The bitter fate of Chocolate. What happened to the heroes of famous Internet memes

The boy was on his way to success, it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out- a phrase from a video about Perm gopniks who brutally killed a man for the sake of a radio and a car. Used in situations where a person has failed or his success is very doubtful.

Origin

On September 22, 2006, the owner of one of the garages in Perm came across the disfigured corpse of 29-year-old Mikhail Goldin. Three teenagers were accused of the brutal murder: Ildar Mursalimov, Alexander Guseinov (nicknamed Chocolate) and Artem Kataev. At that time they were between 16 and 18 years old.

The guys dealt with the man who agreed to give them a ride in his car. On March 29, 2006, the court found all the suspects guilty and sentenced them to 19, 10 and 8 years in prison, respectively.

This story would have gone unnoticed if not for a video from a local TV channel reporting from the court. The guys behaved calmly, said hello to friends, and joked. They did not realize their guilt and were surprised why the jury treated them without leniency.

One of the accomplices noticed that his friend Guseinov (Chocolate) was innocent of the crime, and uttered the phrase that later became a meme: “Chocolate is not guilty of anything. The boy was on his way to success, but it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out.”

In 2011, Huseynov was released on parole. A new interview was released with him, in which the former prisoner told how he feels about dubious fame and the meme “The kid was on his way to success.”

Meaning

The “The kid was on his way to success” meme is used in an ironic way to point out someone’s failures or dubious achievements.

Gallery

Huseynov was convicted in 2008. Together with two friends, they killed a 29-year-old man, inflicting multiple stab wounds on him and firing control shots at point-blank range from an air pistol. The criminals also stole a car from the victim, the father of a one-and-a-half-year-old child. Law enforcement officers later returned the car to the widow of the murdered man. Two teenagers were sentenced to eight and ten years in prison, the adult initiator of the murder was sentenced to 19.

“Chocolate is not to blame for anything, guys, in reality. In reality, the boy was on his way to success. It didn’t work out, it didn’t work out,” one of the convicts told reporters in the courtroom. The video with comments from young people then became an Internet meme.

Huseynov served in the colony for more than five years. The basis for parole was his exemplary behavior.

The media report that during this period, Huseynov met a girl by telephone, with whom he intends to marry in freedom.

“Strangers started sending me hundreds of messages with threats and insults, trying to make my life even worse,” Huseynov told reporters about his unpleasant fame.

According to him, he received the nickname Chocolate at school age, when he arrived from the south very tanned.

“When a friend said about me, ‘the boy was on his way to success, no luck,’ he meant sad things. My life was divided into before and after this whole story,” Huseynov noted. He expressed the hope that over time people will forget about his past.

