"Need to sniff around, ask people in the know who runs the neighborhood" refers to an establishment called "Lazania" on Pyatnitskaya Street in Moscow. In the early 1990s, this restaurant became known as the headquarters of one of the capital's most brutal and powerful crime groups — the Lazania OPG (organized crime group).
The Lazania organized crime group — Chechen in composition — emerged in the late 1980s amid the collapse of the USSR and the weakening of law enforcement. Its founders were Ruslan (Movladi) Atlangeriev and Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, both previously convicted of robbery and fraud. They quickly gathered a fighting core drawn from the Chechen diaspora and carved out a niche in the capital's shadow economy.
The group took its unofficial name from the restaurant «Lazania/LAZANIA», which served not just as a front but as a genuine center of decision-making. The establishment stood on Pyatnitskaya Street, in an area controlled by the "Lazania crew," and was well known as a gathering spot for criminal figures. One of the OPG's leaders, Mustafa Shidayev, even bought an apartment near the restaurant to stay close to the center of power.
Lazania (properly "lasagna") is a traditional Italian dish, layers of pasta interspersed with various fillings. The restaurant occupied a 19th-century mansion at 40 Pyatnitskaya Street. It had replaced a café-tearoom that sold baked goods from the famous factory-kitchen on Ostrovsky Street (Malaya Ordynka). In spring 1987, the USSR's first private restaurant, "Kropotkinskaya 36," opened, and "Lazania" on Pyatnitskaya opened almost immediately after — possibly among the first three cooperative restaurants in the country. The most interesting detail: although "Lazania" is considered the birthplace of the Chechen Lazania crime group, its actual owners were Moscow Assyrians.
In the early 1990s, the Lazania OPG became a key player in criminal Moscow. It controlled car dealerships, markets, casinos, restaurants, and commercial businesses, especially in the city's central and southwestern districts. The group was known for extreme brutality: in one 1988 episode alone, the "Lazania crew" raided the restaurant "Labyrinth," stabbing more than 15 rivals from the Baumanskaya group.
The Lazania OPG's allies included other Chechen crime clans, while its rivals included powerful Slavic groups, among them the Solntsevskaya, Lyuberetskaya, and Baumanskaya crews. Despite being seen as "new barbarians" by the traditional criminal world, they refused to recognize the authority of the "thieves-in-law." One of the most notorious incidents was an attempted armed clash with the group of Zakhary Kalashov (Shakro the Younger), which ended in bloodshed.
The OPG's leaders sought to legitimize part of their income and actively moved money abroad. Even so, a major 1990 operation by the Interior Ministry and KGB led to the arrest of much of the group's top tier, including Nukhaev and Atlangeriev. They were sentenced to eight years in prison for extortion.
The restaurant "Lazania" remains part of Moscow's criminal history — a symbol of a time when power on the capital's streets was divided not among state institutions, but among armed criminal groups. The novel's mention of a place like this immerses the reader in the atmosphere of 1993, a time when the line between business and crime was often barely visible.