Quote: (07-11-2013 01:39 PM)BCZalgyris Wrote:
Sounds to me like you were messing with his gf/friend and he could have been connected to the local Mafia. See this video out of Russian Mafia
smack in the middle of Kiev (you'd think they'd be more careful as it's "another country"), notice how everyone just stairs in amazement and is making a point to walk around them....these are definitely people you don't want to mess with as an outsider.
They were not Russians judging by the number plates.
There are a lot of these types in Monaco and Nice. You see a lot of Rolls Royce's with Russian plates down there being driven by these big types but they tend to behave down there I think. I was with my daughter sitting by the beach on Cape Ferrat a year back and it was overlooked by a large villa. Standing on the terrace drinking were three or four Russian mafia types, bare chested and covered in prison tattoos. Again, if you don't get involved with their life they have no interest in you. It was completely different however on my first trip to the FSU in 1993. The lobby of my hotel in Kiev, the Bratislava, was full of tracksuit wearing thugs who would stare you down for no reason. For a very naive fresh out of private school English kid it was pretty unnerving to have to walk past them to get to the lift each day. Kiev really was pretty lawless back then and there were horror stories in the press all the time, it was extremely poor in a way hard to comprehend now. I remember being in the main railway station waiting hall and dead pigeons hanging from the broken ceiling fans, it was like the third world. The people however were incredibly nice. In my two months in Moscow on that trip I saw the then mafia at work a few times on the streets. There was a kiosk near my apartment that I saw smashed to bits and its owner beaten to a pulp by them probably for not paying his roof. I saw a Caucasian flower seller on Prospekt Mira have the beating of his life served to him one evening by the mafia types, it was pretty messed up. Fortunately things have progressed a little now and the mafia usually do their dirty work behind closed doors.