Three past chairmen of the soccer club Lokomotiv Plovdiv have been killed, one by a sniper by the Black Sea.

Three past chairmen of the soccer club Lokomotiv Plovdiv have been killed, one by a sniper by the Black Sea. Seventy-five percent of Bulgarian businesses have security protection, far more than in other countries in Eastern Europe, according to Enterprise Surveys, analysts for the World Bank.As in Russia and some other Balkan nations, corruption has seeped into the fabric of life. Sofia has a thriving black market for blood outside hospitals, where patients’ families haggle over purchases with dealers, according to Bulgarian news reports that track the prices.
The roots of this organized crime date to the collapse of Communism in the early 1990s. Thousands of secret agents and athletes, including wrestlers once supported and coddled by the state, were cast onto the street. During the United Nations embargo of warring Serbia in the 1990s, they seized smuggling opportunities and solidified their networks.The wrestlers, in particular, developed private security forces and insurance companies that were little more than shakedown protection rackets. Other men became shadowy entrepreneurs with close ties to the government.
In the past five years, Bulgaria has weathered machine gun assassinations and inventive daylight attacks. Hitmen disguised themselves as drunks and Orthodox priests. In 2004, a bomb planted atop an elevator in central Sofia was detonated by cellphone, killing a businessman and three bodyguards.The toll now tops more than 125 contract killings since 1993, according to a list compiled by the United States Embassy in Sofia, which does not include at least four people killed this year, including the head of an energy company. Most of the killings are unsolved.