the murder of Selonik by strangulation. I prepared the
cord for the electric iron in advance. In the evening,
Selonik came to us with a girl. Goosev seizing the

(01:09:42):
moment through Selonik face down on the floor, and I
put a cord around his neck and began to choke
him until he stopped showing signs of life. The girl
began to scream. They hit her, after which she lost consciousness.
Later I strangled her with my hands, and then on
the second floor in the bathroom, he dismembered the corpse

(01:10:03):
with a kitchen knife. Oddly enough, the body of the
young supermodel was found not far from Salonik's body in
a wooded suburb of Athens, and the killers, from what
they said in the newspaper article, did not stand on ceremony,
which meant it was a very disgraceful burial. They had
stuffed the remains into a suitcase and bag, after which

(01:10:27):
they just kind of threw it in a shallow grave,
and it was what it was, and her body was
actually found three months later. So they had combed this
particular area in search of stolen cars which were hidden
in various places by Albanian thieves, and they failed to
find anything unusual until a local resident called the police

(01:10:49):
after finding a rusty hunting rifle in the bushes. When
law enforcement went there, they noticed a suitcase peeking out
from under the ground. They thought that maybe some stray
dogs had dug it up, so the police opened it
and it was the headless torso of a woman with
no arms and no legs, and the shallow grave is

(01:11:11):
only about four feet deep one point five meters. They
removed the suitcase and head and limbs of the deceased
girl were carefully placed, and they found a bath towel
and the insides were wrapped in it, so they not
only cut off her arms, legs, and head, they also
took out her bowels and wrapped them in a bath towel.

(01:11:33):
A forensic doctor determined that the victim of unknown Fanatics
was about twenty years old, and despite the fact that
the corpse had been underground for about three months, criminologists
made attempts to take fingerprints from the deceased, and at
the same time, through Interpol, they requested from the Russian
police photographs of teeth, DNA and fingerprints of Svedlana Kotova.

(01:11:59):
This version was supported at least by the fact that
the corpse was found about one thousand feet or three
hundred meters from the Natasha villa and it was one
of three villas rented by Salonik and his people, and
the police saw a photograph of Svetlana which relatives handed
to Athens newspapers back in February, and consider that the

(01:12:21):
similarity with the one they dug.

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
Up was obvious.

Speaker 1 (01:12:26):
Soon after that, Sveda's parents were flown to Greece to
identify her body. Before we get into a little bit
more about Selonic, because we have this long testimony from
his lawyer that kind of describes who Salonik was and
how he was, and he was probably the person who
knew him the best. I want to say, We're gonna

(01:12:48):
go ahead and take another short break, just a minute
or two. We'll be right back here in a few
hit fast forward or see then. All right. So, since
wis the most reliable information about him is usually given
by those people who knew him personally. His lawyer, Valeri Karashev.

(01:13:11):
He wrote a book about some of the people that
he represented. The lawyer visited Greece and did conduct his
own many investigation there to find out what exactly happened,
and here is his story. I began working with Salonik
as a lawyer immediately after his delivery from the twentieth

(01:13:31):
City Hospital of the prison Compartment of Matraskaya to Shina
at the end of October nineteen ninety four. He conducted
all his affairs until his escape on July fifth, nineteen
ninety five. We met almost every day. We talked about
almost everything. He was in general an open person. I
believe that I was able to create a fairly detailed

(01:13:54):
psychological portrait of my client. He was very different from
all the other representatives of the criminal world with whom
I had to deal. He never drank alcohol, never smoked,
never took drugs. He was always ready to take risks,
but he always played it safe. But he had one
weakness women. He was a loving person and was very enthusiastic.

(01:14:17):
Recently before his arrest, he lived with the famous fashion
model Natasha. She waited for him, almost like the wife
of a decembrist. She wanted to become his full fledged wife,
although all of us, including Salonik, dissuaded her. At Natasha's insistence,
my colleague Alexei Z flew to tm AND to obtain

(01:14:38):
a divorce from our client's second wife. I didn't know
what happened between them after the escape, but they broke up.
Now Natasha is married to some businessman, and yet I
learned that his body was in a special police morgue.
I found an informal way to go into his room
with my interpreter and carefully examine the body. After plastic

(01:14:59):
surgery and a clipper haircut, it was really difficult to
recognize him, but the scars from a bullet wound in
his back and kidney surgery left no doubt it was
Alexander Slonik. After returning to Russia, I told his mother
about everything I saw. Until recently she worked as a nurse,
and Kurgan, having been issued a foreign passport, Valentina g

