The other evening, I went to a new Russian restaurant in London. It was a modest family affair, with a mum and daughter doing the cooking, and a son-in-law taking care of the tables out front. I'd heard that the food was good and that the kids of the Russian community hung out there at night, joined by the odd clerk and counsellor from the Russian Embassy. So it seemed worth a visit. Besides, it was the sort of place which you just can't find in Moscow any more: It was friendly, people said, informal and cheap. Pleasant to hang out in.


Imagine my surprise when I arrived there, then, to find it dominated by a large group of beefy young men, crop-haired, all dressed in black -- with a couple of women, also dressed in black, got up as 1920s vamps: kohl-eyed, extravagantly lip-slicked, and with pinched faces framed by frozen waterfalls of hair. A forest of expensive bottles was on the table in front of them; a Mercedes limo was parked outside; and a mobile telephone, permanently tuned to Moscow, was noisily being passed hand to hand.


It was eerily reminiscent, I thought, of a night I'd once spent in a Leninsky Park restaurant which had clearly been taken over for a gathering of every major Chechen hood in the city. So I asked the daughter, when she came to the table, who on earth they were. "Oh," she said, turning to look toward them and then laughing "they're just a bunch of new-rich Russian kids who go to school in England."


For the last year or so, the British newspapers have been regularly announcing that the Russian mobs are coming -- and then that they've arrived. Russian hoods, they say, have now brought up all the most valuable properties to appear on the market; they've brought hookers to Northampton, grenades to south London, arms to northern Ireland, and drugs and massive money laundering operations to virtually wherever you look.


The problem is that as soon as you actually examine any of these stories with more than a passing interest, it's plain that there's not a scrap of real evidence in any of them -- which goes to show either that investigative journalism isn't what it used to be in Britain, or that the papers are peddling -- via rumor and tittle-tattle -- what the public wants to hear: i.e. that Russians are thrillingly criminal, generally up to no good, and right here -- look! -- in our midst.


I myself am inclined to favor the second option -- especially after a visit I paid to London's National Criminal Intelligence Service a couple of days after my night at the caf?. Now the NCIS is often invoked to underwrite in a general sort of way whatever is written in British papers about Russians. ("NCIS sources have revealed. ... "An NCIS investigation has shown. ... etc.) So my meeting with "an NCIS spokesman" of my own was very revealing -- or actually it wasn't.


For every time I mentioned to "the spokesman" a category of crime in which Russians are said to specialize, there followed what was (to me) an embarrassing silence. Grenades, nothing; drugs, nothing; extortion, nothing -- oh, there was one case of money-laundering, he seemed to indicate, but he couldn't or wouldn't tell me in whose jurisdiction it had taken place or anything else about it. He emphasized, instead, that Russian organized crime was not really a problem in Britain -- though it "could well become one." In the meantime the NCIS was "keeping an extremely careful watch on the situation," comparing notes with other countries" and (all round) "staying on guard."


What I think is really going on in all this, behind the scenes, is that there's gold for the Western media in these here hills of Russian crime. The newspapers write stories about criminal Russians -- and the television repeats them -- so that the audience, scared, will stay home and read newspapers (and watch television) rather than go out and actually meet a Russian. Simultaneously, now that there's not much money to be gained by declaring that the old Soviet army is much of a threat, there are empires to be built (mostly police ones) in maintaining that Russian hoods are the next wave of the plague. Newspapers and police collude together in the re-demonizing of that old Red Menace -- to their considerable mutual profit.


I'm not sure what the moral of all this is exactly. Probably only that new-rich kids shouldn't dress up as the mafia in Britain, and we shouldn't take them at face value if they do. Trouble is, of course, that mafia style is in. And Russians like to go out, make a noise, spread money around and pretend that they're rich. Every time they do, though, the way things are, they feed a brand-new Western industry.