A screenshot from Belarus One broadcast
MINSK, 20 November (BelTA) – How shell game artists appeared in Minsk in the early 1990s and where they operated have been covered by the film “Time chose us” aired by the TV channel Belarus One, BelTA has learned.
In Belarus during those years people from provinces, which were rapidly becoming poor, went to large cities seeking moneymaking opportunities. Local street thugs did the same. The latter rapidly joined organized crime and set up crews, who used various means to take money away from naive Soviet citizens.
Minsk’s first shell game artists operated outside the Elektronika store in Logoisky Trakt Street. They tricked passersby by inviting them to match sharp eyes against sleight-of-hand. One crew of criminals came from the Selkhozposelok area. They honed their muscles in a gym in the evenings and tricked “suckers” during daytime.
When the law banning street games of chance was passed and police was given the right to arrest shell game artists, this particular crew went to Poland. The crew specialized in robbery and blackmail and targeted citizens of the former Soviet Union. They used hammers to rob people as their stock-in-trade.
“Time generated them [shell game artists]. They were everywhere. So many people suffered at their hands… They were in every place with a lot of people. I simply cannot understand how people were fooled by them. By the way, they didn’t fear police much. They feared SWAT. When we came as a squad, we put everyone on the ground, separated the victims, and took the remaining crew to the nearest police station,” Aleksandr Barsukov, a member of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Belarus, recalled. He occupied various posts in SWAT units of the Belarusian Internal Affairs Ministry in the early 1990s.
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