His savage methods of persuasion often include torture and brutality. Yacheslav Ivankov is one of the most feared and respected criminals to emerge from the former Soviet Union. There are those who say Ivankov’s reputation is more fiction than fact. What is clear, Yacheslav Ivankov fled Russia and came to the United States with an agenda.
During the days of communist Russia, the government did not officially acknowledge the existence of organized crime. Racketeering was thought to be an American occurrence, giving Soviets a sense of pride. But towards the end of perestroika, a strange new phenomenon began to surface. Restaurants were blown up, people were gunned down in the streets.
Rumors of a Russian mafia began to circulate throughout the Soviet Union and the world. In 1996, the U.S. government scored a major victory with the conviction of alleged Russian crime boss, Vyacheslav Ivankov. Vyacheslav Ivankov was born in the early 1940s in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. As a child growing up in Moscow, he resisted the rhetoric of communism and the reputed greatness of Stalin.
Many of Ivankov’s family members, including his grandfather, had suffered immensely under the ruthless dictator. Maturing into adulthood, Ivankov continued on the path of resistance, never accepting the legitimacy of communism. He excelled in sports and had a very successful amateur wrestling career. Eventually he was crowned champion and attained a celebrity type status among many Russians.
He did not, for example, come up as part of some kind of street gang or adolescent gang or whatever. He was, from all outward appearances, a fairly typical, normal person who… After what he claims was getting involved in defending a woman’s virtue, got arrested, and he was sent to jail. And it was then that he began to make contacts with fellow inmates in the jail, and this began to develop his sense of the possibilities in criminal activity.
James Finkenau is a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He has authored six books. most recently the Russian mafia in America, which takes an in-depth look at Soviet emigre in the United States and their roots in the former USSR. Vyacheslav Ivankov’s nickname is Yaponshik. Yaponshik in Russian means little Japanese.
As I understand it, the attachment of this nickname to him came about because his face has a certain Asian cast to it. Upon his release from prison, Ivankov began his life of crime, capitalizing upon the Soviet Union’s thriving black market economy. In the 1970s, a black market emerged. This was partly because the money supply was increasingly getting out of the control of the authorities in Moscow.
They were providing too much money. And this money fueled a demand within the public for more consumer goods. Demands which couldn’t be satisfied by the increasingly inefficient Soviet production system. Yaponchik began to rise in the Soviet criminal world and was reportedly involved in schemes of extortion, racketeering and drug trafficking.
He eventually formed a gang in Moscow called Sonseskaya. One of their scams was impersonating Soviet police officers and burglarizing the homes of wealthy Russians. People would have reported burglaries or whatever. They were going to investigate these burglaries, and then they would steal stuff out of the home.
They saw this role playing as police officers as being an avenue to get in to commit criminal activity. He was seen by his fellow professional criminals as a tough guy, as a smart guy, as the kind of guy, a stand-up guy, if you will, the kind of guy that if you’re forming… criminal groups. This is the kind of guy you want.
The kind of guy who doesn’t back down. The kind of guy who can impose his will on others both physically and mentally. And he’s this kind of guy. In 1981, Ivankov was arrested and convicted for robbery, drug trafficking, possession of firearms, and forgery. He was sentenced to serve 14 years in one of the Soviet Union’s toughest Siberian prisons.
While in prison, Ivankov’s stature and reputation continued to grow. He was a hardened criminal who stood up to communists and fought to reform the Soviet prison system. Admired by other prison inmates… Japonshik was elected to the status of Borv Zakonya, or thief-in-law, a position held by an elite few professional criminals who are powerful, charismatic, persuasive leaders.
These are professional criminals who reject any relationship or involvement with what they consider to be the establishment. They refuse to cooperate with the authorities in any way. They refuse to work. They refuse to participate in education. They just simply reject all formal… status quo, you know, initiatives.
And they adopt a life of crime, reject their family, family ties, all those kinds of things. Jim Moody is a former deputy assistant director of the FBI Criminal Investigative Division. He spent nearly 30 years fighting organized crime and is believed to be the first FBI agent to officially visit the Soviet Union.
