Vyacheslav Ivankov - Moving To The United States

Moving To The United States

Ivankov arrived in the United States in March 1992, despite having served a prison sentence of around ten years and a reputation as one of the fiercest and one of the most brutal criminals in Russia. Unlike the Cosa Nostra, where the boss gives out the orders, Ivankov used to go out and extort himself. He had arrived on a regular business visa stating that he would be working in the film industry.

His reason for arriving in America was not initially clear. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs advised the FBI that Ivankov had come to "manage and control Russian Organized Crime activities in this country", advice that the FBI took on board. However Alexander Grant, editor for newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo said in 1994 Ivankov had left Russia because it was too dangerous for him there, since there are "new criminal entrepreneurs who don't respect the likes of Yaponchik" and that he was not criminally active in the United States. However, soon Ivankov did become criminally active in the United States. The actual scope of his activities is unclear, since conflicting sources describe his gang on Brighton Beach as around 100 members strong and being the "premier Russian crime group in Brooklyn" to something on the scale Lucky Luciano's nationwide Mafia Commission many decades earlier. However there is no evidence to suggest that he systematically used violence or corruption or attempted to establish a monopoly on any criminal enterprise. However, his conviction was for extortion by definition under US Code a crime of violence. Ivankov was found by the court to have engaged in like criminal acts such as the extortion of a Russian Nightclub located in Brighton Beach "Rasputin"

Ivankov was arrested by the FBI on June 8, 1995, charged with the extortion of 2.7 million dollars from an investment advisory firm known as Summit run by two Russian businessmen, and in June the next year was convicted along with multiple codefendants. At the time of his arrest, Ivankov was found to be in possession of thousands of dollars and many different passports under different names and countries. A .38 calibre revolver wrapped in a sock was determined by witnesses to have been thrown from the apartment in which Ivankov resided.

During interviews in prison, Ivankov accused the FBI of inventing the "myth" of the Russian mafia in order to prove the usefulness of their Russian division. He stated that Russia "is one uninterrupted criminal swamp", the main criminals being the Kremlin and the FSB and that anybody who thinks he is the leader of the so-called Russian mafia is foolish.