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.