Outside a Moscow stadium one night in 2006, deputy central banker Andrei Kozlov was walking to his car after playing soccer when two men opened fire, pumping bullets into his head and neck and also killing his driver.
Days earlier, the man leading Russia's fight against money laundering had shut down a scheme used to funnel $1.6 billion of dirty funds abroad, including at least $112 million via Vienna-based Raiffeisen Zentralbank Oesterreich AG, according to Russian and Austrian investigators.
It was a trickle in a flood of illegal outflows that reached $52 billion in 2012 alone, according to former central bank Chairman Sergey Ignatiev.