Ildar Mursalimov was known as a leader in the company. He put forward ideas, he planned the attack on the driver of the car, and assigned roles in advance. During a search in his apartment, they found a diary, the entries in which testified that a law-abiding lifestyle was not about him. Mursalimov was attracted by the thieves' world, by living according to thieves' - cool, from his point of view, laws. On September 12, the ideological mastermind called his friends and made an appointment. The guys walked along the road along Startseva Street. Voted. Vasily Mamontov, senior investigator of the prosecutor's office of the Sverdlovsk district of Perm: - They were not interested in the specific model of the car. Stopped first<Фольксваген>, not new. Mursalimov spoke with the owner of the car. Apparently, they didn’t agree on a price, so the foreign car left. The next ones to slow down<Жигули>Goldin. Again Mursalimov spoke with the driver. This time he liked both the car and the condition of the interior. Artem Kataev told the investigator in more detail about the events of that evening: - When Ildar sat down, what did he say to the man? - Come on, he says, take me to Zagarye. Here's 100 rubles for you right away. We went towards Yubileiny. - What was the plan? - Stop at the garages. One boy had to go out to relieve himself. To stop the car. After Alexander Guseinov got out, Mursalimov, sitting in the back seat, attacked the driver with a knife. Mikhail Goldin begged for mercy, asked not to kill, because he had a small child. He said that he would give everything. Ildar calmly continued to strike, saying:<Да, ты отдашь мне все!>There is one more point in this tragic story that cannot be kept silent about. When Huseynov got out of the car, he did not close the door tightly, and the light was on in the cabin. Therefore, everything that happens in black<пятнашке>seen by drivers of passing cars. Vasily Mamontov: - Well, they themselves didn’t want to stop - but they could have just called 02. In this case, the police officers would have checked what kind of car was standing on the side of the road, what kind of young people were spinning around it. A person is being killed, and here there is such indifference... After Mursalimov stopped beating the driver with a knife, Kataev took over. He fired a pneumatic pistol six times into the ear of the dying Goldin. The friends dragged the body to the garages, where Kataev stabbed the victim in the chest several more times. The guys searched the dead man. From his pocket they took out a pack of cigarettes, a cell phone worth more than 11 thousand, they took off a silver chain with a cross and a watch. Mursalimov took away his driver's license, as well as the vehicle registration certificate. Afterwards, the corpse was covered with branches and garbage. The killers prudently removed the covers, threw them on the road, tried to cover up their traces in the car, but they did a bad job. Ildar called a friend with whom he had previously agreed on a garage. The trophy was moved to Gorlovskaya Street. The criminal case in the Perm Regional Court was heard with the participation of jurors, whom he insisted<самый продуманный>of the murderers - Mursalimov. The jury's verdict found the trio guilty. The actions of all defendants are classified as robbery. Mursalimov and Kataev were found guilty of murder by a group of persons with particular cruelty. Huseynov - aiding and abetting. Ildar Mursalimov was very lucky: at the time of the murder he was not yet 18 years old, the age of majority<идеолог>the crime reached a month later. He was given the maximum possible: 10 years in prison to be served in a general regime colony. 18-year-old Artem Kataev, who received 19 years in a maximum security colony, was indignant. Alexander Huseynov was sentenced to 8 years in prison in a general regime colony. Kataev (after the verdict was announced): - I am dissatisfied with my sentence. I didn't kill. All the innocent people are sitting here. We only admitted to robbery. I didn’t see who killed the person at all. Ildar Mursalimov (kept calm): - Soon, in five or six years, I will be free. I wish health to my friends and family. I did not commit this crime. And everything will return to normal. I am a positive person, decent, why keep me in prison. Alexander Huseynov (the one who got out of the car<по нужде>): - I got it for nothing at all and I’m sitting there for nothing at all! I will have to live in this nasty prison for 8 years. Prison is not a place of correction, but a school for new crimes! While being interviewed by a correspondent for one of the TV channels, the convict said the phrase from behind bars: “ It's not chocolate's fault! The boy was on his way to success". Fully confident that the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation will overturn the unfair verdict, the friends left the courtroom. Today Marisha Goldina is playing hide and seek with her mother. From now on, the girl will know her dad only from photographs. The young widow Olga believes that Misha sees them from the other world : - There was still a connection between us. We had a very great love. We have known each other since we were 18, it was love at first sight... The verdict has not entered into legal force - the convicts are waiting for an answer to their complaint sent to the Supreme Court.

There are people who dream of being famous since childhood and try to achieve this goal in every possible way, and there are those to whom popularity comes completely by accident. We are talking about the unwitting creators of Internet memes. Often we don’t even know what their names are in real life, but the phrases they say or the funny grimaces of these random “stars” stick into the souls of millions. What happened to “Yazem,” the girl who was deprived of the holiday, and the criminal Shokolad, tells AiF.ru.

"No holiday"

Was: The first of September was for Asi Petryaeva a real tragedy. The girl was accidentally locked in the classroom by the teacher, and while the schoolgirl was trying to get free, her classmates were congratulated on the holiday and given balloons. Such injustice brought Asya to tears. At the very moment when the child began to cry and be indignant, a journalist from one of the channels approached her. On the Internet, the video with the first-grader gained a huge number of views and was called “No Holiday.”

Now: Asya successfully graduated from the same school in Kaluga that deprived her of her “holiday”. By the way, Petryaeva’s graduation was much more successful than September 1st. A few years ago, a girl said in the media that she was going to move to Moscow and would like to master the specialty of organizing mass events. However, on Asya’s Instagram, which, by the way, has more than 3,000 subscribers, it is written that she is a philologist.

"Ide"

Was: When an ordinary fisherman Victor Goncharenko caught the “fish of his dreams” - a kilogram ide, and shared his sincere emotions about this on the Internet, he not only gave birth to a new meme “YAAAAZ!”, but also launched a wave of a huge number of parodies of his own video. Since then, Victor himself has firmly adopted the nickname Iz.

