Rostov legends about the Tolstoypyat brothers. Once upon a time in the USSR

The case of the Tolstopyatov brothers (Fantomas)

The case of the Tolstopyatov brothers was considered by the Rostov Regional Court in 1974. It occupies a special place in the history of Russian crime. For almost two decades, there were no criminal cases of banditry in the Soviet Union - it was believed that the last gangs were defeated and banditry in the country had no class or any other roots. It is no coincidence that one of the leaders of the Prosecutor's Office at that time declared with pride for his country: “Gangsterism is not a phenomenon for our soil!”

This was the second case in the country, after a long break, in which the defendants were convicted of banditry. From time to time, cases of criminal groups that committed armed attacks arose, but, firstly, this phenomenon was not at all as widespread as it is today, and, secondly, the actions of the accused in almost all cases were qualified as group armed robbery (in the country By definition, banditry could not have triumphed over socialism). But, according to the criminal legal classification of the actions of the convicts, although the case was rare, it was still not the only one. There was one feature in this case that made it unique. The Tolstopyatov brothers, Gorshkov and Samasyuk were armed with homemade machine guns and revolvers. In those distant times, it was easier to make an assault rifle (not only the Israeli Uzi or the exotic Chechen Borz, but even a Kalashnikov assault rifle) yourself than to buy it on the black market.

For almost five years - from October 1968 to June 1973 - “Fantômas”, as they were called because they were worn during one of the first attacks to camouflage their heads stockings, kept the city in suspense. Over the entire period of its existence, the gang committed a total of fourteen armed attacks on cashiers of government agencies and enterprises, on stores, and on collectors. Three killed (and one more - bandit Samasyuk - shot during detention), three wounded (plus wounded three times - twice during attacks and once during detention - bandit Gorshkov), almost one hundred and fifty thousand rubles (a very large amount at that time) taken away the state has money. Today, the scale of their criminal activities is unimaginable. But there were other times and other assessments. For each episode, the guilt of the defendants was proven according to the strictest procedural standards.

The Tolstopyatov brothers - the Fantomas gang

The city learned about them on October 7, 1968, when a car from the Rostov Watch Factory, driven by Dzeron Arutyunov, was seized. The attack was carried out by Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samasyuk and Gorshkov. The car was needed to attack a cashier near the building of the Regional Office of the State Bank. The attack did not take place - they understood that Arutyunov, who jumped out of the car, would inform the police. They will be looking for the car; the appearance of this car near the State Bank may be noticed by police officers. And such means of disguise as fake license plates have not yet been invented by their criminal imagination.

Three days after the attack on Arutyunov, the same persons, with the participation of a new member of the gang, Srybny, tried to attack the cashiers of the Rostov shoe factory. They did not at all intend to attack the cashiers of this particular factory from the very beginning. No, they guarded any cashier with a large bag at the October office of the State Bank, thinking that where there was a big bag, there was big money.

In order for the attack to be successful, they stocked up on a car, it was provided by Srybny. So that no one would suspect Srybny of complicity, his hands were tied in advance - let the police think that the car was taken away by force. Quite by chance, the cashier with the large bag turned out to be a cashier from a shoe factory. Having hesitated and not having time to carry out the attack before she got into the car, the whole company in Srybny’s car began to move behind the truck with the cashier. But completely unexpectedly for the pursuers, the truck, in violation of traffic rules, turned left along Ostrovsky Lane and disappeared behind the gates of the Shoe Factory. The criminals were furious at the failure.

In October, November and December 1968, four more daring armed attacks were carried out in the city. The coincidence of the signs of the criminals reported by eyewitnesses, the method and nature of their actions allowed us to conclude that all crimes were committed by the same persons. The first in this series is the attack on store No. 46, located in the village of Mirny. The testimony of witnesses paints a fairly detailed and vivid picture of this crime.

On October 22, in the evening, shortly before the expected arrival of collectors, three people entered the store with unusual-looking machine guns and pistols in their hands. Their faces were covered with black cloth. Their frightening appearance, the indiscriminate shooting they opened at the walls and ceiling, forced the buyers to scatter - among whom the majority were women, including women with children.

One of the robbers remained guarding the door, while the other two, threatening with weapons, moved towards the cash register. And then the first disappointment awaited them - the first, but not the last on the path they had chosen: thanks to the resourcefulness of the cashiers, the main amount of money was safely hidden. Their entire loot this time, together with what was stolen from the departments, amounted to only 526 rubles. But it was not for the sake of such prey that such ferocious-looking revolvers and machine guns were created! In fact, it turned out that this weapon did not intimidate precisely those whom it was intended to intimidate - cashiers Orlova and Luneva, saleswomen Goryunov and Gunina did not give up the proceeds.

Having profited from a little bit from the piece, bread and dairy departments, and some small change from the cash register, the criminals began to leave the store. And here another surprise awaited them. When the first two left the store, pensioner Guriy Sergeevich Chumakov, who happened to be nearby, tried to detain them. A hereditary worker who worked all his life as a blacksmith, who defended his Motherland on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War and was awarded for his actions in battles against fascist invaders courage and dedication with an order and medals, this man rushed after the leaving criminals - one by two, with a piece of pipe - against the machine gun and revolvers.

It was him, Chumakov, that Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov called in the court hearing with the impersonal word “enemy,” and in his diary much more definitely, “enemy.” No, not a piece of pipe - the courage of a Soviet citizen, the conviction that the interests of society are also his interests, the readiness to defend these interests to the last drop of blood - were his main weapon. And they, armed to the teeth, ran. But there was still a third left. He left the store later than the others and Chumakov did not see him. He sneakily shot Chumakov in the back with a machine gun.

Exactly two weeks later, on November 5, 1968, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Samasyuk attacked the driver of the Rostov Main Gas Pipeline Administration, Viktor Gareginovich Arutyunov, trying to seize the car. The car was stopped on Tekuchev Street not far from the Central City Hospital, and Samasyuk immediately took a seat next to the driver, and Tolstopyatov, going to the left front door, opened it and demanded that Arutyunov get out of the car. Arutyunov, realizing that he was dealing with criminals, but not at a loss, abruptly rushed away, deciding to detain Samasyuk. Tolstopyatov shouted to Samasyuk: “Shoot!”, and Samasyuk began to shoot. Either from excitement, or from fear - after all, Arutyunov was not afraid of them, but began to resist! - his hands were shaking, he couldn’t hit (it was the driver sitting next to him!), but in the end he hit with the third shot. Then Arutyunov turned onto the tram tracks and stopped the car. People jumped out of a tram that stopped nearby and, although they did not take any measures to detain the criminals, they considered it best to hide.

Just twenty days after the attack on Arutyunov, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samasyuk and Gorshkov committed a new crime - they seized a Radiotechnical School car driven by the driver Kushnarev, drove it to the Oktyabrsky branch of the State Bank and here they took a bag with money from the ATX cashier - 5 Matveeva. The roles were distributed and performed as follows. Gorshkov stopped a car on the street (it turned out to be Kushnarev’s car) and drove it to a secluded place near the Zoo, where Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Samasyuk were already waiting for him. After tying up Kushnarev and seizing the car, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov got behind the wheel, Gorshkov sat next to him, and Samasyuk sat in the back seat next to the tied up Kushnarev.

At the Oktyabrsky branch of the State Bank, the whole trio stopped the car and began to wait for the cashier with a large bag. This time it turned out to be the cashier of ATX-5 Matveeva. Samasyuk jumped out of the car with a machine gun in his hand, ran up to Matveeva, fired from the machine gun next to her into the ground, snatched a bag of money from the hands of Matveeva, who was taken aback, and got into the car again. There were 2,700 rubles in the bag.

Another month later, on December 29, 1968, an attack was carried out on store No. 21 of Gorpromtorg, located on Mechnikov Street. Two people entered the store - Gorshkov and Samasyuk, and the third - Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov - remained at the door. a tall robber with a pistol in his hand went to the cash register, pushed the cashier out, unlocked the cash register and took the money. Samasyuk cleared out everything that was there, and there was almost one and a half thousand money in the cash register - 1,498 rubles - an amount, although not very small for such a small store, but still significantly less than what the bandits were counting on.

The next attempt was to seize the salaries of the workers of the October Revolution Chemical Plant. This episode indicates a qualitatively different stage in the gang’s activities. The target of the attack is no longer a small store with three defenseless saleswomen or lone cashiers. They no longer act at random, waiting at the bank for a random cashier with a large bag in the naive confidence that where there is a big bag, there is big money. Here is a preliminary exploration with an approximate (and not very far from the truth) calculation of the size of future production. There is a clear division of roles here, which required the involvement of new participants: along with the “militants,” there are also observers, “signalmen,” whose job is to notice the car with the cashier in time and give a sign to those who are directly about to carry out the attack.

The gang is no longer just a “stable armed group.” Its stability is determined not only by the repeated attacks. Samasyuk is not there, he is serving a sentence in a colony for hooliganism, but the gang did not calm down, did not hide - the largest (at that time) attack was being prepared and carried out. Here there is already everything that was repeated later in their last crime - the distribution of roles, and preliminary reconnaissance, and shooting, and the pursuit, and failure as a result. We can judge all this, as well as subsequent events, from the fairly detailed testimony of all participants, which agree in significant details, on both sides, primarily from the testimony of the defendants: both Tostopyatov brothers, Gorshkov and Denskevich. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov testified in court how he came to the plant several times, allegedly to get a job. I talked with people, studied the orders and announcements posted on the stands. He managed to find out on what days wages are given out at the factory, what kind of car they use to bring money from the bank; find out that an armed guard usually goes along with the cashier to collect the money, and he carries the bag of money from the car to the building.

According to the plan they developed together with Vladimir Tolstopyatov, it was assumed that Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov would wait at the factory management for a car with money, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov would take the bank bag with money from the security guard, and Gorshkov would at that time take the keys to the car in which they were already driving from the driver. money - they will disappear safely. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, who was “exposed” during reconnaissance visits to the plant, feared that if he and Gorshkov waited for a car with money in the immediate vicinity of the checkpoint, he might be recognized. Therefore, they decided to wait around the corner - on Teatralny Avenue. In case the car arrives on Tekuchev Street, because of which they see it too late and do not have time to run up to the entrance, Vladimir Tolstopyatov and Denskevich should be on Tekuchev Street. Their task was to give a timely signal to Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov about the appearance of the car. Perhaps this was almost the only part of their plan that turned out to be realized - Vladimir Tolstopyatov and Denskevich stood where they were placed, and were ready, as they say, to “give the go-ahead” if the car appeared from their direction. In all other respects, as is known, the plans of the criminals did not come true. The car drove up along Teatralny Avenue, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov saw it in time and jumped up to the entrance in time. But then life made its own adjustments.

The courage of the plant workers was the reason for the failure. The same courage that these strategists did not take into account. They, who considered themselves “superman”, relied only on strength and did not care about anything human life, could not think of those around them as anything other than people meekly raising their hands at looking fierce their revolvers and machine guns. However, in life everything turned out differently. The security guard was not afraid and did not give up the money. On the contrary, he himself, retreating to the entrance and further - inside the building - from the raiders who were shooting at his feet, began to take his Nagan out of his holster. Tolstopyatov, not immediately understanding what was happening, rushed after him into the entrance, but quickly came to his senses and returned back. As they say: “I don’t care about fat, I wish I was alive.” We had to save ourselves. At this time, Gorshkov tried to take the keys from the driver. The terrifying shots at the fence next to him and even a fatal shot at the driver himself did not really frighten him. Moreover, the wounded driver himself took the machine gun from Gorshkov. And Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, together with Gorshkov, no longer had the keys - he had to take back his own machine gun. Vyacheslav shot at the driver, wounded him again, snatched the machine gun and they began to run away.

Armed from unarmed, young and healthy from a wounded old man. And people were already rushing to the driver’s aid, including his son. The raiders jumped up to a truck stopped in front of a red traffic light and pulled the driver out of the cab, which they did only because they shot at him and wounded him in the arm. They fled in a seized truck, getting away from organized security chase, during which Gorshkov was wounded in the back by one of the shots.

