To any New Yorker who happened to notice him, Vyacheslav Ivankov looked like an ordinary Russian immigrant businessman. He could often be spotted at the Paradise Restaurant in Brighton Beach: a plumpish 55-year-old with an Asian cast of eye, battling to avoid the more alluring corners of the Paradise's menu -- jellied sturgeon, stuffed vegetable marrows and pickled calves' tongues -- and usually losing.


To the FBI, though, which had been following his every move for two long years, he was more than just a businessman. He was, according to the word from Moscow, a boss of bosses of Russian organized crime. He was Yaponets, "The Japanese," a suave killer with a reputation for extreme brutality. Now, it was said, he was the powerful Russian mafia's chief emissary in the United States, sent to bring the Russian rackets there back under the control of Moscow.


At 7 a.m. this past June 8, a heavily armed squad of FBI agents began pounding on the door of a 21st-floor apartment in a building in Brooklyn. Inside, asleep with a girlfriend, was Ivankov. When he eventually came to the door, he seemed something less than a legend. Wearing underpants and a black T-shirt, with a high forehead, close-cropped hair and a trim Orthodox beard, he looked more like a sleepy Russian priest than a murderous mafia chieftain.


When he saw who was waiting for him, he simply muttered in Russian and went back inside to get his clothes. Only later, when he was being escorted from the FBI's Manhattan headquarters to a court back in Brooklyn, did he begin to play the vicious part assigned to him. He spat and kicked out at the throng of news photographers as if they were responsible for his present plight.


The charges against Ivankov, handed down the same day, were disconcertingly prosaic, considering his awesome reputation. They centered on an extortion attempt alleged to have been made by him and eight co-conspirators on two U.S.-based Russian businessmen for the comparatively trivial amount of $3.5 million.


The businessmen had told the FBI that from November 1994 they had been constantly harassed and threatened by Ivankov's henchmen. Then, in April 1995, after they'd refused to hand over the money, the father of one of them had been beaten to death on the platform of a Moscow railway station. A month later, the two of them had been kidnapped, they alleged, from a hotel at gunpoint and then driven to a Russian restaurant in Fairview, New Jersey, where they'd been compelled to sign a contract guaranteeing payment.


According to sources in the New York Police Department, Ivankov actually had not been present at the kidnapping or the murder. But the FBI had put a court-authorized wiretap on his phone and caught him talking about the extortion plot. (He was also referred to by the other suspects on tapped phone lines as ded -- the Russian word for grandfather -- which the FBI said was evidence he was the chief authority in the group.)


This was enough to haul him in on the charge of conspiracy in the alleged crimes, under the same law that during the Vietnam War had put Dr. Benjamin Spock in the dock in Chicago with peacenik co-conspirators he had never even met.


It "was the most important arrest we have made in connection with expanding Russian organized crime activities in the U.S.," said James Kallstrom, the head of the FBI's office in New York City.


One of Ivankov's lawyers later scoffed at that claim, saying: "Mr. Ivankov was simply arrested because of his reputation. The FBI say they've been following him for two years -- and this is the best they can do."





The word "mafia" in Russian is vague and all-encompassing. It is used to describe everyone from President Boris Yeltsin's closest cronies in government -- "the Sverdlovsk mafia" -- to the businessman next door doing better than you. In one sense, this use of the word is a fair reflection of the situation, for Russia is in the grips of a smash-and-grab, Yukon-style capitalism, with a corrupt police force and bureaucracy, universal protection-racketeering and very few laws to deal with them. Money is power, and power is money. The giving and getting of money is, by definition, paralegal, subject to its own laws of reward and retribution. Like communist ideology, it is the expression of a mafia state within the state.


Amid all of this murkiness, it is extremely difficult to establish for certain the details of Vyacheslav Ivankov's criminal career. According to Yury Shchekochikhin, head of the investigative department of Literaturnaya Gazeta, he was born in Vladivostok in 1940, and later graduated from a circus school as an acrobat. These sorts of burly sports figures, men who were acrobats or wrestlers, were often used as enforcers and point men in the gangs that sprang up at the beginning of the corrupt Brezhnev years. Ivankov is said to have become a soldier, together with a young Georgian named Otary Kvantrishvili, in a Moscow gang controlled by a crook known as "the Mongol."


"The Mongol," according to a spokesman for the Moscow militia's Anti-Organized Crime Unit, died recently in a plush Moscow hospital. He made his name as a shakedown and protection racketeer who preyed on his own milieu, on drug dealers and the underground manufacturers who were beginning to spring up in the new political climate. Ivankov is said to have become his star pupil, extending the gang's influence as far as Sverdlovsk, 960 kilometers from Moscow. Even at this age, Ivankov was known for being smooth, clever -- and extremely menacing. Part of his legend was that he liked to shove plastic bags into his victims' rectums, then use an oxy-acetylene torch to seal them shut.