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Yaponchak was a thief-in-law. He went through the coronation ceremony. He had been serving a prison sentence in a Soviet prison for torturing and extorting individuals out of their money. He was a great extortionist and was in Russia. That’s what we convicted for last time. Like his predecessors, Ivankov conducted business from prison.
Reportedly, he fought for a more aggressive participation in drug trafficking. and advocated a war against the Chechens and other gangs in order to break their drug monopoly. While Yaponchik was serving his time in prison, the Soviet Union was undergoing massive progressive reforms by its newly elected leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev’s reforms in the 1980s were an absolute prescription of how to make an organized crime problem. I mean, the first thing he did the month he came into office was institute prohibition. And that allowed organized criminals to acquire 10% of the national revenues each year. There was an enormous amount of capital flight from Russia during these years, including money which belonged to the Communist Party, which disappeared into foreign bank accounts.
In 1991, Ivankov was released from prison. In that same year, the curtain finally dropped on the Soviet Union, which signified the end of an era. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was informed by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs that Ivankov was sent by other Vori or thieves to the United States.
His mission? To take control and organize Russian criminal activities in America. But in order to better understand Ivankov, you must first understand the origins of Russian organized crime. An old Russian mafia leader once said, the Soviet communists were able to get rid of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia.
They could never ever completely crack up. We had our own codes and our own individual way of collective living. We were for Russia and not for communism. By the turn of the 20th century, Russia’s borders extended from Afghanistan to China with extensive territory along the Pacific coast. In 1894, Nicholas II, Russia’s last czar, ascended to the throne.
There has always been a great divide between the haves and the have-nots in Russia. After the Russo-Japanese War, Nicholas II was forced to make concessions to reformers, including the creation of an elected legislature called the Duma. With the industrialization of many western cities, Russian workers began to organize in the local political organizations or Soviets united under the Social Democratic Party.
In 1912, the Social Democratic Party divided into two separate parties. The radical Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin and the more moderate Mensheviks. Russian organized crime was always, from the beginning of this century, very closely tied with the government. Veteran foreign correspondent Stephen Handelman spent six years in Moscow as a bureau chief of the Toronto Star.
He is the author of Comrade Criminal, which takes a comprehensive look into post-Soviet organized crime. The early Bolshevik conspirators, the early Marxists, saw Russian crime groups, Russian gangs, as a model, in effect, for many of their proletarian organizations. One of the reasons was because of their very close hierarchical paramilitary structure.
They were almost impenetrable to outsiders. They were very small groups, small cells, who were very effective in what they did. We know that Both Lenin and Stalin saw value in using the early crime groups, early criminal societies, as a way of furthering their own cause. The Russian Revolution came about for one important reason, and that was the impact of the First World War, which led to enormous human and physical losses, which disorganized the political system.
which weakened the Tsar. Although the Bolsheviks had great support in Moscow and St. Petersburg, they were by no means in control of the country, which collapsed into civil war. Many of the early Russian crime groups began fighting against the early Bolsheviks, and they began operating in all parts of the country, harassing communist officials.
After the death of Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin became dictator of the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. A decade and a half later, Vyacheslav Ivankov was born under Stalin’s ironclad rule. Young Ivankov would suffer great family losses due to the strict totalitarian policies of Eastern Europe’s most feared ruler.
Today you find some of the older veteran gangster leaders calling themselves the early dissidents. They were the real dissidents of the Soviet state because they actually felt that the communist system was anti-Russian, anti-God, anti-just about everything they believed in. They saw themselves as the real carriers of the Russian tradition.
They themselves called the Vorotskoye Mir, the thieves’ world. And it was a world of very small, tightly organized criminal groups which were brought together by a very strict and hierarchical code. The leaders of these groups who were called thieves in law, which meant really thieves within their own law, they were called vody.
The thieves’ world has a deeply rooted history in Russia, which some say dates back to the 18th century. It is a legacy of political resistance and lawlessness that can also be linked to Vyacheslav Ivankov. The vore or thief is bound by a strict code of honor, the boroskoi zakon, or thieves code. He must forsake his family, refrain from marrying or having a family of his own.