After this failure, there was almost a year and a half break in the gang's activities. There were objective reasons for this. Samasyuk was imprisoned, Gorshkov was wounded in the back, and Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was not so brave and reckless as to attack anyone alone. But Gorshkov’s wound healed. They didn’t even think about removing the bullet - they didn’t contact the doctors, and being stuck in the back, it didn’t hit the spine or any vital organs and, in general, didn’t really interfere with Gorshkov’s life. Samasyuk's sentence ended and in July 1971 he returned to Rostov. Just a month after his return, the gang committed another attack - on the cashier of the UPR - 112.

The attack itself was preceded, as Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov told us, by two of his visits to this department - for reconnaissance. He managed to find out when money was brought to UNR-112 to pay salaries to employees. And so, at half past one on August 25, 1971, when the cashier Gorbashova with a bag containing 17 thousand rubles, as well as the UPR employees accompanying Gorbashova - engineer Marchenko and driver Lunev - entered the UPR building and began to climb to the second floor, they Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov met on the stairs. Vyacheslav demanded that the money be given to him and he shot upward for warning. Gorbashova got scared and gave the money, after which Vyacheslav and Gorshkov jumped out into the yard, got into the bus standing there - there was no other car - and together with Samasyuk, who was standing “on watch” outside, they left. After driving a few blocks, they abandoned the bus, leaving behind a bag with 500 rubles in change - it was hard to carry.

The attack on UNR-112 served as a warm-up before what happened next. On the evening of December 16, 1971, the gang raided collectors who arrived at savings bank No. 0299, located on Pushkinskaya Street not far from Dolomanovsky Lane.

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Homemade weapons of the Fantomas gang

The shootout, which ended with the murder of the collector and the seizure of the collection vehicle, is an event that shook the city. Collector Malikov, who was in the savings bank premises at the time of the attack, ran out into the street in response to the shots and opened fire back at the attackers; driver-collector Tezikov, who was in the car at the time of the attack and jumped out of it, throwing his revolver; passers-by Mikheev and Kibalnikov, who observed this fleeting battle from the side; the results of an examination that established that collector Zyuba died from gunshot wounds, and the bullets extracted from the corpse, as well as bullets and cartridges found at the scene of the incident, were fired from the same submachine gun that was used in the attack on the October Revolution Chemical Plant. All this allows us to clearly imagine how events unfolded. The criminals, who were waiting for a car with collectors on the street, seized the moment when the brigade of collectors was not in full force in the car - Malikov entered the savings bank for the proceeds - jumped up to the car and, threatening with machine guns, demanded that Zyuba and Tezikov get out of it. Tezikov obeyed and jumped out of the car, throwing his revolver on the seat. Zyuba, on the contrary, opened fire from a Nagan service revolver. Malikov ran out to hear the shots and also began shooting at the attackers. By that time, however, Zyuba had already been killed, the criminals took possession of the car and drove away. Malikov’s shots “to catch up” could not stop them. The car with Zyuba’s corpse was found some time later in one of the city landfills, but the money, which according to the savings bank documents should have been a little more than 20 thousand rubles, was no longer in the car. Gorshkov was again wounded, this time in the arm, by one of Zyuba’s shots.

The gang improved their tactics. Vladimir Tolstopyatov was nearby during the attack and observed what was happening, and then observed the actions of the police and investigators who arrived at the scene. He observed in order to then carry out an “analysis” of the actions of both the bandits themselves and the police officers. Such a “analysis” with a detailed analysis of errors and conclusions for the future took place a few days later.

Almost six months later - on May 26, 1972 - Samasyuk, with the participation of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, attacked store No. 44 of the Oktyabrsky District Food Store, which is located on Dolomanovsky Lane. This attack was spontaneous, it was not planned in advance. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Samasyuk were driving along Dolomanovsky on a “Vyatka” scooter, which Vyacheslav had acquired by that time. Seeing the store, Samasyuk suggested that Vyacheslav take the proceeds. He had no objections. We stopped. Vyacheslav remained outside by the scooter. Samasyuk, having entered the store, jumped up to the cash register and, threatening cashier Reutova with a revolver, grabbed money from the cash register - it turned out to be three and a half hundred rubles - and, in front of the frightened eyes of Reutova and the saleswomen, ran out of the store.

Six months later, on November 4, 1972, the defendants, at gunpoint, seized a Volga belonging to the Rostov branch of Gruzavtotrans. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samasyuk and Gorshkov took part in the attack. Driver Ivan Semenovich Azivsky, who stopped at their request, suspecting nothing, agreed to take the trio to the Brick Factory. At the Brick Factory, in a deserted place, to Azivsky’s surprise and horror, they threatened him with a revolver, forced him to get out of the car and climb into the trunk, after tying his hands. A few hours later, at the Tannery Association club, in front of the participants of the recreational party who had gone outside to smoke, this Volga literally crashed into a tree. The engine compartment was crushed and the windshield shattered. The passenger jumped out of the car and ran away, and the driver, who was in drunk, compassionate citizens were sent to the hospital along the way. After that, hearing some knocks in the trunk, people gathered around the car opened the trunk and took out the bound Azivsky. Azivsky spoke in detail about the circumstances of his captivity and seizure of the car, and identified Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov as one of the raiders. He also identified Samasyuk from a photograph. At this time, the driver - i.e. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov - regained consciousness on the way and already on the territory of the Central City Hospital almost next to the emergency room, feeling a revolver in his pocket, he realized that it was not the police who brought him here, he explained to his “saviors” that if they will hand him over to the emergency room, then they will then be called in for interrogation, more than once, but he already feels decent and will walk about forty meters to the emergency room on his own. The owner of the car and his friends were not at all eager to be interrogated, they dropped Vyacheslav off, turned around and left. Vyacheslav, having washed the blood from his face and hands under a tap that happened to be on the street next to the emergency room, walked home. If the traffic inspector who arrived at the Tannery Association club, having listened to eyewitnesses of the incident and Azivsky, who had been taken out of the trunk by that time, had immediately contacted the city police department, and the duty service had immediately organized search activities, then Vyacheslav could have been detained that same evening. But the traffic inspector did not want to believe Azivsky for a long time and generally stated that before looking for bandits, he needed to find witnesses and draw up a report. When the police department finally reported what had happened, it was already too late - the search did not bring any results.

Both brothers Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov gave detailed testimony about why the car was seized. As a result, we know that Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samasyuk and Gorshkov, taking with them weapons - a whole arsenal: two Nagan revolvers, one homemade revolver and two homemade machine guns - one small-caliber and the second that fired 7.9 mm caliber balls - were going to attack on collectors who come to collect money from the Strela store - a fairly large grocery store, located, however, at some distance from major highways. While observing the store, they found out that collectors arrive at it at the end of the route with proceeds received at other points.

In a Gruzavtotrans Volga with Azivsky in the trunk, they drove up to the store and began to wait for the collectors. We waited a long time, got bored with the wait, so we went for wine. We returned and began to wait again. They drank out of boredom. Drunk, they almost quarreled: Gorshkov, offended by the collectors for his shot hand, demanded that Samasyuk give him the “ball” machine gun - he really wanted to take revenge, and this machine gun had a larger caliber and twice the amount of gunpowder in the cartridge. Samasyuk objected and even hit the machine gun on the floor of the car. The impact caused an involuntary shot - it pierced Samasyuk’s hat almost a centimeter from his temple. Without waiting for the collectors, they took Gorshkov home, the bag with weapons to the hiding place, and decided to abandon the car on the station square. On the road, on the descent near the Leather Club, a drunken Tolstopyatov lost control and the car crashed into a tree. The impact knocked out several of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov's teeth and he was forced to turn to dentists. Dentists Sitnikova and Rusanov identified him as a person who came in for a traumatic tooth extraction a few days after November 4.

The failure led to the conclusion that more careful preparation of attacks was necessary. The next crime - an attack on the cashier of the Yuzhgiprovodkhoz design institute - is characterized primarily by lengthy preparatory actions. As Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov testified in court, they - and mainly he himself - “went to the scene” several times - walked around the institute building, clarified the location of the cash register, using orders and instructions posted on stands, and based on conversations of employees in the dining room and corridors, trying to figure out how many workers at the institute and what the amount of their earnings is, on what days the institute pays salaries. According to the estimates of Vyacheslav and Vladimir Tolstopyatov, on the day the salary is issued, the cashier should bring approximately 250 - 280 thousand rubles from the bank, and salaries at the institute are issued on the 7th and 22nd of each month.

Gorshkov fell ill in May 1973 and was hospitalized. It would be completely unreasonable to carry out such a large-scale attack together. And then Chernenko turned up for Vyacheslav. An auxiliary worker at a vegetable store who never thought about the compliance of his actions with the law - he gave the impression of an experienced person and ready for anything. At his job, among other things, Chernenko also delivered goods on a cargo scooter to retail outlets. This came in handy. He was instructed to wait with the scooter near Yuzhgiprovodkhoz during the attack. It was assumed that, having grabbed a bag with money and ran out of the institute building with it, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Samasyuk would hand the bag over to Chernenko, who, along with the money, would flee the scene on a scooter and deliver the money to the appointed place.

On May 22, 1973, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samasyuk and Chernenko arrived at the Yuzhgiprovodkhoz building and were ready to begin their criminal operation, when suddenly Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, already in the institute building, ran into his friend Kozlova. She recognized Vyacheslav, they stopped and even talked about something. This innocent conversation had serious consequences: Vyacheslav immediately decided to cancel the “operation”, because he was afraid that Kozlova might connect the attack with the fact of his appearance at the institute, which threatened to expose him. Moreover, fearing a second such meeting, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, during the attack on Yuzhgiprovodkhoz that took place two weeks later, did not dare to enter the institute building at all.

Information about the amount of money brought to Yuzhgiprovodkhoz on salary day excited the mind and gave no rest. They decided not to abandon the attack on the institute and to carry it out on the next payday - that same fatal day for the defendants, June 7, 1973, the last day of their criminal activities.

The circumstances of what happened on that day are known in detail. On this day, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov with Gorshkov, Samasyuk and Chernenko arrived at Yuzhgiprovodkhoz in advance. Gorshkov and Samasyuk entered the building, went up to the second floor and began to wait for the cashier with the money near the cash register. Chernenko remained downstairs not far from the watchman in order to cover the departure of Gorshkov and Samasyuk with the money if something happened. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was waiting outside the building, so to speak, on standby. He was supposed to join Gorshkov and Samasyuk, seize a car with them and escape with it. Vladimir Tolstopyatov arrived at Yuzhgiprovodkhoz independently, independently of these four. He, as in a number of previous episodes, had to watch from the outside everything that would happen, in order to then arrange a “debriefing”. The analysis, however, did not take place because immediately after the attack and seizure of money, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov, as a result of a completely cinematic chase, were detained red-handed, and Samasyuk escaped detention only because during the chase, being wounded, he died on a bag of money. Ironically, Samasyuk once said in a drunken company that he would like to die drunk on a bag of money. That's exactly what happened.

So, Gorshkov and Samasyuk waited near the cash register until the cashier appeared with the money. We waited and waited. Cashier Ponomareva did not approach the cash register alone. There were several people with her - those who accompanied her to the bank, and those who joined them from among those awaiting their salaries directly in the institute building. There was a lot of money - 124,500 rubles, but the burden was both voluminous and heavy. Therefore, this time they were not in a bag, but in a backpack, which was carried by one of the men accompanying Ponomareva - Amerkhanov. As soon as the cashier Ponomareva began to unlock the lock, Samasyuk and Gorshkov jumped up to her and her retinue with revolvers in their hands. Samasyuk snatched the backpack with money from Amerkhanov’s hands and he and Gorshkov went out. We went downstairs, passed the watchman and Chernenko, who was waiting there, and went out into the street. Several people followed them - Muravitsky, Sarkisov, Kozlova, Kuzina Kravtsova, Ponomareva, Manessi, Shapovalova, Amerkhanov. They indignantly demanded the money back and did not lag behind the raiders, despite the fact that they threatened with weapons.

