Russian Organized Crime (ROC)The term "Russian Organized Crime" (ROC) refers to criminal groups from the 15 republics that made up the former Soviet Union. The ROC has existed for 20 years in the United States, but over the past five years law enforcement has observed a sharp increase in their criminal activities. Criminals from the former Soviet Union have created their networks in major cities and are emerging in some smaller cities as well. ROC groups are involved in murder, money laundering, extortion, car theft, weapons smuggling, drug trafficking, prostitution, currency counterfeiting, and a multitude of complex fraud schemes. In the United States the ROC evolved in Brighton Beach, New York, which at one point was a small Russian immigrant community. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet government liberalized its immigration policy which allowed its citizens to immigrate and travel freely. Approximately 200,000 Soviet citizens emigrated to the United States to escape the religious persecution they had suffered during the 70 years of communist rule. It was during this time that many Soviet criminals came to the United States under the guise of fleeing this religious oppression. Additionally, some U.S. government officials suspect that the KGB has emptied its prisons of hardened criminals, just as Cuban dictator Fidel Castro did during the raising of the Mariel ship in 1980. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many criminals and Russian criminal organizations crime figures fled to the United States. In 1992, Russian authorities alerted US law enforcement agencies to the arrival in New York of Vyatcheslav Ivankov, identified as the leader of the "Thieves in Law", who is a middle of paper.... . .9.Francis AJ Ianni, A Family Business, 1972.Thomas E. Dewey, Twenty Against Hell, 1974.Alan Block and William Chambliss, Organizing Crime, 1981.President's Commission on Organized Crime, The Impact: Organized Crime Today (Report to the President and the Attorney General), 1986.Stephen Fox, Blood and Power, 1989.G. Robert Blakey, “RICO: The Federal Experience (Criminal and Civil) and an Analysis of Attacks on the Statute,” in Handbook of Organized Crime in the United States (Robert J. Kelly et al., ed.), 1994. Michael Maltz, “Defining Organized Crime,” in Handbook of Organized Crime in the United States (Robert J. Kelly et al., ed.), 1994. Rufus Schatzberg and Robert J. Kelly, African-American Organized Crime, 1997. James B. Jacobs, Gotham Unbound, 1999. Robert J. Kelly, The Underworld and the Underworld, 1999.