This does not preclude him from having a lover. He must never work. He must survive by criminal activities alone, help other thieves, and recruit and train young beginners in the trade. Limit his drinking and not amass gambling debts that he cannot cover. The thief can have nothing to do with the authorities or serve in the military.
He must keep his promises made to other thieves and abide by punishment determined by other thieves-in-law. The thieves-in-law survived the gulag of the Stalinist labor camps and maintained the traditions of future thieves-in-law. Within one century, Russia had experienced two revolutions, the latter having a transnational crime effect which quickly spread across the globe.
In America, Russian organized crime activities have been reported in more than 20 states, with staggering economic criminal activities in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami. In 1991, Ivankov was released from a Siberian prison after serving only 10 years of his original 14-year sentence. Like so many prominent Russian mobsters in the late 1980s, he had high-level political connections.
Again, the claim, the basis of his ostensibly early release from prison is that he, through some others, bribed the judge to order his release. Consequently, he did get his release. He was well connected at high levels. For example, one of his contacts was with a person by the name of Yuri Cherbanov. Yuri Cherbanov was Brezhnev’s son-in-law.
Cherbanov himself ultimately went to prison for being involved in various kinds of frauds and schemes in Uzbekistan. But it shows you that Ivankov is not a nobody that ivanka because nobodies were associated with people like the son-in-law of the head of the soviet union it has been reported that soon after ivan cost released from prison a meeting of major significance took place in a region called vedencivo outside of moscow in december of 1991. in the last month of 1991 the same month that the hammer and sickle came down over the kremlin a large group of
Soviet mafia leaders, Russian mafia leaders, met in Dasha, outside Moscow. They’d had many councils and many meetings in the past. This was one of their ways of arranging the government, so to speak, or the governing bodies of crime in the old Soviet Union. And on their agenda, on the top of the agenda, was what to do as the system was floating around.
These powerful Russian mobsters gathered to plan the criminal migration into the U.S. The individual allegedly chosen to organize the Russians’ criminal enterprises in the United States was Russian high-ranking vore, Vyacheslav Ivankov. So in this meeting and over a series of other meetings in 1992, the early part of 1992, they began working out how to develop a new structure.
But with this structure came conflicting interests for the first time among the various groups. By early 1992, Ivankov had entered the U.S. and settled in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, New York. Brighton Beach houses one of the largest Russian communities outside of Russia’s borders. Sometimes referred to as Little Russia or Little Odessa, it is frequently cited by the New York press as the hub of Soviet emigre organized crime.
In the early part of the 80s, Brighton Beach in Brooklyn became a focal point. for Russian immigration? Well, Brighton Beach is really the premier Russian community in the United States. This is where most of the emigres who came, and they’ve come in various waves, but particularly those who came in the 1970s, when you had an opening up of the emigration by Jews from the former Soviet Union.
They would come typically to Kennedy Airport, and they would arrive at Kennedy Airport, and as many has often been the case historically with emigres, they spread out within a narrow range of the port of entry into the country. I remember going to Brighton Beach in the 1970s and visiting a restaurant, and the manager of the restaurant came up to me, and I knew that this restaurant was one of the centers of organized crime.
in Moscow and he had been the vice director of the restaurant and started to tell me about how many times he’d been arrested under Soviet rule and every time he’d managed to get himself out of it. Once in Brighton Beach, Ivankov wasted no time in setting up and organizing the Russian community’s criminal activities.
By the mid-1990s, due to the fall of communist Russia, many Russians were free to leave the country. This mass exodus also allowed many former Russian criminals to exit as well. Late mid-1970s to late 1970s, early 80s, there were about 200,000 Russian immigrants that came to the United States. About 2,000 of those were hardcore criminals.
However, by the mid-1990s, when the Russian communist system broke down and it was free and open for anybody to leave the system, You began to see the formal, classical Russian crime groups leaving, sometimes on assignment from their godfathers in Russia, to settle in the U.S. and to begin to invest money and get involved in criminal activities.