Junior Sergeant Alexey Rusov, Junior Lieutenant Evgeniy Kubyshta, Captain Viktor Salyutin, Sergeant Gennady Doroshenko

This unusual-looking group of people attracted the attention of Volodya Martovitsky, a loader from the neighboring Gastronome, who was passing by. Having apparently understood the situation, he grabbed Gorshkov by the shoulder and demanded that he hand over the backpack with the money. Gorshkov and Samasyuk, who were carrying a heavy backpack and snapping at the advances of the group of Yuzhgiprovodkhoz workers pursuing them, had no time for Martovitsky. In any case, the appearance of this decisive guy - Martovitsky - sharply changed the balance of power and created a real threat of detention or, at least, return of the money. But that’s why Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was waiting outside, to insure against such troubles. He shouted to Gorshkov to bend down, and in cold blood - and no wonder, not for the first time - he shot Martovitsky with a machine gun. These shots turned out to be fatal not only for Martovitsky. Police sergeant Rusov was nearby - Kravtsova turned to his help, and she, along with everyone else, went out into the street and rushed to look for the police. Having found his bearings by the sounds of shots, Rusov, taking his pistol out of his holster as he walked, ran to the scene of events. He saw a trio leaving, two - they were Gorshkov and Samasyuk - were carrying a backpack, and the third - he was Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov - was running after them with a machine gun in his hands. The criminals did not react to warning shouts and upward shots and Rusov opened fire to kill. Gorshkov was wounded by his shots - he was so lucky that whenever and whoever shot at them - security guard Pluzhnikov, collector Zyuba, or now police sergeant Rusov - Gorshkov was sure to be wounded. Samasyuk was also wounded by Rusov’s shots and, as it turned out later, fatally. Samasyuk - in agony, and Gorshkov - in passion and excitement - continued to run to Lenin Avenue, where Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov had already seized a Moskvich that was accidentally standing on the sidewalk, pushing the owner, Korzunov, out of it. They tried to escape in this Moskvich. But Fortune had already turned her back on them. The deputy commander of the Fire Department Salyutin and his driver Doroshenko, who happened to be nearby and observed the shootout, put Rusov in their car and began to pursue the raiders. The district inspector of the Oktyabrsky district police department, Kubyshta, also joined the chase, and managed to inform the Department. And no matter how Gorshkov threatened his pursuers with a machine gun, no matter how hard Tolstopyatov tried to escape the pursuit, they were caught up and detained. The Moskvich contained a dead Samasyuk on a backpack with money, revolvers, a machine gun and three homemade grenades. Tolstopyatov had the fourth grenade, but he did not use it.

In the Yuzhgiprovodkhoz building, in the semi-basement, a worker at the Larin Institute discovered a Nagan revolver, the same one that Chernenko had thrown into a hole in the floor of the toilet, which he himself told about when he was detained the next day. The detainees Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov confessed to all the crimes at once - and it would be strange to expect anything else after they were detained red-handed, after a search was immediately carried out at the Tolstopyatovs’ house, during which a cache of weapons, ammunition, masks, and false license plates was discovered .

The group consisting of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samasyuk and Gorshkov was a stable group operating long time- more than four and a half years - and has committed a significant number of attacks on government agencies and organizations, to individual citizens. The group was armed with homemade submachine guns, a machine gun, revolvers and hand grenades. On December 16, 1971, the group’s weapons were replenished with two Nagan system revolvers.

Thus ended the activities of the Phantomas gang. Vyacheslav and Vladimir Tolstopyatov, as well as Gorshkov, were sentenced to death, the rest of the defendants were sentenced to imprisonment for various terms. Cassation appeals of convicted persons Supreme Court The RSFSR was left unsatisfied. The sentence was carried out on March 6, 1975.

