1) Roman Abramovich
He’s the current owner of the following
1) Chelsea Football Club
2) The world’s largest private yacht, the eclipse
3) Basically whatever else he wants.
Why’s that? Well because he’s worth over 13 billion USD dollars. Not rubles. USD.
How did he get it? Well it didn’t come easily or legally.
See he’s an orphan who grew up in Siberia. You know Siberia, the vast Russian tundra most famous for it’s gulags and terror inducing railroad. He lived in that wasteland until he was saved by military conscription. When an upward move is military conscription, you know you’ve had a rough childhood.
While in the military, Roman got his start in the criminal world selling stolen gasoline to his commanding officers on the cheap. Once out of the military, something called Perestroika took over Russia, and Roman began selling rubber ducks out of his apartment. Not a lie.
How do you go from the lucrative rubber duck trade to gangster billionaire?
Well, you get into the oil business. By that we mean, you start to steal oil from your government by bribing factory managers to sell you entire barrels for $1, then you resell those barrels on the open market for profit margins that would make heroin dealers suuuuper jealous.
Finally, for your piece de resistance, you befriend your countries president. Once you’ve done that, you can convince that President to make the following hilarious deal.
You’ll give your country a loan for $200 million USD, but if they default on that loan, which you all know they will, they owe you all the shares of a state owned company of your choice. That’s how you turn $200 million loan into $15 billion in assets virtually overnight.
That wasn’t enough for Roman though; he wanted to control the aluminum industry too, which he eventually did, at the expense of many plant managers, traders and journalists lives. The murders stopped when Roman finally got to the top. Weird huh?
He’s made a lot of enemies and maybe that’s why he rolls with two bulletproof Maybachs, a yacht AND plane with missile defense systems and a private 40 person army of former MOSSAD members. Like MC Hammer said. Well you know.
2. Griselda Blanco
The recently deceased Griselda Blanco was the original cocaine cowboy, but replace boy with girl. She grew up about on the streets of Colombia, which is a great way to earn your masters degree in Cocaine. She translated those experiences into a fortune selling cocaine in America. Like, A LOT, of cocaine.
How did she start? Well when she was 11, she kidnapped a young boy and held him for ransom.When the family refused to pay up, she just killed the kid.
She then ascended into a life of prostitution and petty counterfeiting in Medellin (yes Pablo Escobar’s Medellin) until the sweet smell of cocaine lured her in, as it does most.
By 1975 she was a defendant in the first major fed crackdown on cocaine smuggling in the States. But, somehow, despite being the focal point of the trial, she fled to Miami. Fleeing prosecution turned out to be a greatest decision she’d ever made because within an astonishingly short period of time, she’d become a cocaine billionaire.
How? She literally shot past the competition. When she came to Miami, 25% of corpses in Miami morgues were riddled with machine gunfire. The coroners office had to rent a reefer van from a local burger king to store the bodies because they were piling up so quickly. How good does a horse meat whopper sound right now?
Oh, she also named her son Michael Corleone, so she’s got great taste in movies.
3. Semion Mogilevech
Semion didn’t have quite as nasty an upbringing as the previous two. In fact, he’s actually been nicknamed “The Brain” because of the economics degree he earned as a young man in Ukraine. He’s put those lessons to use by landing himself on something called the FBI top ten most wanted list.
How’d he get there? Well, perhaps while spending time in jail, otherwise known as crime school, for petty theft, he decided to step his game up. He then “bought” deeds from a massive way of Russian Jews emigrating to Israel. He promised to send the money along once they’d entered Israel.
He definitely made use of that economics degree that time by realizing, hey, if I don’t send them anything, then I’ll make a great profit on these transactions. So that’s why he did. He fleeced millions of dollars from this plot and decided to keep on truckin.
He invested into industries that make banking look like God’s work.
Weapons and drug smuggling along with prostitution and gambling became Semion’s favorite past times. He bought an airline, you know, to smuggle heroin. Maybe his greatest feat however is, apparently according to U.S authorities, buying Hungary’s arms industry. We don’t mean he bought a few guns and a couple tanks. We mean, he bought Hungary’s ENTIRE arms industry.
How powerful has this made him? Well, an FBI agent told CNN that
“He has access to so much, including funding, including other criminal organizations, that he can, with a telephone call and order, affect the global economy,”
The cops finally picked him up in 2008, but guess what, when you’re friends with the President of the country you’re arrested in, charges tend to get dropped pretty quickly.
He’s currently on the loose. Or at this next guys palace getting shit faced.
4. Vladimir Putin
At the upper echelons of gangsterdom (which is a word we just coined) lays Vladimir Putin. Supreme Ruler (okay President) of Russia.
Official U.S memos label Vladimir Putin as the head of a virtual mafia state in which bribery alone is worth $300 BILLION USD.
How did he ascend to Russia’s top spot?
Born in Leningrad, when that still existed, to a factory foreman and his wife, he was recruited to become Russias version of James Bond. He then spent 17 years in the famous friendly KGB, before being handpicked by Boris Yelstin as his successor, thereby becoming the CEO of the Russian Mafia. How’s that for a business card.
Notable points on Mr. Putin.
Official government cables reveal that the Americans believe Putin was likely to have known about the operation to murder Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
NPR’s senior news analyst Daniel Schorr, a journalist, on the air said, Putin is a bigger dictator than even Kim Jong-Il of North Korea.
5. Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman Loera
He’s recently been declared “public enemy No. 1″ by the city of Chicago. The only other person ever officially designated public enemy No. 1 by the city of Chicago was some guy named Al Capone. The American Government itself has a $5 million bounty on his head, which is peanuts to him because he’s got an estimated net worth that places him neatly on the Forbes list between a swiss oil tycoon and the heir to the campbell soup fortune.
A spent his childhood selling oranges in a rural Mexican town before he “apprenticed” for “El Padrino” aka, THE Mexican drug lord at the time. He used those skills to start his own Cartel in 1980.
After being sentenced to jail in 1993, he escaped in 2001 by bribing prison guards to smuggle him out via laundry truck. In the aftermath of the escape, 71 prison officials were arrested for their involvement in a $5 million a month bribery scheme El Chapo ran in the prison which allowed him to maintain control of his cartel.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of all this is that he did it all with a 3rd grade education.
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