It became: Thanks to the video, Victor became a real star. First, he was invited to host the culinary show “Ide. Reboot”, and then the program “Ide Against Food” on the Rossiya-2 TV channel. The new profession helped the former policeman and father of four children see the world and visit more than 20 countries! However, the television projects did not last long, the Internet star had to quickly return to normal life - filming was replaced by work as a fireman at a local college. Goncharenko himself is not very sad about this, moreover, sometimes he acts as an expert on various TV channels and even records paid birthday greetings from Yaz.

"On the bottom"

Was: Thanks to Andrei Malakhov, the rape story Diana Shurygina The whole country knows it very well. During one of the broadcasts, a studio guest tried to ask the girl how much vodka she drank during the ill-fated party where everything happened. Shurygina accompanied her answer “at the bottom” with a demonstration of the amount she drank, which gave rise to a new meme phrase.

It became: While the public, in heated debate, was trying to understand whether the poor girl had been raped, or whether she had simply slandered an innocent young man, Diana married a TV cameraman Andrey Shlyagin. The couple tied the knot literally three months after they met. In addition, Shurygina became a singer and together with the performer Sasha Act recorded the song “Fly”. However, the track did not bring her much popularity. Apparently, for this reason, Diana continually tries to break into federal channels with “hot” topics. She recently accused her husband of cheating and tested him with a lie detector on the “Actually” program.

Harold hiding the pain

Was: The strangely smiling grandfather, whose photo can be seen in a variety of articles and advertisements, has become popular all over the world thanks to Russia. It is in our country that Hungarians András Arato dubbed "Harold Hiding the Pain".

It became: Today Arato is a fairly popular character on social networks. He has a small team dedicated to creating content and trying to monetize the popularity of "Harold." András also has a background in filming a video for the group Cloud 9+ and a commercial for the Manchester City football club. By the way, in May of this year the famous grandfather-meme visited Moscow, this is his second visit to the capital, before that he came to Russia 30 years ago.

“The boy was on his way to success”

Was: Popularity has overtaken Alexandra Huseynova nicknamed Chocolate, not just anywhere, but in the courtroom. In 2006, local television filmed a report about the brutal murder of a 29-year-old taxi driver, which involved three young people, among them Alexander. However, in the process it turned out that he himself did not take a direct part in the crime. Trying to defend the honor of a friend, one of the convicts Artem Kataev said a phrase that eventually became popular among the people: “Chocolate is not to blame for anything, guys, in kind! The boy was on his way to success. It didn’t work out, it didn’t work out..."

It became: In 2013, Alexander was released on parole. The young man said that while he was in prison, he met a girl on the phone and was going to start a family with her.

"Borscht and sausages"

Was: “Good borscht with cabbage, but not red, sausages, there is also some strange salad where carrots, cabbage, apples and pineapples are chopped, in general it infuriates me...” - so colorfully with a slight touch of pathos in the voice Nikita Litvinkov talked about what he was fed in the school cafeteria. Already in the evening, the young man’s television debut was seen by the entire native Korolev, and then the video migrated to the Internet.

It became: Nikita served in the army, graduated from the Music College, plays two instruments - accordion and piano. From Korolev near Moscow, the young man moved to Voronezh, where he works at the local House of Culture. In modern photographs, it is very difficult to recognize the young man from the video - the long, flowing hair of the once Youtube star has been replaced by a short, discreet haircut.

Sentenced to two years in prison for creating Titanium, a tool with which hackers launched powerful attacks on computer systems around the world. Lenta.ru tells how a guy who almost never left home and suffered from attacks from classmates was able to start a profitable business right from his bedroom and ended up in jail for developing dangerous cyber weapons.

When 20-year-old Adam Mudd heard he was going to prison because of his extraordinary abilities, no emotion showed on his face. At the trial, he admitted that he actually developed Titanium Stresser - a tool that was literally idolized by the most seasoned hackers. It was used to attack almost two million websites in the USA, Russia and Chile.

In 2014, Mudd, already tired of his stupid college classmates, noticed that he had been robbed. Naturally, this upset him, but he hoped that the police would find the culprits and return his things. After he realized that no one was going to do a serious investigation, he simply went home and took down 70 educational sites in the area. Caused trouble for his college and, apparently for fun, hooked up with Cambridge University.

At the age of 16, the failed student launched his program at full capacity and began renting it out based on his own business strategy. He calculated a separate price for each attack depending on its duration, and in case of a complex process he sold premium accounts. All this worked like clockwork, and Mudd sat for days at a time at the computer in his bedroom.

