If you own a BMW X5 or a Porsche Cayenne, you shouldn't park it in the streets of Berlin too often, because these fancy SUVs top the list from which the Russian mafia is "shopping" in Germany's capital. The criminals cruise the rich neighborhoods until they find their car of choice, then open, short-circuit and load it onto a truck -- in less than two minutes. Chances are the owners won't see their cars again.

"Such vehicles are brought into nearby body shops �� where they are tuned or taken apart completely," Bernd Finger, the head of the Berlin Criminal Office, said earlier this month in an interview with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. "From there they are taken to intermediate traders in Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia. And from there they are taken into the buyer's country, most often Russia or Asia."

Finger is Berlin's chief anti-mafia czar, and he raised eyebrows when he recently revealed that Berlin, along with London and New York, has turned into a hub for the Russian mafia.

"We're in the center between east and west," he told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. "You can get stolen goods to Poland within an hour, and the anonymity of a metropolis with 3.4 million people enables �� ethnic compartmentalization. The members stay among themselves, and thus undisturbed."

He later told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that Berlin in 2007 saw 68 organized crime cases with more than 1,000 individual crimes. Because of ongoing investigations, Finger didn't want to comment on how many members the Russian mafia has permanently stationed in Berlin.

Unlike the Mafia from Italy, Russian organized crime is not based on local or family structures, he said, but on professional strategic alliances that operate globally.

"It's all about making a lot of money very quickly," Finger said.

The organized car thefts are only the lowest in a three-tier structure the Russian mafia has established in Berlin, officials say. The Russian mafia's activities also include the middle league, such as prostitution or human trafficking, and the top league -- money laundering. Berlin for these crimes serves as an intermediate hub between Europe and the rest of the world, said Finger, who has also had to investigate targeted killings and racketeering.

So what do these guys look like? Big SUVs, tattoos, ordering several Dom Perignon bottles at once -- that holds true only for the midlevel gangsters, the henchmen, Finger said.

The really dangerous guys are eager not to make waves, and most often they are wearing expensive watches and business suits instead of gold chains and baggy pants.

"They work as economic experts in international companies, and move, in a matter of seconds, millions (of euros) that are tainted with the blood of the innocent. These are the guys we have to take care of."

The Berlin police also advise German politicians, because the Russian mafia in the past has tried to influence their decision-making.

"You won't believe it, but many politicians like to experience this sort of excitement that comes when you encounter the criminal milieu," he said, adding that organized crime is increasingly trying to influence how government money is spent.

Spending money the right way -- the German Police Union feels that has not happened when it comes to fighting organized crime.

"It doesn't seem to be the political wish to do more" against the mafia, Konrad Freiberg, head of the police union, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper a few days after the Finger interview. He said the German states needs to dish out more money to improve police equipment.

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