(01:15:21):
flew to Greece, took her son's body from the morgue
and buried him in the local cemetery. It must be
said that the question of whether killer number one was
really killed was of interest not only to law enforcement agencies,
but also to no less an extent to criminal structures.
Because a new redistribution of spheres of influence in Moscow

(01:15:43):
is now ripe Japp is under arrest in America, Mikas
is in a Geneva prison. Pasha died in La Fordevo.
Most of the biggest leaders have been neutralized. The main
sniper of the upcoming redistribution could be Selonic. It was
he who was able to dot the eyes. When I
started getting ready to go to Greece. Somehow some criminals

(01:16:06):
found out about this, and I received several calls asking
me to thoroughly understand this matter and provide them with
maximum information. Upon my return, to restore a complete picture
of his life in Greece, I tried through the Russian
community to find people with whom Selonik could have crossed paths. Here,
people from Russia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Georgia are called Pontic Greeks.

(01:16:33):
When widespread immigration to Greek began, all Pontic Greeks were
given citizenship without any problems and given Greek surnames. So
Selonik also left his passport was genuine, so through my translator,
also a Pontic Greek, I reached out to the Russian community.
I noticed that at first, at the mere mention of
the name Selonik, everybody literally shunned us. But gradually I

(01:16:57):
managed to establish contact with representatives of criminal structures, who
calmly enough said that they knew him, saw where he lived.
The paradox is that despite plastic surgery on the lower
part of the face and the strictest observance of secrecy,
Selonik did not always know how to keep his mouth shut.

(01:17:17):
There was some kind of fanfare in it. I went
to the Russian consulate. They diplomatically answered that since Selonik
was Greek according to his passport, it means that the
Russian authorities are not interfering in this matter. I contacted Interpol.
They confirmed that they were monitoring him, but they refused
to provide any information since I am a lawyer and

(01:17:39):
not a representative of the intelligence service. I remember, while
still in prison, during a meeting, Selonik unexpectedly blurted out
to a defendant from another building, a member of one
of the Moscow groups, that he was that same superkiller.
The news of this immediately spread throughout the prison, but

(01:18:00):
he could have been killed there since he initially confessed
to the murder of several authorities and thieves and laws.
Slonik had many blood relatives in Greece. He had a
passport in the name of Vladimir Kessov, and he often
posed as a Russian consul, but in fact many people
knew who he was. According to information received in a

(01:18:21):
private conversation from a representative of the Greek consulate shortly
before this incident, a local nightclub dancer, a Russian girl,
called the embassy and Selonik actually gave up. The embassy
immediately passed this information to the police. However, after my
numerous meetings with local law enforcement officers, I came to

(01:18:42):
the conclusion that the intelligence services knew about the presence
of the fugitive superkiller here from the very beginning. For example,
soon after his escape, Colonel Streleetski's people came here. Interpol
also had all the necessary information on this. Each of
these versions will be carefully examined in the book Selonic

(01:19:04):
Mafia Executioner, which I am preparing for publication together with
Moscow journalist Leonid Sharrow. While still in the pre trial
detention center, Sasha repeatedly told me about the possibility of
writing a book about him, and even wanted an action
packed action movie to be made based on its materials.

(01:19:26):
For some reason, he chose Nikita Mikhilkoff for the role
of director and invited me to begin relevant negotiations with him.
A certain amount had already been allocated for the book
and film, but the unexpected escape made significant adjustments to
our plans. Communication with Selonic and other criminal leaders strengthened

(01:19:46):
me in the idea that there is a secret organization
of special services that is engaged in the physical destruction
of criminal authorities. The fact is that according to today's
legal status of a thief in law law, he cannot
serve as a participant in any crime. He cannot kill,
he cannot rob, he cannot bear arms. As they say

(01:20:08):
in these circles, suit does not permit. He can only
be an organizer, an arbitrator, or a treasurer of the
common fund. In a word, it is almost impossible for
law enforcement agencies to get close to thieves in law
or authorities who often act only as ideologists of the
criminal world. In general, Greece is literally crammed with Russian mafiosi.