A dozen reliable facts from the life of the “Rostov phantomas” The surname of the Tolstopyatov brothers is known far beyond the borders of “Rostov-Papa”. Despite the years, the memory of the brothers lives on. There are still so many different, sometimes incredible rumors about them that the Tolstopyatov brothers have long turned into one of the legends of Old Rostov. I. The famous “Rostov gangsters”, “Fantomas” - the Tolstopyatov brothers were not native Rostovites. Before the war, their family lived in the Bryansk region. The Tolstopyatov family had two children: Vladimir, born in 1929, and Vyacheslav, born a year before the war, in 1940. The Tolstopyatovs’ father worked as the head of the district police department, and died in the first days of the war. The Bolshevik’s family was threatened with imminent death in the occupied territory, and the Tolstopyatovs’ mother, with two children (!), managed to get to Rostov, where their distant relatives lived. In a small outbuilding on Pyramidnaya Street in Nakhalovka, they survived the occupation. The family was in dire need. Mother worked as a cleaner, then as a postman, and received pennies. It also happened that in winter the brothers had nothing to wear to go outside. When Vyacheslav was tried for the first time, his mother said in court: “My sons never ate their fill.” The brothers - Vyacheslav and Vladimir - both loved to design. We read a lot. Vladimir played the button accordion well, and Vyacheslav showed amazing drawing abilities very early on. In the winter of 1945, Vladimir's older brother was drafted into the army. He went to fight, and was even awarded the medal “For the Capture of Koenigsberg.” 2. Vyacheslav especially loved to sketch. He could pore over some book for hours, redrawing an illustration, and achieving absolute similarity - down to the smallest detail. At about 15 years old, Vyacheslav became adept at drawing banknotes. He drew 50 and 100 ruble banknotes (this was before monetary reform 1961). At first, Slava exchanged them in wine and vodka stores. He threw the purchased bottle into the bushes (Vyacheslav almost never drank alcohol all his life), and spent real money on sweets, books, and tools. Over time, Vyacheslav got used to selling the drawn money to taxi drivers: he drove a short distance in a car, handed the driver a bill folded into a quadrangle (it should be noted that the “pre-reform” post-war banknotes were much larger than the current ones), took the change and disappeared. Seeing that taxi drivers never unfold banknotes, Vyacheslav became bolder to such an extent that he began to draw money on only one side. This is what destroyed him. On February 23, 1960, a taxi driver named Metelitsa, having given Vyacheslav a ride to the Suburban Station, nevertheless unfolded the bill offered to him - and was stunned when he saw it on the back side Blank sheet paper!.. “Vyacheslav confessed to everything at once,” recalled the investigator in Tolstopyatov’s first case, A. Granovsky. “In the investigative experiment, using colored pencils, watercolors, BF-2 glue, a compass, a ruler and a blade, Vyacheslav drew in four hours (!) absolutely exact copy 100-ruble bill. We all gasped. Even in the police, even while under investigation, Vyacheslav won everyone’s sympathy with his politeness, modesty, and erudition. It was a pleasure to talk with him. I petitioned the court for a mitigation of the sentence - given my young age, complete repentance, assistance provided to the investigation." Counterfeiting banknotes is classified as a serious crime against the state, but the court sentence was unusually lenient; four years in prison in a general regime colony. 3. Vyacheslav began to put together his gang “in the zone.” He perceived the court's verdict, even such a mild one, as a personal insult inflicted on him by the state (Vyacheslav expected that he would be given a “suspended” sentence). The convicts made fun of him: “Well, artist, will you still draw money?” Vyacheslav replied that he would do something else - better. IN free time, before lights out, he sketched out some drawings. He didn’t tell anyone what he was drawing. However, he became friends with Sergei Samasyuk, who was serving a sentence for malicious hooliganism. Having been released in February 1964, Vyacheslav arrived in Rostov and shared his plans with his brother Vladimir: to make machine guns and rob a bank. “We are people with a head,” Vyacheslav said. “And in our time you can’t honestly earn a comfortable life.” Sergei Samasyuk, who was released after Vyacheslav, also joined the gang. They say that Slava Tolstopyatov met his old “Kent” when he was standing in line for wine. He immediately agreed to Vyacheslav’s proposal, noting: “It is better to die on a bag of money than under a wine barrel.” His words later turned out to be prophetic: Samasyuk accepted his death literally lying on a bag of money. Another member of the gang was Vladimir Gorshkov - the brothers' neighbor and childhood friend, a gray personality with low intelligence - who was completely under the influence of Vyacheslav. Vyacheslav and Vladimir Tolstopyatov completed the weapon drawings in 1964-1965. Automatic machines and pistols of the original design were designed for a small-caliber (5.6 mm) sports cartridge. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov undertook to obtain ammunition: he headed the sports shooting section in ATX-3 (where he worked as a driver). To make the barrels, the brothers used two TOZ-8 small-caliber rifles that they kept. Most of the parts were made by familiar workers at the Legmash plant. By the fall of 1968, the gang had 4 self-loading pistol and 3 machine guns. Vyacheslav formulated his main goal as follows: to “earn” a million and stop criminal activities. He planned to “take” a million in one fell swoop - by robbing a regional bank. 4. Robbing a bank turned out to be not such an easy task: the brothers were convinced of this immediately. Then they decided to act differently: to snatch the bag from the hands of some cashier right near the entrance to the bank. For a whole month, the Tolstopyatovs, Samasyuk and Gorshkov took turns on duty opposite the bank, on Sokolov Avenue, watching cashiers of various enterprises carry out bags of money. They found out on which days the largest payments occur. They even got the hang of identifying the cashier by his appearance - a large amount he got it, or not really. The brothers' plan was simple: scare the cashier with a machine gun and escape in a previously seized car. On October 7, 1968, they decided to try their luck as a bandit for the first time, but fate turned out to be unkind to them. The driver of the Volga, which they got into on Engels Street (now it is), saw the gun, sharply pressed the brake and jumped out of the car screaming. Having driven around the city in a captured Volga, the newly minted raiders did not dare to go to the bank that day and abandoned the car in one of the courtyards. In order not to give unnecessary noise to this matter, Vyacheslav himself called the police from a pay phone and reported where the car was, adding that he and his friends decided to play a prank on the driver, but he did not understand the joke and was afraid of a water pistol. Three days later, Vyacheslav agreed with a driver he knew, Evgeny Rybny, and the bandits in his Moskvich-407 were on duty opposite the Oktyabrsky branch of the State Bank. They herded the cashier of a shoe factory, who received a large sum of money. ...Elderly woman with a heavy bag in her hands she appeared on the street. The Moskvich rushed forward, but... its path was blocked by a GAZ-51 truck, into which the cashier quickly got into. The GAZ driver turned out to be a reckless driver: having rushed along Kozlov Street to Ostrovsky Lane, he, contrary to the traffic rules, made a left turn and drove into the factory gates, which closed in front of the Moskvich’s nose. The reckless driver, without knowing it, saved the money of his enterprise, and, possibly, two lives: his own and the cashier’s. They began to be called “Fantomas” after their first successful case - October 22, 1968. They “took” the “Gastronom” store in the village of Mirny. This is how Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov himself recalled this case (during the investigation after the arrest): "...After the failure with the car, we decided to take the store, although we understood that there would be no big money. While working as a driver, I looked at the “Gastronom” on Mirny; a convenient place, near a grove, far from the police... Women's nylon stockings were cut off. Theirs (Samasyuk and Gorshkov - author's note) are black, mine are green. They took two machine guns and a pistol. We arrived by tram. It was evening, already getting dark. Masks were worn around the corner of the house where the store is located. Then they entered. Many people. Gorshkov stood at the door with a machine gun, I stood in the center with a machine gun, Samasyuk stood at the cash register with a pistol. There was not enough money: the cashier managed to hide it. Together with the revenue from the departments, they took about 250 rubles. We left. There are a lot of people on the street. Went. First - Samasyuk, then Gorshkov and me. Some man swung at Gorshkov. I shouted: “Don’t interfere in your own business!” Fired 4 rounds. We reached the grove. Gorshkov lost his beret. We calmed down and came to our senses. We took the tram to Budennovsky and went home.” In their first case, the Fantomas "took 526 rubles 84 kopecks - a significant amount for those times. The man who took a swing at Gorshkov was old man, war participant - Guriy Semenovich Chumakov. Vyacheslav cold-bloodedly shot him point-blank with a machine gun. 5. Vyacheslav loved to make beautiful gestures. His favorite film (besides the cult series about the adventures of Fantômas) was the popular film of the Italian director Domiano Domiani, “Confession of a Police Commissioner to the Prosecutor of the Republic,” which was popular in those years. Lush speeches, beautiful life, risky actions... Vyacheslav watched this film twenty times and knew it by heart. I took my “comrades” to see it, but they perceived the film differently. “Cattle,” - this is how Vyacheslav characterized Samasyuk and Gorshkov. Here is an excerpt from the diary of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov (March 20, 1972): “... the rest of the people who surround me are no better. What is sacred about them? Then they count every ruble and think that they have done much more than someone else. Gray (Samasyuk - author's note) takes without asking, and they know exactly their worth, and their amount is equal. So go ahead, act categorically..." Diary of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov. General notebook in brown leatherette binding. Neat, clear handwriting. Some words are highlighted with ticks. One feels that this diary was written for a reason - Vyacheslav himself re-read it several times. For what? Did you try to understand or analyze something? On the very first page of the diary is written the address of the Committee for Inventions and Discoveries under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and next to it is the police telephone number; 6-56-30. In the same notebook, the “Dictionary” was rewritten foreign words" to letter 3: "zone-probe". And then - a note of a personal nature. "May 26. Shop. Small change, paid off debts. 50 rubles left... May 28. Sery and Valya drank every penny..." Vyacheslav's relationship with Samasyuk deserves special mention. The cocky, wayward Samasyuk did not like the intellectual superiority that Vyacheslav demonstrated over the rest of the gang. Samasyuk gradually began to express his claims to leadership. Vyacheslav kept the whole gang “in his fist”: he did not drink alcohol himself, and did not allow anyone to get drunk - a drunk would sell everyone out. After successful business, he put aside half of the money - “for a big deal.” Samasyuk brazenly stole money from Tolstopyatov and got drunk. Here is just one episode of the spring of 1972, reflected in Vyacheslav’s diary: “March 5... At the bus stop, Sergei admitted that he took money in the amount of 360 rubles and that he sent it to his father... Only a boor would lie so unskilledly. Yes, his petty nature is gradually revealed. He is not capable of anything. ". Inventions, designs, and especially the purpose for which I organized this business - all this does not touch him at all. He goes to work only because there is nowhere to escape (the tail is long), and even because he is used to throwing money around (like - "No man at all), but has no prospects for the future. Someone did a lot with him during his second term. Okay, we'll see." Difficult relationships in the gang were probably one of the reasons why Vyacheslav in every possible way supported his reputation as a “risky guy” who doesn’t mind shedding blood, be it his own or someone else’s. Here's just one episode: one day Gorshkov ran to Vyacheslav and reported that Samasyuk, drunk to smithereens, was telling near a wine barrel that he was robbing cashiers with a machine gun. Vyacheslav dragged Samasyuk home. Here both grabbed their weapons and... Samasyuk could not stand it and threw the pistol. Vyacheslav put him against the wall and began to “knock the crap out”: he planted bullet after bullet into the wall - a centimeter from his head. Samasyuk howled with fear. Another noteworthy case was when, during the hunt for cashiers, in a seized car (the driver was tied up in the back seat), Vyacheslav drove along Khalturinsky Lane, past the city police department. “It’s boring to live without risk,” this is how he explained his action. Another “nice gesture”: when the cashier of motor vehicle service number 5, Matveeva, had her bag containing the salary of the entire enterprise (2,744 rubles) taken away, Vyacheslav calculated that 44 rubles were Matveeva’s personal money. The next day he found her house (using her passport) and dropped a bag with documents and 75 rubles on the doorstep of the house. “Why?..” - they asked Vyacheslav during the investigation. “They just felt sorry for the woman and to at least somehow compensate for the trouble caused,” he answered. Vyacheslav loved romance and despised people who were not romantic. He had an affair with his older brother's wife. Vladimir knew about this - and was silent. Were you afraid? The role of Vladimir Tolstopyatov in the gang was never fully understood. Vyacheslav did not take his brother on any business. Vladimir usually watched the robbery from the sidelines, used a stopwatch to time how long it would take, from which side the police would arrive, and then watched the actions of the policemen. It was believed that he analyzed the actions of the phantoms." But maybe he was "covering Vyacheslav's rear? Or did the younger brother have some kind of sense of responsibility for the elder? 6. The “big money” never came. Neither the robbery of the ATX-5 cashier, nor the attack on store 21 of Gorpromtorg (Mechnikov St., 144) yielded large profits. Vyacheslav was waiting for a serious business in which he would hit a big jackpot. “Take” a lot of money, enough to last a lifetime, and “give up”: this was Vyacheslav’s plan. He understood that you can’t rob endlessly: sooner or later, you’ll get caught. “God is not a fraer, he sees everything!” The right opportunity soon turned up. The gang received information that on April 21, 1969, the cashiers of the chemical plant named after the October Revolution would receive a large sum - over 100 thousand rubles. By that time, Samasyuk had been convicted of hooliganism, and for the “Fantomas” to take cashiers without the “center Gray” was a matter of principle: could they do it without him? Instead of Samasyuk, Vyacheslav’s acquaintance Boris Denskevich agreed to go “to the job.” They decided to attack in a new way - not near the bank, but near the entrance of the chemical plant and escape in the cashiers' car. ...As soon as the gray Volga stopped near the plant management building, two people jumped up to it - in gray raincoats, with machine guns. But the Volga driver managed to lock himself inside the car. And the cashier, clutching a bag of money to himself, jumped out of the opposite door and shouted “They’re robbing!” rushed to the factory management building. The guards were already running out from there. "Fantomas" opened fire. The first bullet hit the Volga driver Kovalenko. But a rare case occurred: the bullet hit the forehead tangentially, flattened, and remained under the skin. Kovalenko survived. In a shootout with the guards, the “Phantomas” constantly jammed their homemade machine guns. The security began to press them, but Vyacheslav and Gorshkov, running across the road, seized a truck in which they escaped. Shot after, Gorshkov, already in the car, was wounded in the lower back. The gang drew three conclusions from this failure. First: they can’t do without Samasyuk. Second: the ammunition was no good. Third: you must shoot immediately - to kill. Forced to “retire”, the brothers hesitated in further development of weapons. Vyacheslav made a cartridge of his own design. Its caliber remained the same - 5.6 mm, but the size was significantly increased. The brothers produced two new-design machine guns for this cartridge. This weapon was distinguished by increased power compared to earlier models of Tolstopyatov machine guns. With the help of familiar Legmash workers, the brothers set up production of hand grenades with duralumin casings right at the factory. Hunting gunpowder mixed with aluminum powder was used as a bursting charge, which ensured high temperature and explosive force. In July 1971, Sergei Samasyuk was released from prison, and on August 25, with new weapons in their hands, the “Fantomas” attacked the UHP-II2 cashier, seizing 17 thousand rubles.” 7. The whole city started talking about “phantomas”. Rumors gave birth to rumors: rumors multiplied their “exploits.” Small punks began to work “under the phantoms”: they pulled nylon stockings over their heads and snatched bags from the hands of women in dark gateways. The police were not inactive, but what was confusing was the fact that the “phantomas” had a completely professional style. They were looked for among the “professionals” of the criminal world. Well, who could have imagined that simple “hard workers”, “men” who regularly work at their own enterprises and do not seem to stand out in any way, can act so boldly and so skillfully? The “phantomas” themselves once discussed a question: is it worth making contact with the local underworld? We decided to “work” on our own because there was less risk of getting exposed. But the search for new gangsters was active, and in 1970 Rostov detectives picked up the trail of a certain Kirakosyan. He was arrested in Lvov. He and his accomplices carried out several daring raids with murders in Rostov, Yerevan, Lvov and other cities of the Union. They were armed, including small-caliber weapons. Kirakosyan’s “handwriting” was close to Tolstoy Pyatov’s. Kirakosyan was brought to Rostov and several witnesses identified him: yes, it was he who took over the store on Mirny! It turned out that the “Phantomas” raids temporarily stopped during this period. And the police department breathed a sigh of relief: yes, it’s them!.. A victorious report flew to Moscow. Kirakosyan was tried in Yerevan. He was accused of several “Fantômas” episodes. And after some time, “phantomas” emerged from nowhere and robbed the UNR-112 cashier on Budennovsky. 8. The most brutal crime that shocked the whole of Rostov was committed by the “Fantomas” on December 16, 197I near the savings bank number 0299, on Pushkinskaya Street. In November, Vyacheslav hatched a plan to attack the collectors. Having chosen a quiet corner on Pushkinskaya Street, the gang members spent almost two months monitoring the work of the State Bank collection teams that serviced this area. They established that one collector always enters the savings bank, and two remain in the car. They decided to use this moment for an attack. Considering that the collectors were armed, the bandits put on homemade body armor: specially curved steel plates that protected the chest and abdomen. They took several grenades with them. ...Samasyuk jumped up to the car first and disarmed the driver. But senior collector Ivan Pavlovich Zyuba, who was sitting in the back seat, pulled out his revolver and began to shoot. He shot even when he was hit by machine gun fire. I.P. Zyuba was killed on the spot. The cylinder of his revolver was empty; The collector fired until the last cartridge. Having thrown out Zyuba's corpse, the "Fantomas" in the collection "Volga" rushed to Dolomanovsky Lane. The third collector who jumped out of the savings bank fired after them. The bag contained over 17 thousand rubles, bonds and lottery tickets. Gorshkov, who received two bullets in this case, was secretly treated by a surgeon at the S.-K.zh.d. hospital. Konstantin Dudnikov, asking for two thousand rubles. 9. The Tolstopyatovs were no longer going to “give up” with the raids; they never managed to “take” a large sum, and it is always difficult to give up a good life. So one crime leads to another. Have the “phantomas” experienced remorse? No! They liked to feel significant, they liked to hear conversations on trams about unprecedentedly daring raiders... Can an artist refuse fame? Could the "phantomas" throw away their machine guns? Meanwhile, the brothers continued to develop new designs small arms, and by the fall of 1972 they created the most famous “gangster” machine gun, shooting 9 mm balls. The rate of fire and penetration ability of this terrible weapon were amazing. From three meters away, a shot from such a machine gun pierced a railway rail! The barrel of the machine gun was made to break, and this feature made it possible to carry the weapon unnoticed under clothing. From the conclusion of the forensic ballistic examination of the All-Russian Research Institute of Forensic Expertise (01/25/1974): "None of the known examples of manual firearms was not the model on which the submachine guns brought in for examination were made... This weapon, when fired from short distances, has excessive lethal force... The kinetic energy of the smooth-bore machine gun created by Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov exceeds the kinetic energy of a conventional weapon bullet by 4.5 times.” After several minor episodes, the "Fantomas", already having a ball machine, in the fall of 1972 they decided to attack collectors near the Strela store, located not far from the entrance of the steam locomotive repair plant. The Strela store was one of the last points on the route of the collection team, and there should have been a very large sum of money in the car. Vyacheslav had previously made fake numbers of the ROF series from adhesive tape (police cars then drove under this series in Rostov). It was planned to seize the car in advance and shoot the collection team from ball machine, reload bags of money and escape. On November 4, 1972, they seized a Volga car near the 2nd brick factory. The tied driver was locked in the trunk, and at about half past seven in the evening they drove up to the store. It turned out that, fortunately, that evening the collectors were delayed somewhere along the route. It was boring to wait, and Samasyuk suggested going for wine. They took wine all the way from “The Three Little Pigs” (a well-known store on the main street of Engels in past years) and when we returned to “Strela”, it turned out that the collectors had already passed. After drinking wine, the “phantomas” decided to intercept the collectors at the entrance to the regional bank. But this attempt also ended in failure. Then Vyacheslav decided to just drive around the city, and in Gvardeysky Lane, opposite the yeast plant, the Volga crashed into a tree at high speed. Vyacheslav and Samasyuk were injured, but managed to escape. The driver in the trunk was also seriously injured. 10. The latest case of the “Fantomas” is an attack on the cashiers of the Yuzhgiprovodkhoz Institute. The idea of ​​the robbery was born in Vyacheslav’s head at the moment when he came to the institute’s cash desk to get a job and, walking along the second floor corridor, saw the “Cashier” sign. The Fantomas learned that about four thousand people work at the institute. They calculated that with an average salary of 70-75 rubles, the total amount received from the State Bank should have been within 300 thousand rubles. This was the biggest jackpot in all the gang's activities. They prepared for the crime for several months - from March to June 1973. Every 7th and 22nd, “phantomas” with weapons under their clothes approached the institute and watched the cashiers. They decided to “take” on June 7th. ...At first everything went well for the “Phantomas”. On the second floor of the institute, Samasyuk and Gorshkov, pointing their revolvers at the cashier, snatched his bag with 125 thousand I48 rubles and, running down the stairs, jumped out into the street. All this happened in front of the institute’s employees, who rushed in pursuit. On the street, Samasyuk pointed the revolver towards his pursuers and pulled the trigger. There was a dry click: misfire! But this was enough for the people running after the “phantomas” to stop. Slava Tolstopyatov, who was on duty on the street, joined Samasyuk and Gorshkov, holding a machine gun at the ready... And at that moment he rushed at the criminals. Yes, many people still explain desperately brave act Martovitsky because he was allegedly drunk that day. These rumors are not worthy of mention: it is unlikely that even drunken courage will force one to go to the gun barrel. Vladimir was a truly brave man. He rushed to defend state money only because that’s how he was raised. He died. One of the streets in Rostov is named after him. Gorshkov shot at Martovitsky from a revolver. And then Tolstopyatov pierced him with a machine gun burst. This was the decisive moment. The shots near the institute were heard by a nearby police squad. The criminals went to Lenin Avenue - past the construction site of the Palace of Culture of the helicopter plant. And a junior police sergeant jumped out right at them. Samasyuk was the first to raise his revolver - and it misfired again! Rusov was not taken aback, and offhand, as he was taught in the border troops, released the entire clip after the “Phantomas”. It was like being in a cool action movie. The sergeant shot as a sniper: Samasyuk was wounded in the chest and both legs, Gorshkov - in the right buttock. The cartridges in the clip have run out. Rusov took cover behind the wall of building 105 to reload his pistol, and meanwhile the “phantomas” jumped out onto Lenin Avenue, seized an old Moskvich-402 standing by the side of the road, and rushed at full speed along Lenin towards Selmash. Rusov jumped out onto the pavement. It seemed that the bandits had left. But at that time, a GAZ-69 of the regional fire department was passing by, in which were Sergeant Gennady Doroshenko and Captain Viktor Salyutin. The firefighters were unarmed. But they quickly got their bearings in the situation, and without hesitation made the decision to pursue the armed criminals. - Sit down, sergeant! - Salyutin shouted to Rusov, opening the door of the gas car. Turning on the siren, they rushed in pursuit. Rusov’s partner, policeman Evgeniy Kubyshta, also joined her: he stopped a passing UAZ minibus and ordered the driver to catch up with the Moskvich. Near the building materials plant, the pursued Moskvich suddenly stopped. As it turned out later, Vyacheslav decided to throw grenades at his pursuers. But... in the front seat, the half-mad Gorshkov was groaning in pain and fear; in the back, lying on a bag of money, (the prophetic words came true!) Samasyuk, who had received a bullet in the heart, was dying. The pursuers were also cautious and did not come close. But they weren’t going to lose sight of the bandits... In general, after standing for a minute, Vyacheslav rushed off in the Moskvich further along Lenin Street. Driving through the Square of the Land of Soviets, on the roundabout, Vyacheslav very impolitely “cut off” a brand new GAZ-24 Volga. This car was used by taxi drivers for the economic needs of their taxi fleet. They were infuriated by the impudence of the Moskvich, and they also rushed in pursuit - just to punch the lout driver in the face. The taxi drivers had no idea who they were pursuing... Then events took an even more exciting turn. Before turning onto Trolleybusnaya Street, the engine of the firefighting GAZ truck suddenly stalled, and the Moskvich with the Phantomas disappeared around the bend. Salyutin and Rusov, in the excitement of pursuit, jumped out of the car and rushed to run after him, and - lo and behold! - just around the bend they saw a stuck Moskvich! It turned out that the taxi drivers on the Volga, in turn, having caught up with the Moskvich, cut it off so much that it flew onto a high curb and got stuck on it, sitting tightly on the rear axle. The taxi drivers got out of their Volga to hit the lout driver in the face, but they recoiled when they saw a grenade in Tolstopyatov’s hand.
And here Vyacheslav allowed fatal error, the second on that fateful day. If he had captured the taxi driver's Volga, he would have had a chance to escape. But instead, he, picking up the wounded Gorshkov and a bag of money, rushed to the brick wall of Rostselmash, hoping to climb over it and hide on the territory of the giant plant. But Rusov was already running towards him with a pistol in his hands, and Salutin, unarmed but full of determination. Vyacheslav threw the money bag and the wounded Gorshkov, and reluctantly raised his hands up. And more and more police cars drove up to the wall of Rostselmash: the entire garrison was alerted. 11. Then, in the heat of the moment, the police had not yet realized that they had detained the very “phantomas” whom they had been chasing unsuccessfully for several years in a row. The wounded Gorshkov was taken from the place of detention to the Central City Hospital, Tolstopyatov to the Oktyabrsky district police department. Samasyuk was already dead. Vyacheslav immediately, at the very first interrogation, quite frankly began to list episodes of the activities of his gang. Those present were stunned... Investigators went to Tolstopyatov’s house, on Pyramidnaya Street, 66-a. A search was ordered there. At first, nothing criminal was found in the house. But they discovered a cable underground: Tolstopyatov was quietly stealing electricity (not his biggest sin!). The cable led to an outbuilding in the courtyard, where there was both a home and a workshop of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov. At first they were very afraid that the outbuilding was mined. We went inside with caution. Measurements showed that the internal volume of the room is much smaller than the external parameters of the building. This means there is a hiding place in the outbuilding! By tapping, they determined that behind one of the walls, into which a large wall mirror was mounted, there was emptiness. At first glance, the mirror was bolted in place. However, the bolts did not unscrew! They were just camouflage. One of the assistants, having climbed onto a stool, began to twist the top bolt in the middle of the wall, when suddenly the mirror moved right towards him! This was the entrance to the hiding place. There were shelves behind the mirror. And on them are stacked machine guns, pistols, grenades, boxes of ammunition... Alexey Rusov was summoned to Moscow for a reception with the USSR Minister of Internal Affairs N.A. Shchelokov. Nikolai Anisimovich personally presented Rusov with the “Excellence in Police” badge, a cash prize and a valuable gift - a “VEF-204” radio receiver. Rusov's name was included in the Book of Honor of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, his photograph was hung on the Board of Honor in the ministry. The other three employees of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Rostov Region - Salyutin, Kubyshta and Doroshenko - were not forgotten either. The investigation, headed by the most experienced employee of the regional prosecutor's office A. Sokolov, lasted almost a year. In April 1974, the trial began in the “Phantomas case.” The trial (chaired by V.F. Levchenko) aroused the interest of not only central but also foreign media. “Finally, gangsters have appeared in Russia,” the Western press spoke in this spirit. Eleven people appeared before the court: the Tolstopyatov brothers, Gorshkov, as well as all those who in one way or another contributed to the many years of successful activity of the “phantomas”... The large hall of the Rostov Regional Court was filled to capacity. The situation was nervous. The possibility of a terrorist attack was not excluded (there was a suspicion that some of Vyacheslav’s friends would try to free him). Member of the regional court V.F. Levchenko recalls an incident that is memorable to many. During the hearing, one of the upper windows was open - almost under the high ceiling of the courtroom: television crews had pulled some kind of cable through it. And suddenly, in the midst of the silence reigning in the meeting, a roar was heard. It was the window frame that collapsed, falling off from above (probably it was removed and poorly secured). Everyone jumped up from their seats. “Calm down!” said the presiding officer. “This is not at all the case that is being talked about in the city.” “What are they talking about in the city?” - Vyacheslav immediately became wary. Was he hoping for something? Gorshkov was a pitiful and comical sight. "Citizens judges! Mitigate the punishment! I am a disabled person of banditry!" - he addressed the court quite seriously, causing laughter in the hall. He wanted to save his life at any cost, and blamed all the sins on his brothers. Vyacheslav was noticeably angry about this, and he treated his former friend with pointed contempt. He called him “bullet catcher” - after all, Gorshkov was wounded three times during various raids. Vladimir remained silent during the trial. Vyacheslav acted out the fun, tried to make fun. IN last word the brothers asked the court to spare their lives. “If at first I was overcome by the passion for design, then later the question rested only on money. The injury of one of us unsettled me, continuous nervous tension, the nerves were subjected to a triple test - this had a detrimental effect on the mind. I could no longer think creatively, as before, any event caused trauma, I was haunted by the nightmare of what was happening, its meaninglessness. You can’t blame me for envy and greed, I’m used to being content with little, I shouldn’t live for the sake of sweetness. I was surrounded by people, I alone had to think for everyone. But nothing goes unpunished, especially meanness. With my will, I could have become what I wanted, but I became a criminal and am responsible for this before the court" (from the last word of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov). The Tolstopyatov brothers and Vladimir Gorshkov were sentenced to death with confiscation of property. The remaining accomplices of the “phantomas” were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. 12. For another year, after the verdict was passed, the Tolstopyatovs were on death row in the Novocherkassk strict prison ST-3. They were given paper and drawing supplies. The brothers designed. They still hoped to invent something for which they would be given life. From the cassation appeal of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov (dated July 15, 1974). Written in beautiful, neat handwriting on ten pages: “I ask you for life, since it is given once and cannot be neglected. It is a pity, of course, that we realize the value of life late, but it is better to feel it late than never.. " Gorshkov was more succinct: "Save my life, I will atone for my guilt throughout my life." Vyacheslav, while on death row, developed a new design for an automatic 11mm pistol. Vladimir invented the “perpetum mobile” - a perpetual motion machine. He claimed that he knew how to build it: “...for about 20 years I was engaged in the invention of an engine without fuel, which I started, and I saw with my own eyes its endless movement...” There are still persistent rumors in Rostov that the Tolstopyatovs were left to live and locked up in some secret design bureau - for the sake of their design abilities. However, there is a certificate in the file: “The verdict of the Rostov Regional Court dated July 1, 1974 in the case of Vyacheslav Pavlovich Tolstopyatov, Vladimir Pavlovich Tolstopyatov and Vladimir Nikolaevich Gorshkov in relation to all three was executed on March 6, 1975.” From a reliable source, I heard the following story about their execution. The sentence was carried out in a special soundproof chamber equipped with a bullet trap. All three were told that their request for clemency had been rejected. The Tolstopyatov brothers greeted this news in silence. Gorshkov cried and begged for mercy. First, the sentence was carried out against Vladimir Tolstopyatov. Gorshkov came second, fully showing his cowardice before his death. Third - Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov. He only said: “Put me where this scum was not shot (he meant Gorshkov). I don’t want to get dirty with his blood.” These were his last words. Alexander OLENEV.

