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Stephen Handelman, United States/Canada, is a columnist for TIME magazine and The Toronto Star, who has written extensively on Russian organized crime.

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Prior to working as an international affairs columnist in New York, Handelman was the Star‘s Moscow bureau chief for five years and before that served six years as bureau chief in the paper’s London office. The Economist called his 1995 book, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya, the first full-length study of Russia’s criminal network. After interviewing Russian racketeers, gunmen, politicians, former dissidents, and new millionaires, he linked Russian hit men to fatal crimes in London and discovered that there were about 30 million unregistered firearms circulating in the former Soviet states. Handelman is a frequent radio and television commentator on organized crime in post-Soviet Russia. In 1994, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute of Advanced Soviet Studies. Handelman and Ken W. Alibek also wrote Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It in 1999.