(01:20:33):
Some are on vacation, some are on the run, some
are for permanent residents because they have been cut off
in Russia. At the parties where our bandits gather in casinos, nightclubs, cafes,
mainly on Ammonium Square, I recognized many of my former
clients our brothers behave here quite peacefully and do not

(01:20:54):
carry out any serious showdowns. Despite this, Russian groups already
control several casinos, restaurants and even large stores in Greece
and Cyprus. Most of the Russian mafiosi soon after the
murder of Selonik quickly left the country. Everyone understood that
active investigation measures would follow, but luck smiled on me.

(01:21:18):
The fact is that literally on the second day after
my arrival, local newspapers reported that Selonik's lawyer had arrived
in Greece to clarify the circumstances of the Superkiller's death.
By the way, from the moment of my first visit
to the police station, I immediately realized that I was
under external surveillance. Two cars were constantly on my tail,

(01:21:41):
and the stompers were not even hiding. In one of
the cafes, a young man approached my translator and said,
which can give us some information on the issue that
interests us. The next day an appointment was made. It
turned out that the personal bodyguard of Killer number one
contacted me. He introduced himself as Kostya Grek and said

(01:22:03):
that he came from Russia five years ago. In July
nineteen ninety five, his acquaintances received an offer to be
a translator and at the same time a bodyguard for
a Russian businessman. At first, Kostya had no idea that
the businessman under his care was one of the most
dangerous criminals in Russia. Arriving in Greece, Selonik was at

(01:22:26):
first in complete inactivity. He was lying on a beach, swinging, swimming,
sunbathing in a word, he was resting. At first, he
often changed villas, but feeling safe, he settled for a
long time in one in the Athens area. In the
last months before his murder, Selonik had three rented villas
at once. There was no point in buying them since

(01:22:47):
he was constantly moving. The average cost of renting a
villa with a pool is from five to ten thousand
dollars a month. I visited all these houses and they
were not at all difficult to find. Slonik had a
Mitsubishi Piero jeep and it was a rather expensive toy.
In general, he was a real car enthusiast. At his request,

(01:23:09):
I often brought car catalogs and auto review magazines to prison.
He studied them with pleasure and could tell me for
hours about the advantages of this or that model. He
loved weapons just as passionately. Selonik was a great expert
in this area. Before his arrest, he rented two neighboring
apartments in Moscow, one of which was used entirely as

(01:23:32):
an armory. When Listyev's murder occurred, Selonik was in jail.
Despite this. On the same day, someone from a newly
created investigative team came to him and asked, isn't this
your work by any chance? Slonik says, of course mine.
I came out of the pre trial detention center, hit
the TV guy and came back. Okay, okay, Can you

(01:23:54):
tell me who did it? Selonik said, I can. This
was done by those people who have long been dead.
The fees of a killer of such a level of
Selonik sometimes amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Often
Alexander himself determined the price. After all, the costs of
ordering are always justified. When someone is killed, the commercial

(01:24:17):
structure that the deceased authority that was under the control
will most likely pass to those who ordered the murder.
Through his informants, Selonik found out what interests of commercial
structures were affected as a result of his action, what
economic effect his well aimed shot gave, and based on
the information collected, he adjusted the proposed amount. But sometimes,

(01:24:42):
as Sasha said, he worked not for money but for interests. Once,
while discussing a television series with a lawyer, he said,
this is all nonsense. If they filmed my life, it
would be a detective story. Only in the end they
would definitely kill me. Whooh fucking wild man. His death

(01:25:03):
is still shrouded in a little bit of mystery, and
there are about three versions left. First version is that
he was killed by people from the Secret Service, second
one is that he was eliminated by the Italian mafia,
and the third is it was ordered by Russian bandits.
All those people you know that he had killed from

(01:25:25):
different families that were made guys like, all of them
got together and fucking killed him. Costia grec his bodyguard
before he passed away. He says that he backs up
the Italian version because, according to him, Salonik was getting
ready to go to Italy for a planned hit on

(01:25:46):
a really, really big criminal figure. Believe it or not,
at this point in time, in the mid nineties early nineties,
there were Russians and all kinds of shit going on
in Italy. So consequently that until diligence services only have
access to illegal methods of putting pressure on leaders of
criminal community, contract killings, or artificially pitting one group against

(01:26:11):
the other. Now, meanwhile, Greek law enforcement agencies did disagree
with Kurashev's version, who was a Salonic's lawyer. They found
out that shortly before his death, Selonik attempted to kill
the godfather of his native Kurgan mafia, a guy by
the name of Astraan, in one of the northern Greek cities.