And they often shouldered aside these small-time gangsters who began in Brighton Beach and took over more and more and more of their operations. To gain entry into the United States, Ivankov claimed he was a film director on his visa. Ivankov was probably at that time one of the larger members of Russian organized crime that was operating in the United States.
He had capabilities of having support with other members of organized crime in the Russian area, and he was able to infiltrate the ethnic communities in the United States, the Russian ethnic communities, because of his notoriety and his reputation in Russia. Russian organized crime members came to the US with more than just a plan of how they were going to make money.
They’re also armed with years of experience in manipulating bureaucratic red tape. These Russian criminals had a wealth of knowledge in forgery, counterfeiting, and fraud. Richard Ward is the executive director of the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston University in Huntsville, Texas. The Russian mafia is an extremely problematic group for law enforcement, and what makes them different is that here you’re talking about some extremely bright individuals.
Who are experts at carrying out a whole range of activities that are illegal. Everything from illegal immigration, to insurance fraud, to crimes within Russia, to a growing involvement here in the United States. Russian organized crime in the United States is very violent. All organized crime is violent. There’s just different…
Elements of sophistication, like the American La Cosa Nostra one time, we had five La Cosa Nostra members that cooperated with us and started telling us about murders. They told us about over 230 murders, but we only had about three or four bodies. Most people just disappeared. The Russians are different in that they kill people and they’re not as sophisticated about it, but they also do a lot of torturing of people before they kill them.
One of their most profitable and sophisticated schemes was so complex, it confounded all but the highest levels of law enforcement. This scheme was called the Daisy Chain. Russian criminals perpetrated this fraud by first creating a fictitious company, which would purchase fuel from the state of New Jersey and transport it across state lines into New York.
There, the fuel was shipped to a second fictitious company. which was set up to forge tax documents sent to a third fictitious company. This third company would then distribute the fuel to the public and then collect the federal and state taxes. These taxes were pocketed by the criminals. By the time the government attempted to collect the taxes, the companies had vanished without a paper trail.
The daisy chains are, I mean, this is the personification of the Russian criminal mentality because, I mean… These guys who are now involved in crime here, for the most part, came out of the old black market system that operated in the Soviet Union. And this scheme is made to order for them. Well, one bug that was placed on John Gotti revealed that he wanted to hire some of these smart Russians to run a tax evasion scheme on the gasoline.
So they controlled the gas stations within their territory. But they couldn’t do the complex mathematical computations to deprive the U.S. government of tax revenues. So teaming up with these smart Russians, as they said, they were able to deprive the U.S. of a quarter of a billion dollars in tax revenues.
The Russians, in exchange for protection from the Italian mafia, gave Gotti a piece of the fuel scam action. Vyacheslav Ivankov, who in Russia had admired the New York mob boss. would attempt to emulate his idol and take control of Russian organized crime in America. Ivankov posed as a police officer and entered Holmes under the guise of official business.
He was a thief, he was a thug, but he was smart, and he was in New York. He became the personification of the so-called Russian mafia in America, particularly in the eyes of law enforcement and the New York press. As the highest ranking member of the thieves world in America, Ivankov brought with him a legacy of brutality and a tradition of surviving outside of governing rules.
To say that he was the major figure in the United States, yes, he was. There’s no question in our mind about it. There was no question in the Russian authorities’ mind about it. You have to kind of understand that Ivankov’s reputation is even bigger in Russia than it is in the United States. The news of his arrival in Brighton Beach sent fear throughout the community, which would ultimately become his base of operation.
Japonshik quickly began to organize and establish front companies for his illegal activities. The illegal activities that he was in were extortion, prostitution, some gambling, narcotics. He never really left extortion. He was always involved in extortion. And he also was very active in money laundering. Now, some of the companies that he used in money laundering, we don’t know whether they were actually participants in it voluntarily because he’s still a strong-armed man.
