After I wrote a piece about the Russian Mafia and tennis, Nina Alberti of TennisInfoBlog contacted me with more information about organised crime in Russia. When I asked her for sources, she came up with information that led to a complex web of connections between sports, business, government and organised crime in the country.

Not to be left out, the KGB - the Soviet Union's communist era equivalent of the CIA - is right in the middle of this mess. And not just in the presidency. Russian president Vladimir Putin is a former member of the intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB but so are many prominent businessmen in Russia, according to an article in the New York Times this week.

Organized crime has its connections to business, too, and it’s more than just skimming the top off their profits. The Times also reported that organised crime laundered money for offshore shell companies that were tied to Russian business interests. One case tied the Russian Mafia to $70bn that ended up in a tiny island nation in the Pacific.

'The director general of Russia’s most popular football team and the head of the country’s Ice Hockey Federation were allegedly murdered in contract killings because they weren’t willing to pay the mafia a cut of their profits'

Nina’s research showed that organised crime became interested in sports in the 1990s because sports organisations had tax and duty exemptions. One of those sports organisations was the National Sports Fund and its exemptions allowed it to import cigarettes and alcohol tax free. In fact, the NSF became the largest importer of cigarettes and alcohol in the country.

What has this to do with tennis? Current Davis Cup and Fed Cup captain Shamil Tarpischev controlled the National Sports Fund while those cigarettes and alcohol were flowing in. Much of that money made its way into political campaigns and, no doubt, created a billionaire or two.

While this tangled web made a lot of people rich, it certainly didn’t help tennis players if you look at Moscow’s Spartak Tennis Club. It’s a dump. Spartak is the facility that trained Marat Safin, Anna Kournikova, Elena Dementieva and other Russian tennis stars. Its outdoor tennis courts are only usable six months of the year due to the cold climate and its one indoor court is sporadically heated. Spartak’s training methods are responsible for all of those Russian women in the top 20.