United States - The Mob: The Russians

The Russians started coming in the late 1970s and early 1980s-300,000 in all-when the Soviet government temporarily lifted immigration barriers allowing persecuted Soviet Jews to emigrate. Included in this batch was what the FBI terms as "second-echelon" criminals, who settled in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. They basically beat up on each other, and the Feds stayed out of it. The second wave arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russia upped the number of visas to the United States from 3,000 a year to nearly 33,000-a more than 10-fold increase. Savage and unrepentant, the Russian mob counts on fear to scare its enemies-and doesn't think twice about wasting cops. In 1994, the FBI-with the help of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD)-got a tip on a top Moscow crime boss, Vyacheslav Ivankov, who was coming to New York to oversee the gang's U.S. operations. Ivankov was under surveillance once he got to the States and then made the mistake of extorting a couple of Russian emigrÄs who owned a Wall Street investment consulting firm. To show he was serious, Ivankov had one of the targets' father show up dead in a Moscow train station. Ivankov was later busted and ended up spitting at and kicking reporters after he was fingerprinted. The Feds have a lot more to learn about the Russian gangsters, who one MVD official categorized as "very tough, very smart, very educated and very violent."

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