He noted for torturing people and exhorting them at the same time. So some of the people that were working with him were actually victims at the same time. He paid a Russian woman who had become an American citizen $15,000 to marry him so he could gain resident status. It was business as usual for the career criminal, but the FBI had become aware of his presence in New York and quickly began building their case.
Primarily, his base of operations was throughout the metropolitan area, New York City. But obviously, because of his ethnic background in the Russian community, he spent a lot of time in Wrighton Beach because of the community nature, because of the people that were there. He also spent a lot of time in Miami, Los Angeles.
and Denver and he was able to utilize contacts in those communities with other members of the Russian community to foster his criminal activities. I first became aware of Ivankov whenever I was talking to the Russian authorities and asked them to help us identify the major criminals in the United States that came out of Russia and they provided me the name of Ivankov.
When we first started looking at Ivankov, He was bouncing from one city to another. He was primarily in New York City, but he was in Boston, and he was in Denver, and he was in Los Angeles, and he was in Miami, and he was in San Francisco. Then he may go back into Russia to meet with other thieves. So he was bouncing around. We had a difficulty in identifying where he really was or who he really was.
And we found out later, whenever he was arrested, that he actually had seven passports. As you investigate organized crime, there’s a few things that you have to understand dealing with professional criminals. Their strength is their secrecy. Their weakness is their secrecy. But their weakness also is they cannot stop conducting illegal activity.
If they ever stop conducting illegal activity, they lose their position in organized crime. So regardless of what’s going on, they have to continue conducting illegal activity. The Evenkoff investigation was initiated in the early 1993 time frame. We were working primarily ad hoc investigative activities with the New York City Police Department to focus on Evenkoff’s criminal enterprise.
We were able to utilize investigative expertise from the FBI in Manhattan and also the New York City Police Department to focus on Evenkoff’s activities. He was primarily active in Russia. But he also had some involvement in some activities in Israel and the United States. Kevin Donovan is a special agent in charge of the New York division of the FBI, which houses the Russian Organized Crime Task Force.
In operation since the early 1990s, this special branch investigates organized crimes perpetrated by Soviet emigres. Since the early 1990s, we have worked at task forces with… Members of the New York City Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to focus on criminal activities. The use of task forces by the New York office is not something that’s new.
We have focused on criminal activities in drugs, organized crime, terrorism, and violent crimes through the use of task forces. In 1995, three years after Ivankov entered the United States… he became involved in a scheme to extort several million dollars from a Wall Street investment advisory firm operated by two Russian-born businessmen.
Clearly they were targeted because they were Russians. They were targeted because they were seen to be successful businessmen in this country. If they’re successful businessmen, they must have financial wherewithal. Therefore, they make lucrative targets for this. They also were targets because they still had family back in.
Former Soviet Union. Apparently the money that was the target of the extortion had roots in Moscow. Ivankov learned that the two businessmen had been wired several million dollars from the Moscow bank without the usual paper trail. Therefore, everyone involved assumed that the money had been transferred illegally.
Wanting to capitalize on the situation, Ivankov had an associate attempt to arrange a meeting. The men refused. Ivankov reverted back to some of the street tactics he perfected in Moscow. The father of one of the businessmen was beaten to death on a Moscow subway station platform. The murder has never been solved.
It became brutally apparent that there was no way of escaping Ivan Koff and his associates, or was there? We became aware of the scheme that he was involved in through the victims. The victims came forward, and as a result of the victims’ cooperation, we were able to again engage in sophisticated investigative techniques to bring this case to a logical conclusion.
From his cellular phone, Ivankov ordered his associate to set up a meeting with the two businessmen. The message was given, and the men submitted to paying him three and a half million dollars. Another Ivankov henchman then drew up the papers documenting the amount of money that was to be paid. Everyone agreed, and the papers were signed.
A few days later, on June 8, 1995, Ivankov was charged with extortion. We hope to identify his entire organization and to develop a significant prosecution of them. And we really wanted to put him in jail for the rest of his life. In Russia, they don’t have long prison terms. You know, 20 years is a very long prison term.
