Russian mob boss laid to rest

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Russian mafia kingpin Vyacheslav Ivankov was buried at a Moscow cemetery today. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with writer Stephen Handelman about Ivankov’s lengthy career in the world of Russian crime.

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MARCO WERMAN: As leaders of the Russian government gathered for meetings with Secretary Clinton, some leaders of Russian organized crime gathered for a funeral at a Moscow cemetery.  They’d gone to pay their final respects to one of their own.  Mafia kingpin Vyacheslav Ivankov was laid to rest today.  He died Friday from wounds he suffered during a sniper attack in July.  Ivankov was 69 years old.  He had a lengthy career in racketeering, arms smuggling, and drug trafficking.  Stephen Handelman directs the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York.  He’s an expert on post-Soviet crime and corruption.  So tell us, Mr. Handelman, first of all, how big a figure was Vyacheslav Ivankov in the world of Russian crime?

STEPHEN HANDELMAN:  Well, it’s debatable.  He’s been called the most important Russian crime figure to have come to the United States, which is certainly true.  In the entire pantheon of Russian crime figures, which are called authorities or vori v zakonye, or thieves within the law, he’s right up there.  He’s not the most powerful one, but then again, there is never any one single godfather that dominated the Russian mafia in those years of 1980s and 1990s.

WERMAN:  Right, I mean, Ivankov was actually in jail in the US for a while. What was the charge?

HANDELMAN:  He was in jail for a charge that the FBI moved against him on extortion.  He was in the midst of, some people say, creating a new network in the United States, based in Brooklyn.  And he was picked up.  It was a clumsy effort.  He basically figured that he can get around US authorities in the same way he’d gotten around Russian authorities for all of his career, but that was quickly scotched.  He was really arrested about three years after he came here.

WERMAN:  I mean, if you had to characterize his kind of career as a crime boss, would he be more Don Corleone or more Tony Soprano?

HANDELMAN:  Well, he’s certainly not Tony Soprano, if you means he’s sort of a media conscious celebrity.  Ivankov hated the media.  In fact, he threatened one journalist who was doing a lot of stuff about him, and it was regarded even then as a serious threat.  But with Ivankov’s passing, it’s really kind of the end of an era, when top Russian crime kingpins who emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union hobnobbed with celebrities, made fantastic amounts of money and exerted a huge amount of power in the post Soviet economy at the time, which, if you remember, was both a booming economy, at the same time totally uncontrolled.  So figures like Ivankov had a lot of heft and were involved in huge amounts of turf battles and fights and lots of businesses that extended way beyond Russia to Eastern Europe, Europe and, they hoped, to the United States.

WERMAN:  Now who do you think would have been in attendance at his funeral today in Moscow?

HANDELMAN:  Well, from the reports, there weren’t any celebrities there, but there were certainly a lot of mid level or senior level crime bosses.  Some of the top ones are obviously not going to show up, because they’d be afraid of being arrested.  But it sounds like with a crowd of about 300 to 400, even 500 folks, this was kind of a way to pay respects to a man who dominated Russian crime life, and the image, which is just as important, of the Russian criminal for so long, really for the past two decades in post Soviet Russia.  So his passing really signifies that a lot of the kind of shoot them up first gangsters and gangsterism of the post Soviet economy has really gone.  Although one could say also that the death of the era really predated Ivankov’s own death, because a lot of the criminal activities have in fact been subsumed by corruption by state authorities and by other–

WERMAN:  Right, well I was going to ask you.  I mean, you said that this is kind of an end of an era.  Does that mean that there’s no more Russian mafia?

HANDELMAN:  No, not at all, not at all.  The Russian mafia is an institution and in fact that goes back to well before the Soviet revolution at the turn of the last century.  They’ve been around forever and they operate in the cracks and precipices of Russian society, since the government has always been a weak influence in many parts of Russia.  Russian criminals operated a huge network and a powerful network which supplied a lot of the services that Soviet government couldn’t, and even though a lot of them were in prison, in fact they operated a lot of their activities from prison itself. So these godfathers were prison based for the longest time, until the mid ’90s or so when they began to emerge.

WERMAN:  It’s an odd coincidence that the formal or official international spotlight is on Hillary Clinton in Moscow, but the local news spotlight there has been turned on this funeral of Ivankov.

HANDELMAN:  Well, yes.  Of course, the gangsters were so colorful and they’re so full of the life of immediate post Soviet Russia.  There were songs, still are songs written about them.  A lot of young people, at least in the ’90s, kind of emulated them, because they were the ones who can get money quickly.  They dressed beautifully, they traveled around the world.  I’m not sure they’re so glamorous now, but it was a very strong feature of Russian culture, particularly in the post Soviet era.

WERMAN:  Stephen Handelman is the author of the 1995 book “Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafia.”  He directs the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York.  Thank you very much for your time.

HANDELMAN:  And you’re very welcome.

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