According to the official history of forensic science, for the first time a car was used for criminal purposes by the Parisian anarchists from Jules Bonneau's gang. On December 21, 1911, they attacked a cash collector leaving the Societe Generale bank in Rue Ordener.
Engaged in self-promotion, the bandits informed the public through newspapers that they had declared war on bourgeois society. For four months, they killed a dozen people, seizing scanty booty, but the newspaper hype turned them into "fighters against injustice", revolutionary heroes.
The company of Moscow raiders did not seek cheap popularity, so the news of the crime in Sokolniki was lost in the sections of incidents and court reports of Moscow newspapers. However, the story of the raid on the artel worker of the Ding factory gives grounds to assert that the first "car raid" took place in Moscow, at least eight months earlier than it happened in Paris.
In the early 1910s, cars for Muscovites quickly ceased to be a curiosity and exotic. If in 1905, when they saw a "self-propelled carriage", they still pointed a finger at it, then after a couple of years they paid attention to them, except to examine the brand of the car and estimate its approximate cost.
Hired taxi exchanges have become a common part of urban life. On the morning of May 5, 1911, three young people rented a car on Voskresenskaya Square, driven by the driver Basikhin, and said that they needed to be taken to Sokolniki on Ogorodnaya Street.
They arrived at the place at about noon, after which the passengers asked Basikhin to wait for them while they cope with their business. After giving the driver a deposit and promising to pay afterwards, the whole company left the car, went down the alley from Ogorodnaya to Rybinskaya Street and settled down opposite the gates of Ding's confectionery and pasta factory, obviously waiting for someone.
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When, about half an hour later, a gentleman drove up to the gate of the pasta factory in a cab, the young people rushed to him. Two of them grabbed automatic Mausers from under their jackets and, pointing them at the rider and the cab, ordered them not to move.
The third raider picked up two trunks, which were brought with a cab passenger, after which all three rushed to the alley that led to Ogorodnaya Street. They jumped into a taxi and ordered Basikhin to drive as soon as possible to the village of Bogorodskoye, poking the driver in the back with the trunks of Mauser for persuasiveness.
Meanwhile, the robbed gentleman shouted, a janitor, factory watchmen and a policeman came running to his aid, to whom he told that he was taking the 6,500 rubles received from the bank to pay out salaries at the pasta factory.
The robbers dashed away in a car, but the pursuit of them was organized according to the rules of the new century. The car was noticed by witnesses, the policeman telephoned from the office of Ding's factory to the Central City District, giving the number of the taxi on which the hijackers drove away. In the Central District, it was established that the taxi belongs to the "Moscow Automobile Society", they telephoned the police of the Moscow district, from where a detachment of mounted guards was sent to search for a car with criminals.
Soon it was reported that the policemen Dementyev and Turnyak tried to stop the suspicious car near the bridge across the Yauza, but the taxi passengers opened fire and, seriously wounding Turni in the stomach, broke through.
Mansion of the manufacturer Johann Ding
This shooting attracted the attention of the entire area. Realizing that the car had become a dangerous sign, the criminals ordered Basikhin to stop. Taking the prey, they fled in different directions: one headed towards the village of Bogorodskoye, the other two - towards Rostokino.
The pursuit arrived in time, having learned from Basikhin where the robbers had fled, also divided. Chasing a couple of raiders, who fled to Rostokino, failed - the fleeing created a powerful obstacle on the way, throwing a pack of small money into the crowd of people.
While the police forced their way through the crowd, recklessly looking for ruble bills and silver coins in the dust, the raiders broke away from the pursuit and got lost in the forest.
Towards the morning of May 6, two young people came out to the gatehouse on the 10th verst of the Moscow-Yaroslavl railway, asking the guard how to get to the nearest station, explaining that they had left the company at a picnic and got lost. The guard pointed the way, but as soon as they were out of sight, reported the incident to the police. On the trail of the raiders, they let a sniffer dog, Doberman Tref, but, having brought the detectives to the Losinoostrovskaya station, the dog lost the trail.
The policemen acted much more successfully, chasing after the third criminal, who ran towards the village of Bogorodskoye. His signs were transferred by telephone to the village, a local guard saw how an unknown person near the village council hired a cabman, ordering him to take him through Cherkizovo to the Preobrazhenskaya outpost.
Near this outpost there was the final stop of the tram line, along which one could get to Lubyanskaya Square in the city center. While trying to jump on the step of the already departing tram, a guard from Bogorodskoye, who had arrived in time in another cab, ran into the suspicious type.
With the help of the policeman on duty at the tramway ring and the janitors, he twisted the desperately resisting raider. The detainee was taken to the nearest police station, where during a search they found parabellum and money - 1682 rubles in bank notes, gold and silver coins.
At the very first interrogation, the arrested person, who identified himself as Kurkin, said that while studying accounting courses, he met Fyodor Stepanov, and he brought him together with the driver Ivan Gorshelev, together they decided to rob a macaroni factory artel. He named the address of Gorshelev's concubine, a certain Frolova, but it turned out that on May 5 she left the apartment, and no one knew where she went.
The examination established that the bullet with which the policeman Turniak was mortally wounded was fired from the parabellum that was seized from Kurkin. Taking this circumstance into account, the court sentenced the hijacker to death, which, when the verdict was approved in the highest court, was replaced by indefinite hard labor.
On the trail of two hiding participants in the raid, the detectives came out only in July 1912, when they tracked down Evdokia Frolova. Informants told the detectives' agents that they had seen her in Alexandra Sokolova's little house, in apartment 5 on the second floor of Toralov's house on Krasnoselsky lane. The house was under secret surveillance. At the moment when several people stayed in Sokolova's apartment for the night at once, a police raid came there.
Two of those arrested were identified as Gorshelev and Stepanov. Backed to the wall by irrefutable evidence, they did not deny that together with Kurkin they took part in the attack on the artel worker of the Ding factory.
According to Gorshelev, he met Fyodor Stepanov when he served in a dairy shop, where Stepanov went to shop. Then, when Gorshelev learned to be a driver and went to work in Krylov's garage, settling in an apartment in Sokolniki, a friend visited him there too. Sometimes, getting drunk, friends indulged in dreams of the opportunity to get rich quickly, each time they came to the conclusion that you could not make stone chambers from the works of the righteous.
Stepanov already had some criminal experience: he and his brother were members of a militant group of one of the revolutionary parties, which was engaged in expropriation - that is what the armed raids were called then.
After the defeat of the group, Stepanov's brother was convicted, and Fyodor managed to escape, taking part of the militants' arsenal. To find out where you can find richer booty, Stepanov enrolled in advanced training courses for accountants. Listening to the conversations of fellow practitioners about their places of service, Stepanov chose several objects of robbery.
During the course, he also met a certain Kurkin, who was also ready to risk for a good jackpot. Armed the Stepanov gang, brought
In January 1913, the court sentenced Ivan Gorshelev and Fyodor Stepanov to death, but in February, in honor of the 300th anniversary of the reign of the imperial house of the Romanovs, an amnesty was declared, the capital punishment was replaced by twenty years of hard labor.
Valery Yarkho, World of Crime magazine