And the concept of life imprisonment is not known over there. However, we were unsuccessful doing that because of… The investigation, the way the investigation went, we developed an extortion case on him, and we thought people were about to get killed. And to save their lives, we brought the case down early.
The arrest of Ivankov sent shockwaves through the city and added to the growing fascination surrounding Russian organized crime in America. The reported godfather’s incarceration was a leading story in Moscow and generated in-depth television profiles on his criminal activities. in Russia and abroad. Defense was so weak that they knew that if I was given a chance to speak, I would dispose all the lies.
That’s why they didn’t let me speak. They not only didn’t let me speak, but moreover, they authorized my defense to convince me to give up my right to speak. It’s been a long time. I figured out it was a conspiracy against me. I was often interrupted. They did not let me deliver in full volume the body of facts in chronological order so that I would prove that it was all falsified.
It was a cynical and cruel crackdown on me. A professional criminal, an organized crime member, on a day-to-day basis is involved in illegal activity. He must maintain the conduct of his illegal activity on a day-to-day basis to maintain his position in the organized crime group. Consequently, if you go after him and target him, you will be able to identify the illegal activities he’s in and develop evidence for successful prosecution.
Mr. Ivankoff has pled not guilty. We expect that we trust the jury, and we start the process today. Ivankov’s case is a major case because it demonstrated the ease with which members of Russian organized crime families have been able to infiltrate the U.S. communities. We were able to focus on his criminal activities through the cooperative efforts of members of the community, other law enforcement entities throughout the United States and throughout the world.
We specifically were able to develop cooperation in this investigation with members of the NVD. The Royal Canadian Mountain Police and other international entities that continue to allow us to track and focus on Ivankov’s activities. Ivankov was sentenced for 10 years and is currently in the Allenwood Prison in Pennsylvania.
Vyacheslav Ivankov’s arrest and 1996 conviction is viewed as a significant victory in the fight against Russian organized crime. Until that time, there had been no major arrests of any Russian crime figures. There had been a number of killings that had taken place in Brighton Beach or in the New York metropolitan area.
Nobody had been arrested for these. There was more and more mystery that was developing. For example, some of these killings took place in public settings, in nightclubs, in full view of people, and yet no one saw anything. No one was willing to come forward and say anything about this. Ivan Kopp was a Russian godfather, no question about it.
And I think we were successful with his arrest and with his conviction and with his sentence, although it’s not as much as we wanted. It sent a message back within the criminal community in Russia that you better watch out coming in the United States. The questions surrounding the scope of Ivankov’s criminal activities in the United States may never be answered.
But experts agree that with the demise of the Soviet Union and the formation of the independent states, Russian organized crime is a growing phenomenon. It’s the most… Diversified form of organized crime activity one sees in the world today. The Colombians are concentrated in drugs, the Mexicans are concentrated in drugs.
The Russian organized crime out of Russia and Ukraine has the greatest variety of illicit activity of any criminal groups in the world today. What I find doubly fascinating about Russia is that you have a phenomenon where You once had a classic crime world, classic underworld, which is basically located in the prison camps of Russia, who ran, for the most part, the black economy of the Soviet Union for 40 or 50 years.
They knew very well how to act as manipulators and wheelers and dealers in that system. They have, in effect, handed on their power and their influence and their methods to what is, in a sense, a new generation of Russian criminals. who are in Russian called autorities, who are much closer linked with the government itself.
Many of them are former KGB, former army, former Communist Party apolachiks, who are very well versed in the official world of operating in Russia. Handelman calls them comrade criminals because they have one foot in legitimacy while the other foot walks in the underworld that thrived in the shadows of communism.
The Russians are particularly different than other mafia groups because they have a level of professionalism that really comes from their long record of being able to deal with a very difficult totalitarian system. They know how to get around it, they know how to get around the police, they know how to suborn and corrupt officialdom.
and most of them are quite shrewd and intelligent businessmen. Part of the problem, as we’ve seen, is the laundering of Russian money into legitimate businesses and their criminal activity through legitimate businesses. What is especially pernicious for the former Soviet Union is that the money moves only out.