Rostov phantomas

From October 1968 to June 1973, the gang of Tolstopyatov brothers carried out 14 armed attacks

In 1968, a brutal and well-armed gang appeared in Rostov-on-Don. Over the course of three months, she carried out four attacks on collectors and cashiers of state-owned enterprises, during which two people were killed. Like the screen Fantômas, the raiders go to work in black nylon masks.
The gang's tactics were at the forefront of the criminal world at that time. Many Rostovites suspected the gang of collaborating with Western intelligence services. These tactics included the “correct” bank robbery, hostage taking, surveillance and collection of information after the action, evasion, conspiracy, alibi preparation, retraining, conspiratorial treatment and disguise. For personal disguise, the gang members used black stockings, which is why they received the nickname “Fantômas”.
The gang attempted its first attack on October 7, 1968. On this day, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samasyuk and Gorshkov seized a car belonging to the Rostov Watch Factory with the aim of robbing a cashier at the building of the Regional Office of the State Bank of the USSR on the corner of Engels Street (now Bolshaya Sadovaya) and Sokolov Avenue. The attack was preceded by a long preparation: the bandits monitored the process of cashiers receiving money and established on what days and hours the most intensive issuance of money occurs. However, the driver D. Arutyunov, upon seeing the pistol, sharply pressed the brake and jumped out of the car. Then the bandits decided not to attack that day, realizing that he would report the capture to the police. The car was abandoned in the yard of the House of Actors. In order not to give unnecessary noise to this matter, Vyacheslav himself called the police from a pay phone and reported where the car was, adding that he and his friends decided to play a prank on the driver, but he did not understand the joke and was afraid of a water pistol.