He was also lucky. Twice he was arrested for extortion and put on trial; twice he got off. Less fortunate, or less well-connected, was his fellow soldier Kvantrishvili, who in 1966 was tried and sentenced to 10 years for gang rape -- although he later found a way of beating the rap. "He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic via a bought certificate, and then released from prison," says Larisa Kislinskaya, who reports on crime for Itar-Tass. "He was supposed to have been transferred to an asylum, but never showed up." Kvantrishvili would go on to reach the very top of Russia's organized crime structures, only to be gunned down eventually outside a Moscow bathhouse in the spring of 1994.


In 1981, though, Ivankov's luck ran out. By now the head of his own gang, named for the Moscow district of Solntsevo, he was arrested, together with Kvantrishvili, charged with robbery, firearms possession, forgery and drug trafficking. Kvantrishvili got off, while the full brunt of the charges fell on Ivankov. He was sentenced to 14 years and dispatched to a prison camp in Siberia. It was there that he is said to have reached the highest ranks of the Russian criminal world by being crowned a "thief-in-law" -- the highest ranking in a criminal fraternity bound by, and enforcing, a common code.


The thief-in-law system was born in tsarist times, but came of age in Stalin's prisons and camps, according to ex-militiaman Alexander Gurov, until recently the director of a secret Interior Ministry research institute. The thief-in-law was the prison or camp boss. It was he who dispensed justice among prisoners. He maintained a general prisoners' fund. He organized prison labor and sentenced to death informers and those who cooperated with prison authorities.


Although physical strength was important to thieves-in-law, strength of will and the ability to face down stronger men were more important. Violence was not usually part of their pattern. Most were "pure" thieves who continued their prison roles in the outside world, dispensing justice through "people's courts," maintaining a central thieves' exchequer, and directing crime.


By the 1950s, the system had become so dominant in the prisons that the Communist authorities were forced to take action. According to Gurov, 300 thieves-in-law were gathered in a special camp near Perm and forced to work and clean their cells -- in violation of their own code. Meanwhile, a huge propaganda campaign was mounted against them, and it appeared that their power was finally broken.


With the coming of the Brezhnev years, however, a new generation of con men and gamblers appeared in Russian cities, calling themselves "hussars," "packagers" and "sharps." Among them were a number of former thieves-in-law. At around this time too, they began what Gurov calls "an active and secret correspondence," and their traditions were slowly revived in the camps.


The authorities at first failed to realize what was happening. But then, in the late 1970s, there was a massive rise in crime in Uzbekistan. A special police department was set up there, and a number of modern-day thieves-in-law were exposed. "It became clear to the investigators, though," says Gurov, "that the Uzbek thieves-in-law were merely caretakers. The whole operation was in fact run from Moscow by a new generation who were not Russian by and large, but Georgian, Armenian, Uzbek and Azerbaijani. These new-age thieves-in-law were robbers and racketeers controlling prostitution and gambling. They were underground businessmen operating deep in the shadow economy."


They were also, increasingly, very well organized. In 1979, according to police sources, they called a special congress outside Moscow, the Congress of Spades, to consolidate their operations. Many of the older thieves-in-law were removed or retired, and with them most of their long-standing traditions. In 1986, at another meeting, the new dispensation finally came of age. The voting powers of other veterans were removed. Though some remained as mediators, the real power passed to a central committee of racketeers, variously known as The Moscow Center or The Brothers' Circle, who are said to have appointed none other than Otary Kvantrishvili as their banker.


Ivankov missed this meeting. He was still languishing in a prison camp at Tulun in Siberia. He also missed the crucial years that followed, in which, thanks to Gorbachev's economic reforms, the world completely changed for what was now emerging as a modern-style Crime Inc. Its underground businessmen could now operate openly as the owners of cooperatives and joint ventures. Western money poured into Moscow. Most importantly, alliances were made between the only two groups that understood both money and power: the crime bosses, and those who had been the main beneficiaries of the tottering Communist state -- high-ranking bureaucrats, KGB officers and children of the nomenklatura.


By the time Kvantrishvili finally paid his debt to Ivankov in 1990 -- by organizing a petition for clemency and commutation of sentence -- his cause could be, and was, supported by some illustrious names, according to an article published by the Tass crime bureau. They included the world-famous eye surgeon Vyacheslav Fyodorov; a singer, Iosif Kobzon, who was in popularity the Russian equivalent of Bob Hope or Frank Sinatra; and a leading official of the Russian Supreme Court.


In March 1991, the Supreme Court finally ordered Ivankov freed, five years early, on the dubious grounds of good behavior. According to Russian news reports from the time, there was a celebration party in Irkutsk. Then he was flown on a chartered plane back to Moscow, where his welcome included a new Mercedes and several million rubles from the thieves-in-law central fund. He was immediately put to work. His first task was said to have been bringing Moscow's rogue Chechen gangs back into line, and forcing them to pay dues and accept discipline. And his second was helping organize and attending the most important Russian criminal congress of modern times, held four months after the August coup at the village of Vedentsovo in December 1991. The themes of this congress, described in Stephen Handelman's book, "Comrade Criminal," were the new opportunities opening up in banking, casinos, money-laundering, import-export and other forms of trade. By the time it was over, Ivankov, it was claimed, had emerged as one of the most powerful voices in a new seven-member inner circle, deputized from then on to promote international business and bring the American Organizatsiya back into the fold.





