About Joe Serio

Joe Serio is the only American to have worked in the Organized Crime Control Department of the Soviet police.  In 1990-91, he served a year-long internship inside the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) of the USSR, where he had a front row seat to view the historic rise in the Russian Mafia during the collapse of an empire.

In the 1990s, he worked as a media consultant to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, and other media outlets.  In 1995, he began working as a consultant to the global corporate investigation and business intelligence firm, Kroll Associates.  In 1997, he was named director of Kroll's Moscow office overseeing investigations across the former Soviet Union.

He has visited the former Soviet Union a number of times in the past few years, with his most recent trip to Moscow being in February 2008.

Joe’s interactions with the roots of the mafia began in 1985 in New York when he met world class Soviet athletes, some of whom later went on to become major organized crime figures.  In 1986, he made his first visit to Moscow and several other cities, and returned a year later to study for six months at the prestigious Pushkin Russian Language Institute.

Investigating the Russian Mafia is a multidisciplinary approach to viewing the Russian mafia, including history, psychology, the economic system, and cultural underpinnings.  With an easy-to-read text and stories of personal experiences, the book has been well received not only by scholars, practitioners, and the international business community, readers with a general interest in Russia have found it to be accessible and user friendly.