Deadly Bonds: Five Years Inside the Ukrainian Mafia

(Hardback)

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Description

He thought the nightmare was over, but nearly twenty years later, the most terrible Mafioso in Ukraine was back.
This book is not just a memoir but a confession. In 1994, author Sergey Maidukov accepted an exciting business offer from Samvel Martirosyan, later renowned as one of the most brutal and indomitable leaders of the Ukrainian Mafia. Maidukov quickly discovered that his job as president of a newly created business was actually a front for Mafia activities. Despite regular attempts to extricate himself, he was told that it was too late in no uncertain terms. Thus ensued five adrenaline-fueled years in a long-term apprenticeship with the Mafia underground.
Deadly Bonds: Five Years Inside the Ukrainian Mafia provides a deep look at the Mafia family that dominated the twentieth century post-Soviet state and how it brewed conditions of economic, political, and moral catastrophe.

Reviews

The Russian Mafia may get all the attention, but as this vivid and lively account of a businessman who finds himself trapped in its coils, its Ukrainian counterpart was and is no less violent and entrepreneurial. One can only marvel that, having been caught between the gangsters and the SBU (Ukraine's Security Service), he lived to tell this tale, but he did, and it is very well worth reading. -- Mark Galeotti, PhD, historian and author, A Short History of Russia, We Need to Talk about Putin, and The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia
Deadly Bonds is one of the first books to chronicle the rise of organized crime in Ukraine. It brings the reader into the atmosphere which pervaded Ukraine and other former Soviet republics in the 1990s in the aftermath of the disintegration of the USSR, when organized crime controlled the economy, penetrated law enforcement, mingled with oligarchs, and corrupted politicians. Sergey Maidukov provides us with the background to the rise of the biggest and most powerful organized crime in the Donetsk region who captured Ukraine from the mid-2000s, precipitating a decade later in the Euromaidan popular uprising and war with Russia. -- Taras Kuzio, National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy

Author Bio

Sergey Maidukov is a Ukrainian writer who has sold tens of thousands of copies of his published books in the countries of the former USSR, such as Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and the Baltics. Widely recognized in Western Europe for his intimate knowledge of the criminal world, he worked for twenty-two years as a commissioned writer for the largest publishing houses in Ukraine. His first book for the Rowman & Littlefield, Life on the Run, received praise in the esteemed Kirkus Reviews, and Marcel H. Van Herpen, a security specialist in the post-Soviet states, endorsed it as well. Maidukovs political articles have been published in various US magazines, including Newsweek.