A Russian court has jailed a man for murdering a gangland kingpin in a fatal casino shooting in 1994.
The victim was named in court as the Zarechensk-born Sergei Puchkov, known in central Russian upland criminal circles as Puchok, the Russian media outlet News Tula reported.
Zarechensky District Court jailed the shooter for 9 years and six months at a behind-closed-doors trial that began in April 2025.
The court ordered the media to withhold the shooter’s identity, referring to him by his initial, S, and disclosing the fact that he was born in 1969.
The district court initially began a public trial, but later asked the media to leave at the request of “one of the victims.”
The violent shooting shocked Russia in the early years of the post-Soviet period, a time when casinos operated in a mostly unregulated space.
The Kremlin has since banned online casinos and restricted land-based gambling to six special zones. Some want Moscow to go a step further and fine citizens for using online betting platforms.
Russian Casino Shooting: Killer Brought to Justice After 32 Years
Prosecutors said Puchkov died on the site, at a casino on Tula’s Oktyabrskaya Street. Officials described Puchkov as the head of a mafia-style crime gang.
The incident took place on May 23, 1994, after a dispute erupted between several patrons. S later entered the casino armed with an automatic weapon, believed to have been an AK-47 or an AK-74 assault rifle.
After spotting Puchkov sitting at a poker table, S opened fire, hitting Puchkov with at least 15 shots. A casino employee was also wounded, with S firing a further two rounds. The employee made a full recovery. S then ran away before the police could arrive.
A 2024 Breakthrough
After the shooting, police spent several months trying to establish the identity of the shooter. But their investigation ultimately proved fruitless, and it was later suspended.
But investigators and forensic experts, working with Tula police, made a breakthrough in 2024, discovering new evidence that linked S to the crime.
Officers reopened the investigation, eventually reconstructing the circumstances of the crime and identifying the suspect.
Detectives said that S had a slew of previous convictions. These included the illegal possession of weapons, robbery, and hooliganism.
Elsewhere in the country, Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives last month joined the Russia Investigative Committee to carry out a series of raids on an unnamed domestic payments platform.
FSB officers arrested 24 people and reportedly left the raids with confiscated “bags of cash.”
An FSB spokesperson said the platform provided illegal processing for transactions at online casinos, including Pin-Up, Pinco, and FreshCasino.
