Vyacheslav Ivankov

Semyan "Sam" Kislin (born 1934 or 1935 Odesa) was "a member or associate" of Ivankov per a 1994 FBI report obtained by the Associated Press.

Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov (Вячесла́в Кири́ллович Иванько́в; 2 January 1940 – 9 October 2009) was a Russian mafia boss and thief in law who was believed to have connections with Russian state intelligence organizations and their organized crime partners.

He operated in both the Soviet Union and the United States.

His nickname, "Yaponchik" (Япончик) translates from Russian as "Little Japanese", due to his faintly Asian facial features.

Ivankov was born in Georgia to parents of Russian ethnicity, when it was part of the Soviet Union, to Olga Gostasvits and Bernard Royal-Ivankov, and lived on Iosebidze Street, in the capital of Tbilisi.

He grew up in Moscow.

Ivankov was an amateur wrestler in his youth and served his first prison time for his participation in a bar fight, in which he claimed he was defending the honor of a woman.

After his release, he began to move up in the criminal world, selling goods on the black market.

Later Ivankov became involved in gang activity.

His gang used forged police documents to enter houses and then burglarize them.

In 1974, in Butyrka prison he was "crowned" i.e. awarded by criminal brotherhood the title of vor v zakone (thief in law).

In 1982, authorities had finally caught up with him and he was arrested on firearms, forgery and drug-trafficking charges.

Kislin of Trans Commodities Inc. who hired Michael Cherney to manage Trans Commodities from 1988 to 1992, made donations to Rudy Giuliani's mayoral campaigns in the 1990s.

Though he was sentenced to fourteen years he was released in 1991, reportedly thanks to the intervention of a powerful politician and a bribed judge of the Russian supreme court.

Ivankov was an ardent anti-Communist.

According to Alexander Litvinenko, Ivankov headed the narcotics trafficking of the Uzbek network in the United States.

Robert Eringer confirmed this.

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 front company in the United States was Slavic, Inc.

His reason for arriving in the United States 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, 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 of Lucky Luciano's nationwide Mafia Commission many decades earlier.

Ivankov was arrested by the FBI on June 8, 1995, charged with the extortion of $2.7 million from an investment advisory firm known as Summit, ran by two Russian businessmen, and in June the next year he was convicted along with multiple codefendants.

At the time of his arrest, Ivankov was found to be in possession of thousands of dollars and seven different passports under different names and countries.

A .38 caliber 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.

He was subsequently transferred from a jail in Brooklyn to the more secure Manhattan Detention Complex (MDC) in Manhattan and then Otisville FCI.

Ivankov was incarcerated with his cousin Eugene Slusker, who was also charged in the case.

In prison, he became an associate of Pavle Stanimirović, son of Vojislav Stanimirović.

Ivankov, Slusker and Stanimirović all retained and utilized the services of attorney Robert S. Wolf; the first American lawyer to ever be allowed entry into Russian Gulag prisons in Siberia.

Kislin issued numerous mortgages to investors, who were overwhelmingly associated with countries from the former Soviet Union, in the 2001 opened Trump World Tower.

Kislin, who states that he is very close to the Cherney brothers, claims that he persuaded his ally Giuliani to have President Trump claim that Ukraine is full of corruption.

On July 13, 2004, Ivankov was deported to Russia to face murder charges over two Turkish nationals who were shot in a Moscow restaurant following a heated argument in 1992.

A third was seriously wounded in the alleged incident.

The jury found him not guilty and he was acquitted the same day on July 18, 2005.