He quickly gathered a pack of muscle-bound followers and started making noise. He told anyone who would listen that the Northerner was a senile old relic whose time had passed. Real power, Bull said, belonged to men with heavy fists.
Boris didn’t rush to answer. He waited. He had always known how to wait for the right moment. And before long, Bull trapped himself.
He made the fatal mistake of trying to seize the common fund by force. He went to the man keeping it—a younger inmate called Nail—and demanded cash, claiming he needed it for a bribe and would pay it back later.
Nail refused, exactly as he should have. Bull beat him badly in front of the whole cell.
That was a direct and unforgivable violation of the code. The common fund was untouchable. To lay hands on the man guarding it was to spit in the face of every serious man there. Boris heard about it within the hour.
He called an emergency meeting. About thirty reliable men came. Bull, beaten and struggling, was dragged in by some of his own recent followers.
Even then he kept trying to push his line. “To hell with you, old man! Your rules are ancient history!” he shouted.
Boris didn’t answer him. He only gave a small nod to his most trusted men. Bull was beaten hard, methodically, without mercy.
They didn’t rush it. They broke him piece by piece—ribs, arms, legs. Then they dumped him, bloodied and barely conscious, in the prison infirmary.
He survived, but was transferred in disgrace to the lowest tier of inmates. He never challenged the old rules again. But the whole episode proved something to Boris: the world he had built his life around was changing beyond repair.
There were more and more men like Bull—reckless, shameless, without brakes. Younger inmates didn’t understand why rules mattered at all. To them, life was only force and easy money.
In 1992, Boris was released. He was thirty-nine. The country was in upheaval, and the old system was collapsing.
In the streets of major cities, men were being shot over territory, businesses, and power. The old respected figures were dying or fading into the background. The new ones called themselves authorities, but lived like ordinary gangsters…
