Thief in Law - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• The Isaac Babel play Maria includes the character of Isaac Dimshits, a Lithuanian Jewish vor who rules a black market empire in 1920 St. Petersburg.
• The vory are featured prominently in the 2007 David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises, with members being a part of a criminal gang involved in sex trafficking and smuggling.
• They feature in the popular Soviet comedy film Gentlemen of Fortune. Although the issue is not directly addressed, both the main character and the criminal he is impersonating sport prison tattoos that may be found on a vor. The black comedy film Zhmurki features a character who is a vor.
• In the Soviet TV miniseries The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, the police are tasked with bringing down a gang of vicious robbers known as the Black Cats in post-war Moscow, several members of which are described as thieves in law.
• In The Secret Speech, a novel by Tom Rob Smith, the primary antagonist Fraera is a vor. Vory are encountered at other points in the story.
• Vor v zakone is featured in the game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear.
• Vor v zakone has been featured in a Criminal Minds (season 2, episode 20) Where a Vor implies he has a son and is forced to enforce the thieve's law.
• A vory v zakone organization is part of the main plot of John le Carré's Our Kind of Traitor.
• In the Russian TV series Brigada the main character's gang gets into a conflict with a vor in a few episodes.
• In Running Scared (2006 film) starring Paul Walker, Yugorsky (the head of the Russian Mob) reveals that he is a "Vor" by showing a tattoo on his chest, which signifies that he is of "The Brotherhood".