Former top cop in Moscow is sentenced to 12 years in prison for accepting a mobster bribe

The Moscow City Court has sentenced Alexander Drymanov, the former director of the capital’s Investigative Committee branch, to 12 years in prison and fined him 196 million rubles ($2.5 million) for receiving $200,000 of a $1-million bribe from the gangster Zakhary Kalashov (better known as “Young Shakro”). Prosecutors had requested 16 years.

According to state investigators, Drymanov and several subordinates accepted the bribe in exchange for trying to release one of Kalashov’s compatriots, Andrey “the Italian” Kochuikov.

Maintaining his innocence, Drymanov complained during the trial that the FSB agents who searched his home mocked him during the raid, drinking his cognac and graffitiing the word “thief.” 

Drymanov’s accomplices in the bribery have also received long prison sentences. Alexey Kramarenko (the former head of the Moscow Investigative Committee’s Central Administrative Okrug branch) got 10 years and a 195-million-ruble fine, and Mikhail Maksimenko (the former head of the Investigative Committee’s Internal Security Division) was given more than a decade and fined 250 million rubles ($3.2 million)