In Italy and Colombia and Mexico, organized crime groups invest in the country, but they don’t invest. Hardly anything in any of the countries of the former Soviet Union. So they’re just parasites on their economy without returning any of the capital. A lot of business transactions are cleared in Russia in offshore banks, in Cyprus and in other offshore havens.
The reason for this is quite simple, to avoid paying taxes. The mafia does this, but also perfectly public businesses, private businesses do so. In part it’s illegal, but there are ways of using offshore havens which are not illegal. The reason is just straightforward profit maximization. If you pay less tax, you have more profits to keep.
And that’s essentially why some islands in the Mediterranean have been making so much money at the expense of the Russian economy. Post-Soviet organized crime is involved in all kinds of activities. You can find them in the construction industry, in different parts of the world. That’s one of the prime areas they’ve moved into to launder money.
You can find them in the stock market. We just had a criminal convictions of organized crime manipulating stocks, which is sort of the most advanced side of organized crime activity that you’ll see. There are just so many ways for organized crime to obtain… Huge amounts of money very quickly in an undeveloped, inexperienced banking system.
There was always a Russian mafia. It’s not like it’s new. It’s just that the breakdown, if you will, of the social structure, the breakdown of the economy, offered opportunities for the organized criminal groups to take over. And they’ve taken over a whole large segment, if you will, of the economy. There isn’t global law enforcement.
That’s the problem. And so therefore, there isn’t an international law enforcement effort that is capable of addressing this problem. The United States is gearing up to fight organized crime, but they’re dependent on dealing with the law enforcement of other countries. And sometimes these crime groups… …are committing their activities in seven or eight different countries simultaneously.
It’s impossible to keep track of a lot of Russian activities, the laundering of money from country to country, because much of what Russians do is overtly legitimate, overtly legal, like many other transnational crime groups. Lately, law enforcement in America has had some success, has been able to get into some of these groups.
And they’ve been able to nab a couple of key leaders who’ve been operating in America. But it’s still very much of an uphill battle. To this day, Ivankov proclaims his innocence and believes that his arrest and subsequent conviction was a result of a conspiracy concocted by the FBI and the Russian government.
They would never treat in the same way a representative of any other nation. My right for the final word was taken away from me. I tried several times to say something. My defense said no to that. But I was not given the right to through the restrictions of trial regulations. They tried to play on the side of Russia’s secret services.
My defense, who were American, played on the side of Russian secret services. They said, we are Americans, help us with this trial, and next time, we will help you with what you need. According to various law enforcement agencies, Vyacheslav Ivankov is just one of the many sharks swimming in an ocean of transnational crime.
It is estimated that Russian organized crime is operating in 50 countries around the world. Well, I can hardly think of any place in the world that they don’t operate. I mean, one of the things that they’re extremely good at is operating in offshore islands in the Caribbean or the South Pacific that you may never even have heard of.
The challenges facing law enforcement in dealing with organized crime really focus on communication, intelligence, and cooperation in the legal systems. We don’t have an international court, a criminal court, for example, so there’s no place to take criminals, if you will, so jurisdictions change. One of the real problems is the legal definitions of crime.
What is a crime in one country might not be a crime in another country. But according to author Stephen Handelman, the greater threat is to the stability of Russia itself. One thing that has to be emphasized is that although Russians have come to the United States, Russian criminals have come to the United States in great numbers, this for them is not a major center, the United States for them is not a major center of operations.
For them it’s a good place to bank, it’s a good place to keep money in case things get really bad, but they’re interest and their attention is still focused on the power politics of Russia, where the fight for the spoils of the old Soviet system still goes on, and where people are still in a vicious fight for power and for economic control of the old, of Russia’s resources.
According to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, roughly two-thirds of the Russian economy is under the sway of crime syndicates. Swiss banks are estimated to hold $10 billion of Russian organized crime money. Russia has truly become a superpower of crime. And Vyacheslav Ivankov is just one figure in a country riddled with criminals.
I’m Robert Stack. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for watching