It seems that the parents did not even suspect that their son was a born programmer who earned a lot of money from his talent. They naively believed that the teenager did not get along with his classmates and was immersed in computer games. He was expelled from college, he practically did not leave the house and, as it turned out only at the trial, he suffered from Asperger's syndrome. Mudd's father and mother learned about their son's dark affairs only when the police burst into their house. They demanded that the guy unlock the computer, and he gave in only to his father’s persuasion.

Yes, he made a ton of money from Titanium, but he didn't seem particularly interested in it. When Mudd turned eighteen, he already had more than 400 thousand pounds sterling (more than 28 million rubles) on his balance sheet, but his family didn’t know about it. He did not buy anything for himself, but only saved money and improved the software.

At the final hearing, Judge Michael Topolski was clearly favorably disposed towards Mudd: he repeatedly emphasized that the boy grew up in a good, respected family and showed extraordinary abilities early on. In his speech, Topolski assured the guy that in the future he would make a brilliant career as a programmer and the intelligence services needed him, but he would spend the next two years in prison.

In the UK, as in most countries, Mudd's tool is not illegal. This is a so-called stresser - a program for checking the stability of resources. The creator of the load server is only liable if he knowingly sells services to hackers who cause damage.

The Titanium stresser was quickly recognized in the hacker community as extremely convenient: it automatically overloaded the desired site with standard requests, which made it possible to quickly disable it. Some stressors are used to test the functionality of a website, but Mudd understood that strangers were paying him a lot of money not for the sake of a test, but to commit real crimes.

For those interested in the work of Titanium Stresser, a 15-year-old teenager came up with a winning marketing solution: the first attack could be carried out for free, although only for 60 seconds and on the same level.

But holders of a paid account could use the tool for various attacks at several levels. As a bonus, there were “useful” things: software for “bombing” email addresses with letters, a program for determining the IP address and other tricks that allowed you to track the victim. For premium clients, the student came up with such nice options as parallel double load on the victims’ servers.

The attackers transferred money to Bitcoin wallets or using a prepaid PaySafeCard. Clients could use the stresser to attack a victim for anywhere from 100 seconds (for $3) to 30 thousand seconds (for $70).

The business he created in his bedroom brought Mudd a steady income and, more importantly, finally allowed the teenager to feel like a significant, respected figure. He was available at any time of the day and independently worked as technical support.

It's likely that Mudd's little case might have continued to go unnoticed by law enforcement if his product hadn't at some point been used to attack Sony and Microsoft servers. The British stresser proved himself worthy and from 2013 to 2015 several times left game servers used by PlayStation and Xbox owners offline. Later in court it was clarified that Titanium was used to attack Minecraft, Runsca e and TeamS eak.

American journalist and information security specialist Brian Krebs drew attention to the Mudd case. He said that the authorities of many countries are already fighting stressors. Although the programs themselves are not a violation of the law, more than 30 people have already been arrested for their distribution in the United States and Europe since December 2016.

The journalist recalled how his investigation into the “fighters against corporations” - the hacker group Lizard Squad - once led him to the Finnish teenager Julius Kivimaki, who, as part of the group, committed more than 50 thousand cybercrimes. The guy gave himself away when, in an interview with Sky News, he praised hackers for attacking the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live servers. The young scammers were proud that they were able to bring down such a big player, “who collects huge amounts of money from users for subscriptions.”

In July 2015, Kivimaki was sentenced to two years in prison. The judge, as in the case of Mudd, after serving his sentence, recommended the guy to fight cybercrime. Finn joined the hacker community at the age of 15 and, according to both the defense and the prosecution, could well have pursued a career on the bright side, having reflected on his actions while in prison.

Mudd's case was widely covered in the UK: local authorities insist that it is not so much the guy who is to blame for the current situation, but the people around him, lack of education and inattention of his parents. At the final hearing, the judge seemed to sincerely regret that he read out the guilty verdict, and repeated more than once that the abilities of talented children simply need to be redirected in the right direction in time.

“The case of Adam Mudd is unfortunate because this young man is obviously very gifted, but he chose to trade his talent for personal gain at the expense of other people's suffering. We just want to make it clear that the real sentence for a minor is not our personal whim, but a desire to teach young people to be responsible for their actions. It is important that other equally gifted students understand this before they embark on the path of crime. Parents, if your children do not leave the room, at least take an interest in what they are doing on the Internet,” the local police said in a message.