Vladimir Tolstopyatov, Vladimir Gorshov and Sergey Samasyuk

Three days later, an attempt was made to attack the cashier of the Rostov shoe factory in the car of the Tolstopyatovs’ accomplice Srybny. To prevent Srybny from being suspected of complicity, his hands were first tied. But even here the Fantomas were unlucky: first they did not have time to attack the cashier before she got into the car, and then this car unexpectedly, in violation of traffic rules, turned into the factory gates.
On October 22, 1968, bandits broke into store No. 46 in the village of Mirny. They opened fire indiscriminately and headed towards the cash register. But the cashiers managed to hide the bulk of the money; the loot that day amounted to only 526 rubles. G.S. Chumakov, a pensioner and war participant who happened to be nearby, tried to detain the raiders, but was killed by a machine-gun burst in the back by Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov. On November 25, 1968, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samasyuk and Gorshkov, having stolen a car that belonged to the Rostov radio engineering school, tied up the driver and drove to the Oktyabrsky branch of the State Bank. As soon as a woman with a bag appeared from the door, Samasyuk ran up to her with a machine gun, fired into the air and snatched the bag from the woman. There were 2,700 rubles in the bag. On December 29, 1968, the Tolstopyatov gang attacked a grocery store on Mechnikov Street; production amounted to 1,498 rubles. The Tolstopyatov gang made an unsuccessful attack on the Chemical Plant named after the October Revolution, although the attack was prepared meticulously: Vyacheslav himself came to the plant, tried to get a job, read advertisements on the stands, found out the days when wages were brought, looked at the cashiers, watched the machine bringing money from jar. And yet the attack failed: the bag with the money was carried not by the cashier, but by the security guard. Shots into the ground did not help either. The guard with the bag ran inside the plant, then pulled out his revolver and pointed it towards the attackers. Shots rang out. The Tolstopyatov gang had to run away, they were rushing to their car, and shots were heard from behind, one bullet hit Gorshkov in the back. They barely escaped pursuit in a truck captured along the way. Realizing that a raid had begun on them in the city, they decided to lie low. The break lasted for a year and a half. During this period, the gang did not take any active actions. Gorshkov was healing his back, and at that time Samasyuk was sent behind barbed wire for some minor crime. In August 1971, the Tolstopyatov gang got together and on August 25 attacked construction organization UNR-112; production amounted to 17 thousand rubles. On December 16, 1971, the Tolstopyatov gang attacked collectors at the savings bank on Pushkinskaya Street; production amounted to 20 thousand rubles. In this attack, Gorshkov was wounded in the arm. From October 1968 to June 1973, the “phantomas” carried out 14 armed attacks, killing two townspeople and wounding three. The total amount of loot was about 150 thousand rubles.


In the fall of 1972, the Tolstopyatov brothers create a gangster machine gun that shoots 7.98 mm balls. The rate of fire and penetration of this terrible weapon were amazing. From three meters away, a shot from such a machine gun pierced a railway rail! The barrel of the machine gun was made to break, and this feature made it possible to carry the weapon unnoticed under clothing. The length of the machine is 655 mm. The length of the weapon when folded is 345 mm. The length of the chamber with the stop for the cartridge case is 65 mm. The length of the folding part of the barrel is 325 mm. The bore is smooth. The kinetic energy of the smooth-bore machine gun created by Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov exceeds the kinetic energy of a conventional weapon bullet by 4.5 times.
The end of the gang came on June 7, 1973, during an attempt to rob the cash desk of the Yuzhgiprovodkhoz Research Institute. The car, captured by the gang, was stopped after a slight collision with a train, and a shootout ensued with police officers. Sergei Samasyuk was killed right on the bag of money, Gorshkov again received a gunshot wound and was detained along with the others. On July 1, 1974, a verdict was passed, according to which three gang members (Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Vladimir Tolstopyatov, Vladimir Gorshkov) received capital punishment.

When the first part of the French trilogy about Fantômas was released in Soviet cinemas in 1967, few of the viewers of the film, which was an unprecedented success for the audience, could have imagined that around the same time a gang would appear in the Soviet Union, which the people would call only “Fantômas” . For the two peaceful decades that have passed since the defeat of the post-war criminal gangs, the appearance of Soviet “phantomas” was a shocking event.

Brothers Tolstopyatov

On October 22, 1968, three men burst into the Gastronom store in the village of Mirny in the Pervomaisky district of Rostov-on-Don. Two of them had black women's nylon stockings on their heads, the third had green ones. Soviet gangsters arrived at the store on a tram. One of the bandits stood in the doorway, clutching a homemade machine gun. A man in a green stocking on his head walked into the center of the store, also with a machine gun at the ready, and a third criminal, armed with a pistol, rushed to the cash registers. But there was little money in the cash register. Having taken the proceeds, the bandits ran out of the store. Here the criminals encountered an elderly man. Guriy Semenovich Chumakov, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, could not pass by when a crime was openly committed before his eyes. He tried to grab one of the bandits. A man in a green stocking mask shot Guriy Semenovich with four shots from a machine gun. The victorious warrior died 23 years after the victory on a Rostov street in a village with the characteristic name “Mirny”. The bandits successfully escaped. True, the jackpot at the Gastronom store was small - some 526 rubles 84 kopecks. There's not much to go around, but it seemed enough to the organizer of the gang - the same man in the green stocking. After all, the raid on the grocery store was the first serious “case” of the gang, which entered Russian crime as the “gang of Phantomas”, or “gang of the Tolstopyatov brothers”.

Nakhalovsky “universities” of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov

One of the brothers was the man in the green stocking who killed war veteran Guriy Chumakov in cold blood. The bandit's name was Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov. At the time of the events described, he was 28 years old. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was born in 1940 in the Bryansk region, in the usual Soviet family middle income. Besides him, the mother had another son - an older brother, Vladimir Tolstopyatov, born in 1929. The brothers' father, by a cruel irony of fate, served in the police - and not just as an ordinary policeman, but as the head of a district department. When did the Great Patriotic War, the head of the family almost immediately found himself at the front and soon died. The Tolstopyatov family fled from the Bryansk region to the east and settled in Rostov-on-Don. Here the mother managed to get a job and find housing. In a small outbuilding on Pyramidnaya Street, in house No. 66A, the Tolstopyatov brothers spent their childhood and youth.

Outbuilding of the Tolstopyatov brothers.

Pyramidnaya Street is Nakhalovka. Officially, Nakhalovka was called the New Settlement, but among Rostovites the area was better known by its first name. Back in the second half of the 19th century, areas on the outskirts of the city began to be populated by workers and artisans, who unauthorizedly erected houses and small houses on empty plots. This is how Nakhalovka appeared. Later, after the revolution, Nakhalovka began to grow to the north quite officially - the city authorities allocated land for private construction. This is how a “new” New settlement appeared, to which Pyramidnaya Street geographically belongs. The people who lived here were always dashing, different from the inhabitants of the apartment buildings in the city center. Nakhalovka had its own customs, which were strongly influenced by the criminal world and its subculture. Many of the “nakhalovites” themselves had been in prison, and almost every second inhabitant of the village was not a fool to drink. It was in this atmosphere that the Tolstopyatov brothers spent their youth. The mother earned little, and the family lived in poverty, denying themselves many things. Perhaps this is why the Tolstopyatov brothers dreamed throughout their youth of a good life, in which they would not have to count every penny and save on the essentials. But almost everything soviet people in those years people lived poorly and only a few thought that their financial situation could be improved criminally, especially through robberies and murders of innocent citizens.

However, the Tolstopyatov brothers did not immediately take the path of committing violent crimes. Younger brother, Vyacheslav, was a man not deprived artistic talents. Since childhood, he loved to draw, and he was especially good at drawing pictures and reproducing their details almost identically. Having started by copying illustrations in children's books, by the age of fifteen, Slava Tolstopyatov switched to banknotes. He produced counterfeit banknotes in denominations of 50 and 100 rubles that were almost identical to Soviet money. However, the question arose - how to sell the drawn banknotes. Slava came up with his own method - he got into a taxi, drove some distance and then handed the driver a bill, receiving change. Vyacheslav held out the folded bill and gradually became insolent to such an extent that he began to draw money on only one side. This is where the popular saying “greed ruined the fratern” came into play. On February 23, 1960, he once again got into a taxi and asked to be taken to the Suburban Station. However, the taxi driver still unfolded the bill and saw that a blank sheet of paper was looking at him on the other side.

Pyramidnaya Street, like other streets of the New Settlement, has noticeably improved these days

Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was arrested. He was only twenty years old at the time of his arrest. The boy's youth and artistic abilities misled investigators. They thought that the young man had made a mistake in life and, having received a small punishment, would correct himself and become an ordinary citizen, a law-abiding member of society. The well-known Rostov journalist Alexander Olenev quotes the words of investigator A. Granovsky, who just happened to handle the first case of Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov - about counterfeiting. Granovsky recalled that during an investigative experiment, Slava Tolstopyatov, “using colored pencils, watercolors, BF-2 glue, a compass, a ruler and a blade, in four hours (!) drew an absolutely exact copy of a 100-ruble bill.” This is about the artistic abilities of Tolstopyatov Jr. Another point is related to personal charm young man. “Even while under investigation,” recalled A. Granovsky, “Vyacheslav won everyone’s sympathy with his politeness, modesty, and erudition. It was a pleasure to talk with him. “I petitioned the court for a mitigation of the sentence - given my young age, complete repentance, and assistance provided to the investigation.” Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was sentenced to four years in prison. But the zone, as often happens, did not reform the young man, but only worsened his criminal tendencies. It was in the colony that Tolstopyatov finally realized that instead of grueling work at an enterprise or somewhere else, good money could be obtained through criminal means. Having been burned by counterfeiting, he decided immediately after his release to take more decisive action. Namely, to rob a bank.

The goal is to rob a bank

In the winter of 1964, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was released after serving his sentence. He told his older brother Vladimir about his plans, who also liked the younger brother’s idea. Tolstopyatov Sr. was also a man not without talents. He had pronounced artistic abilities and even worked at one time as an artist at the city zoo of Rostov-on-Don. In addition, Vladimir Tolstopyatov was fond of technology and design. It was he who actually became the “gunsmith” of the gang and its ideological inspirer. Almost immediately after the release of the younger Tolstopyatov, the brothers began preparing crimes. They took the matter seriously. Firstly, the brothers decided to refuse to communicate with representatives of the traditional criminal world of Rostov. From his prison experience, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov knew that the criminal world is “stuffed” with police agents and those who pretend to be the most “thieves” crime bosses, may well turn out to be police informants. Therefore, the brothers preferred to communicate with those who were professional underworld was not illuminated.

Secondly, the Tolstopyatovs decided to arm themselves with firearms. Since getting a ready-made firearm in those years was problematic and risky, they decided to make the weapon themselves. For almost four years, the brothers made weapons and prepared morally and organizationally to commit crimes. The Tolstopyatovs independently developed drawings of pistols and submachine guns. Two small-caliber TOZ-8 rifles were used to make the barrels. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, despite his criminal record, was able to get a job as the head of the DOSAAF small-caliber shooting range and obtained small-caliber cartridges there. Having reached an agreement with familiar factory workers, the brothers gave them orders for the production of complex parts, of course, hiding their true purpose and claiming that the parts were needed as spare parts for household appliances. By the time they committed their first crimes, the Tolstopyatovs had acquired four seven-round revolvers, three folding submachine guns, several hand grenades and even body armor made of steel plates.

The backbone of the Phantomas gang. Above are the Tolstopyatov brothers. Below - Vladimir Gorshkov, Sergey Samosyuk

The closest accomplices of the Tolstopyatov brothers were Sergei Samosyuk and Vladimir Gorshkov. Special mention should be made about them. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov knew Samosyuk from serving his sentence together in prison. Only Sergei got there for hooliganism - he was a rather primitive person, prone to alcohol abuse. Having been released a little later than Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Sergei Samosyuk immediately expressed a desire to join the gang as soon as he became acquainted with Slava’s idea of ​​bank robbery. Vyacheslav met Samosyuk at the wine barrel. Drunk Samosyuk then uttered a prophetic phrase: “It is better to die on a bag of money than by a wine barrel.” Vladimir Gorshkov was a childhood friend and neighbor of the Tolstopyatov brothers. He, too, was not distinguished by either great abilities or courage, but he wanted to live without doing anything. It was Gorshkov who provided part of his house for organizing an underground workshop there, in which Vladimir and Vyacheslav constructed homemade weapons.

The bandits were plagued by misfortunes

The Tolstopyatov brothers and their accomplices Samosyuk and Gorshkov decided to take the first case in 1968. On October 7, 1968, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Samosyuk and Gorshkov decided to rob a cashier near the State Bank building on the street. Engels. Here cashiers received money to pay employees. In order to quickly leave the crime scene, the bandits decided to seize a car. On Engels Street they got into Dzeron Arutyunov’s Volga. However, the driver, seeing a gun pointed at him, jumped out of the car screaming and ran away. The attack plan failed. Out of fear that the driver would contact the police and they would be detained for theft, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov decided to get out of the situation. He himself called the police and reported where the car was parked, and explained his behavior as a prank by the driver. Like, he and his friends decided to joke with the driver, but he didn’t appreciate the joke, got scared of the toy gun and ran away.