In the 1970s and 1980s, huge numbers of Russian emigr?s had made new lives in the West, particularly in the United States and Israel. In the United States, many of them had congregated in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, where they were more or less sealed off from the communities around them by language and their old, deeply ingrained habit of hiding away, as far as possible, from the state. It was an environment in which the soldiers and "authorities" of the Russian shadow economy -- who had moved abroad with them -- could easily thrive.


The first Brighton Beach "godfather" of modern times, complete with all the hand-kissing rigmarole, was a man named Evsei Agron, who was murdered outside his Brooklyn apartment in 1985 by hired killers said to have come from Odessa. But by that time, much of his power had passed to another emigr?: Marat Balagula, known as "the Georgian" or "the Giant." Balagula, once the manager of the largest food cooperative in Ukraine, had established himself in the traditional immigrant way, by helping out and employing new arrivals who couldn't get jobs. By 1980, he'd made enough money to buy an Odessa restaurant-cabaret he began to use as a base, holding "people's courts" in an upstairs room after hours, and employing weight lifters and former Israeli commandos as enforcers.


It was Balagula who slowly made the Organizatsiya, as it came to be called, an important criminal power, through jewelry heists, insurance and Medicaid frauds, heroin and a huge, billion-dollar gasoline-bootlegging and tax scam. But in 1986, he was charged with credit-card fraud, and in November of that year, three days before sentencing, he fled the country. For a while he was able to control the Organizatsiya from long distance, through his lieutenants. But in 1989, he was arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, and finally sent to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. In 1991, his chief henchman, Emil Puzyretsky, was shot nine times in the face and chest while eating breakfast at the National Restaurant in Brighton Beach. After that, according to Yury Shchekochikhin, five different families began fighting for control.


It was into this fraught situation that Ivankov is said to have delicately inserted himself in 1992. Sometime that year he traveled to Germany, masquerading as a member of a film crew from Mosfilm Studios. And it was there, according to reports from Literaturnaya Gazeta, that he applied for entry to the United States, denying in the process that he had any criminal record. Later that year, he was granted entry. He settled in Los Angeles, where he told a Russian-language newspaper: "I have been authorized to bring order here in emigr? circles."


According to an FBI report, he went on to buy a house in Denver, and to meet "Russian organized crime figures" in New York and Vancouver, British Columbia. He also, according to Russian sources, visited Frankfurt and Vienna, where he was seen with the new boss of his old Solntsevo gang.


He stayed well away from Moscow, however, because by this time there was an all-out war going on there between rival factions fighting for huge piles of instant money created under Yeltsin's policies of "privatization" and "liberalization." Those who had traditionally kept the peace, the old-style thieves-in-law, were dying out. The new racketeers, deeply enmeshed in both government and big business, began to fall like tenpins in a series of brutal murders.


At what point the FBI picked up Ivankov's U.S. trail is not yet clear. What is clear, though, is that Ivankov's absence from Moscow began to turn his reputation into legend. Russian newspapers described him as "fighting for, and then winning, control of Russia's oil," as "being the mediator between the Russian mafia and the Medellin cartel" after a huge consignment of cocaine was found in meat tins on the Russian-Finnish border at Vyborg; and even as "controlling up to a third of Russia's economy."


The question has to be asked, though: Who exactly has the FBI now got its hands on: the legendary Yaponets or the unprepossessing Vyacheslav Ivankov? The brutal gang member of the innermost Brothers' Circle, or the businessman who likes to sit in Brighton Beach's Paradise Restaurant, worrying about his waistline -- and once telling a Daily News reporter that he was sent to Siberia for his religious beliefs?


The true answer is probably both. For we are already, when it comes to the inheritors of the old thieves-in-law kingdom, at the stage not of "Godfather I," but of "Godfather III," when what we call the mafia is already deep inside government and big business, and the dividing line between legitimate and illegitimate has become extremely hazy.


In August, Vyacheslav Ivankov was denied bail. And in November, his trial was put off until after the New Year -- no date has yet been set. When it does finally open, though, his defense is likely to rely on the fact that the $3.5 million he is alleged to have conspired to extort from the two Russian businessmen seems to have belonged to a Moscow bank -- it was a loan, plus interest, that the two men had consistently refused to repay.


Ivankov, in other words, will be depicted as merely lending his reputation to a just claim against defaulters, as working in favor of law and order.


Whatever happens, it doesn't look like the FBI is going to have an easy time sending Ivankov to prison -- or in identifying in any coherent way what exactly the Russian mafia has become.