Corrupted by a wolf's charms
They call him the Wolf, and he is the most feared Russian criminal of a decade which has produced thousands of his kind - young thugs willing to kill for a few dollars. Men who were brutalised by years of Soviet repression and who in turn have used violence and fear to earn easy money in the most brutally capitalist country on Earth.
But the Wolf was no hired gun. He was different. And as he awaits execution in a St Petersburg prison, his every utterance holds a nation in thrall.
Sergei Maduev was born in Kazakhstan, where his family had been exiled by Stalin. He was five when his mother - a prostitute and an alcoholic - forced him on to the streets to sell hashish.
At 13, he was accused of murdering his mother's lover and imprisoned. By the age of 20 he had a long criminal record. 'I had so many aliases that sometimes I find it hard to remember my real name,' he confessed.
He chose to operate on his own because he trusted no one. Criminals of that type are rare in the Russian underworld, which refers to them as 'volchara' - wolves.
'He had a sense of absolute freedom about him which he achieved by having no obligations to anyone,' according to Leonid Proshkin, the prosecutor who eventually tracked him down.
In 1990, he was arrested after a violent spree that lasted 18 months and included more than 80 robberies and five murders. He was clearly facing the death penalty, and he would stop at nothing to save his skin.
Enter Natasha Vorontsova, a young female prosecutor, who was hand-picked to handle his case. She had 'no attachments' - her child and husband had been killed in an accident - and therefore would not be vulnerable to threats. She was plain-looking, idealistic - an incorruptible. But sensing her loneliness, Maduev brought her under his spell.
She could not resist his overpowering charisma. Soon she became besotted with him. 'There was so much pain in his eyes, the eyes that couldn't lie,' she said from her labour camp, where she is serving a seven-year sentence.
Using the tactics of a practised seducer ('always tell a clever woman that she is pretty and a pretty woman that she is clever'), Maduev bombarded Natasha with compliments and promises of eternal love. 'He could see the woman in me,' she said.
'As a woman, she was available,' said Maduev. 'For me she was just a prosecutor dragging me to the death penalty.' When Natasha said she would wait for him to serve his 15-year term, Maduev knew she was under his control. He tricked her into stealing a gun. Having promised Natasha that the gun would never be fired, he shot and wounded a prison guard during an escape attempt several days later.
Back behind bars he denounced her to the KGB. Amazingly, Natasha was still reluctant to believe that Maduev was a villain and continued to love him.
A huge tattoo on his stomach depicts, among other things, a cloud. 'This is my freedom covered with mist,' Maduev explains. His concept of freedom was misty indeed.
Maduev wanted to take vengeance for his purposeless life on humankind, thus giving his life some sort of a purpose. That is why he betrayed everyone who helped him.
'Yes, I used Natasha, but I warned her,' he smiles, showing a tattoo on his chest: 'If you haven't known grief, love me!' And she did. Even now, sitting on her bunk in prison, her life and career in ruins, the incorruptible and yet corrupted Natasha keeps repeating like a mantra: 'He must live . . . He must live . . .'