Three days later, on October 10, bandits tried to rob the cashier of a shoe factory. To do this, they agreed with a certain Evgeny Rybny, who provided them with his Moskvich-407 car. Rybny himself was in the car in the back seat, tied up - this was his condition, so that in case of anything it would appear that the car had been seized from him. In Rybny's Moskvich, the bandits were waiting for the cashier near the bank building, but she managed to quickly get into the GAZ-51. The GAZ driver rushed away from the bank at high speed and soon turned into an alley and drove into the gates of a shoe factory. The bandits were left with nothing. And on October 22, an attack took place on a grocery store in the village of Mirny - the gang’s first real case and the first murder of a person. It was after the first crime, in which Tolstopyatov and his accomplices used nylon stockings as masks, that rumors spread throughout Rostov about a certain gang of “phantomas” committing dashing robbery attacks.

Two weeks later, on November 5, 1968, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Sergei Samosyuk attacked the car of the Rostov Main Gas Pipelines Department. Opening the front door, Tolstopyatov demanded that the driver (his name was Viktor Arutyunov) get out of the car. At that moment, Sergei Samosyuk sat down on the other side next to the driver. But Arutyunov did not listen to the bandits and rushed from his place to fast speed, deciding to take Samosyuk, who was sitting next to him, to the police. Samosyuk shot at the driver, but Arutyunov managed to turn onto the tram line and stop the car in front of the approaching tram. Samosyuk managed to jump out of the car and run. However, at the end of 1968, the bandits still managed to carry out two successful attacks - on the 21st store of Gorpromtorg and on the cashier of automobile industry No. 5.

Weapons of the Phantomas gang

The next failure awaited the “Phantomas” in the spring of 1969. By this time, Sergei Samosyuk had managed to get caught for another drunken hooliganism and received a second term of imprisonment. Therefore, the bandits went to the “case” without Samosyuk. He was replaced by his “temporary accomplice” Boris Denskevich. On April 21, 1969, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Gorshkov and Denskevich set out to rob the cashier of the Rostov chemical plant. Having calculated the exact time when the cashier and the factory security guard brought money from the bank to pay wages to the factory workers, Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov waited with weapons in their hands at the factory entrance. According to the bandits' plan, they were supposed to take the bag of money from the cashier and the car keys from the security guard, and then flee the crime scene. Vladimir Tolstopyatov and Boris Denskevich, as they say, were “on guard.” They were supposed to watch the access roads and as soon as the collection vehicle appeared, signal Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov about this so that they would prepare for the attack. However, the bandits’ plan, which looked beautiful in words, immediately began to crack in practice. When Tolstopyatov Jr. pointed his weapon at the guard, he ran to the entrance and managed to take his service revolver out of his holster. Gorshkov shot at the driver of the car, but he managed to take the machine gun from Gorshkov. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, who came to the aid of his accomplice, also shot at the driver, wounding him in the arm. After being wounded, the driver let go of Gorshkov’s machine gun. The bandits ran to the first truck they came across, wounded the driver of the car in the arm and, throwing him out of the cab, rushed away from the plant. However, the enterprise's security guards managed to open fire on the fleeing criminals and wound Gorshkov in the back.

An unsuccessful attack on the cashier of a chemical plant, which almost ended in the arrest of the criminals, or even their liquidation by the enterprise’s security guards, forced the Tolstopyatov brothers to rethink their activities. Firstly, they realized that it was risky for the two of them to go on such attacks, and it was worth waiting until Sergei Samosyuk served his sentence in prison for hooliganism and was released. Despite the fact that Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov treated Sergei Samosyuk with a certain degree of contempt, considering him a primitive and unreliable person, and even dependent on alcohol and prone to senseless hooligan behavior, he understood perfectly well that Samosyuk, desperate and reckless, was a kind of , the “combat cell” of the criminal group. Without Samosyuk, with the cowardly Gorshkov, there was a risk of either falling into the hands of police officers or dying in a shootout. Secondly, the bandits decided that for their own safety and to prevent possible resistance from the guards and collectors, it was necessary to shoot first and to kill. In anticipation of the release of Samosyuk, they “lay low”, improving their weapons base and searching for targets for new attacks. Samosyuk was released in the summer of 1971 and, naturally, immediately expressed a desire to return to criminal activity.

The gang gets a taste

In August 1971, Tolstopyatov's comrades attacked the cashier of UNR-112, who was accompanied by an unarmed engineer and driver. Having fired into the air, the bandits frightened the UPR workers, who meekly gave them a bag containing 17,000 rubles. For that time, this was a huge amount - after all, a Soviet engineer received 120-200 rubles a month. The “phantomas” retreated from the scene of the crime on a UPR bus seized from the cashier, which was abandoned on the street along with a heavy bag - the bag contained 500 rubles in change and the bandits decided not to “fight for money”, leaving the inconvenient bag in the abandoned vehicle.
The captured jackpot whetted the appetites of the bandits. They began monitoring the next object - teams of State Bank collectors serving the savings bank area No. 0299. A plan was developed - to attack the collectors when two of them remained in the car, and one came out of the cash desk with money in a bag. The criminals watched the savings bank for almost two months and finally decided to attack. On December 16, 1971, they arrived at savings bank No. 0299, armed with machine guns and grenades and even wearing body armor. Sergei Samosyuk ordered the collectors sitting in the car to put their service weapons on the seat and get out of the car.

The driver of the car got out, and senior collector Ivan Zyuba, who was sitting behind him, fired a revolver at Vladimir Gorshkov and wounded him in the arm. In response, the bandits shot Ivan Zyuba with a machine gun. The third collector who jumped out of the savings bank opened fire on the retreating car and wounded Vladimir Gorshkov again. This time the bandits also managed to seize a huge amount - 17,000 rubles. The Volga with the body of senior collector Ivan Zyuba, who died in a shootout, was later discovered by the police at the city landfill. However, after this raid, the bandits were faced with a certain problem - the twice-wounded Gorshkov needed medical attention, but taking him to the hospital meant definitely attracting the attention of the police. After all, about any gunshot wounds doctors, even without the patient’s consent, report to law enforcement agencies. Therefore, two thousand rubles from the gang’s “common fund” were spent on Gorshkov’s treatment at home. For this purpose, the Tolstopyatovs brought the surgeon of the railway hospital, Konstantin Dudnikov, who provided services for a large reward. medical care Vladimir Gorshkov.

Despite the fact that within a few months the gang managed to seize funds that were colossal by Soviet standards, the Tolstopyatov brothers decided to continue their criminal activity and take it to a qualitatively higher level. Moreover, the whole city was talking about the emerging gang of “phantomas”, and it is possible that the Tolstopyatov brothers felt proud when they heard the next “ horror stories"about the elusive "phantomas". In the fall of 1972, the Tolstopyatovs designed and assembled a unique machine gun that fired nine-millimeter balls and had amazing penetration ability (a shot from this machine gun pierced a railway rail from a three-meter distance).

In the fall of 1972, the Tolstopyatovs began to hatch a new attack plan - this time the bandits’ eyes fell on the Strela store in the area of ​​the locomotive repair plant. According to the criminals, “Strela” was one of the final money collection points along the route of the cash-in-transit vehicle. Vyacheslav and Vladimir Tolstopyatov came up with the following plan of action. The criminals seize the car in advance, cover it with fake license plates made from adhesive tape, with the letters ROF, indicating that they belong to the police. Then they drive up to the collectors in a stolen car, shoot them with a machine gun and take away the bags of money. On November 4, 1972, in the area of ​​the 2nd brick factory, bandits seized a Volga car. The driver was tied up and loaded into the trunk, and they drove to the Strela store. But the collectors were delayed that day. The bandits in a stolen Volga, with the driver tied up in the trunk, at the request of Sergei Samosyuk, rushed to buy wine - to the Three Little Pigs store on the street. Engels. This was the height of arrogance - after all, the bandits’ route lay past the building where the regional administration police. In a drunken state, the “Phantomas” drove around Rostov until they crashed into a tree on Nakhalovka, on Gvardeysky Lane. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Sergei Samosyuk abandoned the car and disappeared. The driver, who was in the trunk, was rescued but was injured when the car collided with a tree.

The last case of the “phantomas”

The “phantomas” hatched the plan for their latest crime for several months. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov once went to the Yuzhgiprovodkhoz Institute for the purpose of employment. By chance, the cash register of the institution caught his eye and the bandit immediately had a thought in his head: “What if we rob the institute?” Tolstopyatov Jr. found out the number of workers at the institute - there were about four thousand people. Having summed up the average salary of employees at 70-75 rubles, the bandits received a fantastic figure - 300 thousand. For Soviet Union In those years it was unimaginable money, and in the history of the gang it could have become the largest profit. From that moment on, the criminals established surveillance of the institute, which lasted from March to June 1973. Twice a month - on the day of advance payment and payday, on the 7th and 22nd, criminals appeared at the institute building and observed what was happening. Finally they decided to commit a crime. On June 7, 1973, members of the “Fantomas” gang advanced to the institute. Roles were assigned. Sergei Samosyuk and Vladimir Gorshkov were supposed to directly attack the cashier at the entrance to the cash register. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was supposed to seize the car and ensure the unhindered departure of the bandits. Another new accomplice, Alexander Chernenko, who owned a service scooter, was supposed to take the bag with money given to him to the indicated place. Vladimir Tolstopyatov himself was at the crime scene, as always, observing what was happening for the purpose of subsequent analysis and analysis.

Sergei Samosyuk and Vladimir Gorshkov, armed with revolvers, burst into the institute building and took a bag with money from the cashier. They were able to leave the building and were already heading towards Chernenko, who was waiting for them on his scooter, when unarmed institute employees chased after them. In response to the cries of the institute workers, Vladimir Martovitsky, a loader from the nearby Gastronom store, rushed to help. He grabbed Gorshkov by the shoulder. Free yourself from the capture of a strong twenty-seven-year-old guy who was doing military service in Marine Corps, Gorshkov failed, and then Gorshkov and Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, who rushed to help, shot Martovitsky. Meanwhile, one of the institute’s employees, who rushed to look for the police, called a nearby policeman for help. Junior police sergeant Alexey Rusov ran towards the criminals with a pistol in his hands. Sergei Samosyuk shot at the policeman, but his revolver misfired. Alexey Rusov turned out to be a sharp shooter and hit the fleeing Samosyuk and Gorshkov. But while Rusov was hiding from retaliatory shots around the corner of the nearest house, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov seized a Moskvich car standing on the side of the road. The bandits got into the car and rushed towards Selmash. At this time, a fire department official vehicle was passing by, in which there were department employees, driver sergeant Gennady Doroshenko and captain Viktor Salyutin. Policeman Alexey Rusov jumped into their car, after which the three of them rushed in pursuit of the criminals’ “Muscovite.”

District inspector of the Oktyabrsky District Department of Internal Affairs, junior police lieutenant Evgeniy Kubyshta, stopped the minibus and also rushed after the fleeing criminals. Today Evgeniy Kubyshta is 69 years old. Fortunately, he is alive and even gives interviews to the press. In one of them, he told how in order to detain the “Phantomas” he had to seize the car of the deputy director of the Rostov Helicopter Plant: “I seized the car... at gunpoint. A civilian car, driver, deputy director of a helicopter plant. I just rushed to him, he was driving, in a hurry to take the boss to lunch. I tell him: “Stop!” He doesn’t understand, I then jumped out onto the car and threw myself at his window with a pistol. He slammed on the brakes and almost hit me. He shouts at me: “What are you doing, commander? I'm going to get the boss." I tell him, threatening him with a pistol: “If you don’t obey, you will feel bad.” After that, he slowed down, stopped, and let me into the car” (Quoted from: Evgeniy Kubyshta: To detain Tolstopyatov’s gang, I seized the car of the deputy director of the helicopter plant // Southern Region - Don).

