Statistics:

Vors per Capita

Ethnic Group Vors Pop (1989) Vors/100,000 Yezidis 26 152,717 17.02 Abkhazians 9 105,308 8.55 Georgians 242 3,981,045 6.08 Talish 1 21,602 4.63 Greeks 5 358,068 1.40 Ingush 3 237,438 1.26 Balkarians 1 85,126 1.17 Chechens 9 956,879 0.94 Armenians 30 4,623,232 0.65 Jews 7 1,378,344 0.51 Ossetians 3 597,998 0.50 Dargins 1 365,038 0.27 Azeris 16 6,770,403 0.24 Lezgins 1 466,006 0.21 Avars 1 600,989 0.17 Bashkirs 2 1,449,157 0.14 Moldovans 3 3,352,352 0.09 Kyrgyz 2 2,528,946 0.08 Tatars 4 6,648,760 0.06 Germans 1 2,038,603 0.05 Kazakhs 3 8,135,818 0.04 Russians 53 145,155,489 0.04 Ukrainians 6 44,186,006 0.01 Uzbeks 2 16,697,825 0.01 Belorussians 1 10,036,251 0.01 USSR (Total) 432 285,742,511 0.15

“Mafia is not a Russian word,” Vladimir Putin.

It would be more accurate to just call it the Eurasian Mafia. Or the Caucasian Mafia.

This includes the absolute top dogs:

Fast forwarding to the 21st century, some of the most prominent Russian mafia bosses of recent years were the Kurdish Aslan Usoyan (“Grandpa Hassan”), assassinated in January 2013 by a competing kingpin rumored to be either the Georgian Tariel Oniani or the Azeri Rovshan Janiev. In the US, they had their counterparts in the Evsey Agron and Boris Goldberg; the heavily Jewish nature of the Russian mafia in the US was made clear in the 2005 movie Lord of War.

Georgians are particularly well represented:

Georgia always had a disproportionately high number of crime bosses and still has a majority of the 700 or so still operating in the post-Soviet space and western Georgia (Kutaisi clan) is particularly well represented. … The Russian criminal subculture of the thieves-in-law disproportionately included ethnic Georgians. During the 1970s Brezhnev stagnation, corrupt officials increasingly turned to the criminal underworld to source black market supplies. However, the Thieves Code explicitly forbade cooperation of any kind with the authorities, and at a 1982 summit of thieves in Tbilisi, the secret society was split in two, with Georgian thieves favouring closer collaboration with officials while this motion was opposed by Slavic ‘purists’.

In this respect, the latest Deus Ex game was commendably accurate, in that its East European organized crime group was in fact highly Georgianized.