(01:26:36):
Despite the myth about a one hundred percent guarantee of
execution of any contract killings, this time luck was on
Astrian's side. He came out and actually did not die,
supposedly the only person that Salonik failed a mission on
after which, according to the police, he organized a conspiracy

(01:26:58):
against his former colleague, and the police suggested that Selonik's
murder was carried out by Sergei Kashlev, the right hand
of the leader of the Kurugan mafia. Now, according to
this version, his assistance in the wet case where Russian
mafiosi Jim and Dima, who immediately after the death of
the Superkiller together with Kashlev, they left Greece in a

(01:27:23):
hurry and never ever went there again. This again, is
just another version of whatever happened all in all, Alexander
Salonik probably took all his secrets to the grave. The
man known as Alexander the Great aka Superkiller, confessed to
assassinating forty three Russian mobsters in the nineteen nineties, but

(01:27:48):
he never ever, ever revealed who paid him to do
these hits. So when he was confessing for all these murders,
he never said one name about anybody who ever paid
him to do them. So, like I said, there's a
lot more questions going on than the answers. Unfortunately, you

(01:28:10):
know where did he learn to shoot like that? Was
it from his competition shooting in high school? In the army?
Who trained Saloni specifically? Who helped him out financially? We
know that the Kurgan group did he had all the weapons?
Who was taking him around in all these foreign cities
that he was going to? What was he doing on

(01:28:30):
all these foreign cities? And we will just never know.
So let's talk about some sources here, one of which
is the book by V. Larry Karashev, his lawyer. It's
called Notes of Abandoned Lawyer, The Backstage Life of the
Bratva Through the Eyes of the Mafia. Defender got another

(01:28:52):
article from Patrick Johnson October eight, two thousand and five,
The Hitman who Stalked Russia The Life and Death of
Russian Killer number one from January fourth, two thousand and
three from Pravda. Another article Alexander Salonik aka Macadonski and
this is from Comprompta dot ru that's a Russian source.

(01:29:14):
We have another article biography of Alexander Salonik criminal Authorities
thieves in law. This is from mzk one dot ru
that's a Russian site. We have another article the hitman
Who's stock Russia BBC from two thousand and six article
Alexander Salonik Time notote dot info article criminal Ukraine what

(01:29:38):
they don't talk about out loud from twenty nineteen article
is the killer Alexander Salonik Alive? That's from a Russian
source that I cannot fucking pronounce. Article Greek witness in
the Bykov case was taken to Krasna another Russian source.
I can't pronounce that word. Another article Russian of accused

(01:30:01):
cop killer reported found in Athens. Moscow Times, February fifth,
nineteen ninety seven. Book Russian Crime Who Is Who? And
they have a chapter on Alexander Salonik aka Macedonian Alexander Maximov,
Exmo Publishing House, nineteen ninety seven. Article Alexander Salonik the
cold blooded Russian hit man known as the Superkiller by

(01:30:24):
William DeLong from twenty eighteen, Alexander Litvinenko's book Blowing Up Russia,
and then a really good YouTube doc called Alexander Salonik
the Story of the Famous Killer. It's from the channel
called A Different Story. Everything is in Russian, so you
have to put on subtitles. Then you have to hit

(01:30:46):
the translation into English, and then you probably want to
slow down the video two point seventy five as opposed
to like full playback speed to catch a lot of
that stuff. So there is that, and holy shit, fucking
e finally done. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode.
I know it took a long time. I always make excuses.

(01:31:06):
What the fuck ever? This damn thing was harder than
I thought to research. But bays you can find me, dude.
Just go on any social media and type in mysterious Circumstances.
I am not hard to find at all. X at
podcast mc, Instagram, Mysterious Underscore podcast. I got email justin

(01:31:29):
dot mcpodcast at gmail dot com. I'm all over Facebook pages.
You can follow my personal Instagram if you want. It's
not hard to find either. Other than that. Yeah, I
hope you guys enjoyed and uh, it looks like from
voting in the polls, the next episode up is going
to be The Man in the Iron Mask. I do

(01:31:51):
have a couple interviews coming out as well. I gotta
edit one. I just recorded one last week with the
author of a book called Alcatraz Ghost Story. We had
an awesome conversation. It's about a criminal who was locked
up in Alcatraz actually, but he does share a couple
awesome stories about living in the Bay Area on Alcatraz
and stuff like that too. So until next time, I

(01:32:13):
will see you folks on the flip side.