Chance helped catch the criminals. On the Square of the Land of Soviets, “Phantomas” escaping from pursuit cut off the Volga of one of the city taxis. Taxi drivers, not knowing who they were contacting, also rushed after the impudent “Moskvich” in order to “talk like men.” In the end, the Volga taxi drivers were cut off by the Moskvich, and the latter flew onto the sidewalk and got stuck on the curb. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov jumped out of the Moskvich with a grenade, scaring off the taxi drivers. Grabbing the bag of money and taking the wounded Gorshkov by the arm, Tolstopyatov ran to the wall of the Rostselmash plant, hoping to climb over it and hide from pursuit. Sergei Samosyuk had by this time died from a fatal wound received as a result of a shootout with policeman Rusov, in the back seat of a stolen Moskvich. But Aleksey Rusov and captain Salyutin, armed with a pistol, were already running towards Tolstopyatov and the wounded Gorshkov. Tolstopyatov lowered the bag of money to the ground. This was the end of his criminal career and the beginning of the end life path. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov and Vladimir Gorshkov were arrested. Moreover, the gang leader immediately began to confess. From what Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was telling, the police officers were in a state of shock. It turned out that just like that, completely by accident, thanks to the heroically deceased loader Martovitsky and the young junior police sergeant Rusov, the legendary gang of “phantomas”, about which only the lazy had not spoken in Rostov for the last five years, was finally neutralized.

The court showed no leniency

The investigation into the case of the Tolstopyatov brothers lasted about a year. During a search in the outbuilding on Pyramidnaya, 66A, police officers discovered a cache where the criminals kept their arsenal - machine guns, pistols, grenades and ammunition. The cache was cleverly hidden behind a large wall mirror. The entire circle of people who assisted the bandits in their criminal activities was identified. Finally, in April 1974, the trial of the Phantomas gang began. There were 11 people in the dock. These were the Tolstopyatov brothers - Vyacheslav and Vladimir, Vladimir Gorshkov, as well as more minor and tertiary characters who provided all possible assistance to the gang. The Tolstopyatov brothers behaved with dignity, although in their last word they asked to spare their lives. Vladimir Gorshkov, who had never been particularly brave, cried and asked to commute the punishment, blaming the Tolstopyatov brothers as the initiators of criminal activity. He uttered absolutely comical phrases, asking the judges to show leniency towards him as a “disabled banditist.” However, the court's verdict was clear.

On July 1, 1974, Vladimir Pavlovich Tolstopyatov, Vyacheslav Pavlovich Tolstopyatov and Vladimir Nikolaevich Gorshkov were sentenced to capital punishment - the death penalty. However, after the verdict, they remained in the Novocherkassk investigative prison for about a year. Only on March 6, 1975, the sentence against the Tolstopyatov brothers and Vladimir Gorshkov was carried out. Accomplice of the "Phantomas" in last thing Alexander Ivanovich Chernenko was sentenced to 12 years in prison to be served in a maximum security colony on charges of banditry. The following were accused of aiding and abetting banditry: Denskevich Boris Konstantinovich - sentenced to 10 years in prison in a maximum security colony; Srybny Evgeniy Andreevich - sentenced to 5 years in prison in a maximum security colony; Zaritsky Viktor Nikolaevich - sentenced to six years in a maximum security colony; Nikolai Ivanovich Berestenev and Yuri Ivanovich Kozlitin were each sentenced to three years in prison in a general regime colony. The prosecution demanded that doctor Konstantin Matveevich Dudnikov, accused of harboring a bandit, be given five years in a general regime colony. However, the court reclassified the charge against the doctor from concealment to non-reporting.

Heroic participants in the arrest of the "Fantomas" gang

Heroes of gang arrest

As for the heroic participants in the arrest of the “Fantomas” gang, the memory of them is still alive in Rostov-on-Don. A street in the Voroshilovsky district of Rostov-on-Don is named after Vladimir Martovitsky, an ordinary guy, a loader who died, quite by accident. Alexey Aleksandrovich Rusov (1952-2000), who came to the police after military service in the border troops and was a policeman-driver of the PMG-16 (mobile police group) of the Oktyabrsky Department of Internal Affairs of Rostov-on-Don, was summoned to Moscow after the capture of a gang of “phantomas”. The Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, General Nikolai Shchelokov, personally promoted the young junior sergeant immediately to police lieutenant. The all-powerful Shchelokov then really liked the sincere and young police officer from Rostov-on-Don. Alexey Rusov worked in the criminal investigation department, then in the juvenile affairs department. In 1986, he was in Kyiv, attending advanced training courses for employees of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, from where he was sent to eliminate the consequences of the accident at Chernobyl nuclear power plant. There Alexey Alexandrovich received a dose of radiation. After Chernobyl, he worked for some time in the penitentiary authorities, then quit and worked as the head of the security service in a commercial organization. In 2000, being a 48-year-old man, Alexey Rusov died as a result of a second heart attack.

Viktor Afanasyevich Salyutin (1940-2000), the second direct participant in the detention of Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov, made a serious career in the fire department. He rose to the rank of Major General of the Internal Service and served as Head of the Department fire service Main Department of Internal Affairs of the Rostov region. He died at the age of sixty after a long illness. A street and alley in Rostov-on-Don are named after Alexey Rusov and Victor Salyutin. Evgeny Kubyshta for a long time worked in the internal affairs bodies of Rostov-on-Don, then retired.

The case of the “Fantômas” gang had an impact on the transformation of the very system of fighting crime in the Soviet Union. How he remembers former employee criminal investigation Anatoly Evseev, “The gangster “successes” of the Tolstopyatovs prompted the reorganization and creation of a modern police force. It was in Rostov-on-Don that PMGs were created for the first time in Russia - mobile police groups, patrol cars with a driver and two employees. After the gang was detained with their help, the Rostov experience was spread throughout the country. An additional payment for the rank appeared: junior lieutenant plus 30 rubles, lieutenant - 40, senior officer - 50. They began to strengthen the duty units" (Quoted from: Pilipchuk A. "Citizens judges! Mitigate the punishment! I am a disabled person of banditry!"). Perhaps the gang of Tolstopyatov brothers became the first example of post-war organized crime of this level in Rostov-on-Don, and in the Soviet Union as a whole. Its uniqueness lies in its originality, the virtual absence of connections with the professional criminal world and the existence “outside the field” of the traditional criminal subculture. At the same time, the Soviet law enforcement agencies, which initially had no experience in fighting such criminal groups, began to modernize their organizational structure, improved the mechanisms of activity. In Rostov, both young and old still know about the gang of “phantomas”, retelling to each other rumors and tales born forty years ago.

Materials used:
1. Kasyanov V. Tolstopyatovs. Once upon a time in Rostov // http://samlib.ru/w/wladimir_kasxjanow/tolstopjatovi.shtml.
2. Olenev A. The Tolstopyatov Brothers. A dozen reliable facts from the life of the Rostov “phantomas”.
3. Pilipchuk A. “Citizens judges! Reduce the punishment! I am a disabled person of banditry!” // http://pravo.ru/.

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In 1974, the Rostov Regional Court considered the case of the Tolstopyatov brothers. The uniqueness of this case was that the Tolstopyatov gang was “advanced” in the criminal world and was armed with homemade machine guns and revolvers - at that time it was easier to make weapons yourself than to buy them on the black market.

“Gangsterism is not a phenomenon for our soil!”

For two decades in the USSR, the courts did not consider cases of “banditry.” It was believed that the gangs were destroyed and could no longer be revived. However, there were criminal groups that carried out attacks, but their cases were classified as armed robbery - after all, there could be no bandits in the country of victorious socialism. In the 70s, prosecutors liked to repeat: “gangsterism is not a phenomenon for our soil!”

From 1968 to 1973, for 5 years, the Tolstopyatov gang kept Rostov-on-Don in suspense. They were called "phantomas" because they disguised themselves by pulling women's black stockings over their heads for camouflage. Over 5 years, the Tolstopyatov gang carried out 14 armed attacks: on cashiers of government agencies and enterprises, on collectors, on stores and stole 150 thousand rubles. Today these figures seem insignificant, but then the number of attacks and the amount taken was amazing.

Who was part of the criminal group

The Tolstopyatov gang consisted of 4 people: Vladimir and Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, Vladimir Gorshkov and Sergey Samasyuk. They received the nickname “Fantômas” not only because they put women’s stockings on their heads, but also because the premiere of the 3rd part of the film about Fantômas occurred during the group’s activities.

The founder of the gang, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov, was born in 1940 in Bryansk. As a child, he loved to draw, design, especially sketch, ensuring that his copy of the drawing did not differ from the original. At the age of 15, he learned to draw banknotes and exchanged them in wine and vodka stores. I threw away the alcohol and used the change to buy myself sweets, books, and pencils. Over time, he began selling copied banknotes to taxi drivers.

He saw that the taxi drivers did not unfold the banknotes, and began to copy the money on only one side. This was his undoing: one of the taxi drivers unfolded the bill and saw that there was nothing on the other side! Vyacheslav was sent to prison for 4 years in a general regime colony.

In prison he met Sergei Samasyuk, and there they began to develop a gang plan. Upon his release, Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov enlisted the support of his older brother, Vladimir Tolstopyatov. The fourth member of the gang was Vladimir Gorshkov, who was an old acquaintance of the brothers.

The Tolstopyatov gang: the beginning

Rostov “found out” about the gang in October 1968, when the Tolstopyatovs and their accomplices seized a car from the Rostov watch factory. Dzeron Arutyunov was driving. The Tolstopyatovs needed a car to attack the cashier of the Regional Office of the State Bank. But the attack did not take place: Arutyunov jumped out of the car, and the bandits realized that it was better not to use this car for their insidious purposes. Failure spurred on the bandits.

In October 1968, they tried to attack store No. 46 in the village of Mirny. But the cashiers were able to hide the proceeds, and the bandits were able to take away only 526 rubles. In November, a gang robbed a woman near the Oktyabrsky branch of the State Bank. They took the woman’s bag, which contained 2,700 rubles. In December, the Tolstopyatovs robbed a grocery store on Mechnikov Street in Rostov and “enriched themselves” by as much as 1,498 rubles.

After three not very successful attacks, the bandits realized that they were poorly prepared. It was decided to rob the Chemical Plant. The Tolstopyatovites approached the preparation of the case scrupulously: Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov tried to get a job at the plant, found out the days when salaries were paid, watched the cashiers, the car that brought the money... And again they missed: on the “X-day” the bag with the money was carried not by the cashier, but by the security guard. The man was not afraid, he ran into the factory building, pulled out his revolver and drove away the bandits. After this, the Tolstopyatovs “lay low” for a year and a half.
In 1971, the Tolstopyatov gang attacked the construction organization UNR-112 and were able to take away 17 thousand rubles. In December 1971, they also robbed collectors near the savings bank and were able to “earn” 20 thousand rubles. There were 14 attacks in total, the total amount of loot was 150 thousand rubles.

Homemade weapons

Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was responsible for arming the gang. The weapons were manufactured in semi-industrial conditions: blanks were made in the workshop, parts were ordered to milling machine operators at the factory “through connections.” Before the series of attacks began, 4 revolvers, 2 pistols of a unique design, 11 grenades and even body armor were manufactured.

Developed bandit tactics

Despite the initial failures, the attack tactics were at that time advanced for the world of criminals. The Tolstoy Pyatovites had 2 options for robbery: first, one of the bandits stops the car asking for a ride. After he managed to catch the car, the bandit asked him to be taken to the designated place, where other gang members were waiting for him. The driver was tied up and placed in the back seat or trunk. Vyacheslav Tolstopyatov was always the “driver”, and Samasyuk and Gorshkov carried out the attack. After that, the car drove away at great speed, the driver and the car were left somewhere in an inconspicuous place.

In another case, a collector's car was seized at the scene of the attack. Then they committed a crime in this car and disappeared.

Vladimir Tolstopyatov did not participate in the “active phase” of the crime. Usually he worked in the rear: he ideologically inspired the group, observed the situation after the crime was committed, monitored the police and listened to the stories of witnesses.

Detention

To detain the bandits, the operational headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Affairs created mobile response teams and equipped several police cars with radios. In the early summer of 1973, the Tolstopyatov gang was caught: they were trying to rob the cash desk of the Yuzhgiprovodkhoz Research Institute. During the arrest, Sergei Samasyuk was killed and Gorshkov was injured.

Sentence

On July 1, 1974, the brothers Tolstopyatov and Vladimir Gorshkov were sentenced to death. 8 accomplices received different prison terms for complicity or failure to report. All complaints were rejected, and on March 6, 1975, the brothers Tolstopyatov and Gorshkov were shot.