middle east oil + russian mafia?

I have a criminal justice professor who is a retired FBI agent. He mentioned in class that a big part of why oil prices get to be high is because parts of the russian mafia have the hands dug deep into it. I've tried finding info on it, but the only thing i can find is mentions of the russian mafia trying to buy out parts of Israels oil industry that support their military. Anyone ever hear anything about this?

Originally posted by ideophobia
I have a criminal justice professor who is a retired FBI agent. He mentioned in class that a big part of why oil prices get to be high is because parts of the russian mafia have the hands dug deep into it. I've tried finding info on it, but the only thing i can find is mentions of the russian mafia trying to buy out parts of Israels oil industry that support their military. Anyone ever hear anything about this?

Thats some nice propaganda and passing the black sheep to a known and demonized enemy!

Its far from the truth actually, and the truth is always near home then you think

I was able to find this:

We know how to deal with the Arab armies. We are stronger than they are. We can take care of them. We know how to deal with terrorism. But we do not know how to deal yet with this problem. It is a problem from within. The Russians have so much money that they could buy, and they have tried in the past to buy companies that the Israeli army uses. Gas and oil companies that are part of Israel's strategic military reserve.

Full article: www.fas.org...

And this:

Leaders of the Western democracies stood helplessly by as the Mafia tightened its grip over the distribution of profitable export commodities like aluminum and oil from Siberia.

One of them was Marat Balagula a college-educated black market profiteer from Odessa, who earned a fortune by evading state and federal excise taxes on gasoline by running his profits through dummy corporations on the East Coast. Balagula’s gasoline-tax scam, which made him millions of dollars by the mid-1980s, helped build the first successful alliance between the Russians and the Italian Mafia of New York.

Over the next few years, the FBI monitored 12 Russian Mafia gangs in New York City and Brooklyn. Greater numbers of immigrant Russians live in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, where local gangsters belonging to the Odessa Mafia and Malina Organizatsia carried out acts of extortion, arson, murder, burglary, fuel tax fraud and narcotics trafficking primarily aimed at neighborhood residents.

Whole article: www.search-international.com...

Areas of influence (Also taken from above article)

Tatarstan-

Oil to Serbia

I hope that helps abit.