MOSCOW, May 21 (AFP) - Russia's new top cop Vladimir Rushailo is a career police officer who pioneered Moscow's fight against organised crime and is reportedly close to Kremlin kingpin Boris Berezovsky. "For the first time neither a politician nor a military officer is going to run the interior ministry but a professional policeman," said Larissa Kislinskaya, a journalist who specialises in the Russian mafia. The 46-year-old has risen through the lower echelons of Russia's 250,000-strong interior ministry troop force to hold the rank of general, is a trained lawyer and senior police college graduate. But it was as the founder of Moscow's anti-organised crime department in 1992 that Rushailo forged his reputation. The task force was greeted with deep scepticism at its inception by the traditional police hierarchy who opted to send young recruits to the nascent service instead of experienced officers. Nevertheless, within months the anti-crime brigade had flexed its muscles and displayed its effectiveness. Undercover officers managed to infiltrate crime gangs in the capital, feeding the authorities with priceless details of the mafia's structure, names and addresses. "For the first time, the mafia got scared," said Kislinskaya, although organised crimes is far from facing outright defeat in the Russian capital. At the end of 1996 the then interior minister Anatoly Kulikov offered Rushailo the number two post in the ministry's anti-organised crime section, but he turned down the job to concentrate on the Moscow operation. The decision was to prove costly, and he resigned to become an advisor to Yegor Stroyev, the influential speaker of the Federation Council upper chamber of parliament, a job he kept for two years. But the dismissal of Kulikov in March 1998 and the elevation of Sergei Stepashin to the interior ministry portfolio saw him return to his former post in the Russian capital. That enabled him to resume his ties with Berezovsky, eminence grise in the Kremlin of President Boris Yeltsin and former number two in the powerful Russian Security Council. Last October it was Rushailo who accompanied Berezovsky during his sallies into Chechnya to secure the release of Russian and foreign hostages held in the breakaway Caucasus republic. The billionaire business mogul is accused of buying the hostages' freedom, notably paying out a seven million dollar ransom to win the freedom of Valentin Vlassov, Yeltsin's personal representative to Chechnya held for six months by kidnap gangs in 1998. Berezovsky denies making any payments. Last year, he came under the question when the media revealed that a close aide had been accused of embezzling money from a special fund set up to help the families of policemen killed by organised crime gangs. Three-times married, Rushailo has two sons.  