Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

As in the case of the Fabergé egg scam.

At the beginning of 1995, again in partnership with Solncevo, he acquires jewelry stores in Moscow and Budapest to cover his traffic in precious stones, antiquities, and artworks stolen from Russian churches and museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. But his project is far more ambitious and sophisticated, to the point of using the world’s most prestigious auction house: Sotheby’s. Mogilevic and his associates purchase a shed just outside Budapest and stock it with the most up-to-date equipment for restoring antique jewels and setting precious stones. Mogilevic watches the preparations from outside the building, arms crossed over his prominent paunch. Now he needs to find talented artists capable of replicating the most famous golden eggs of all time, Fabergé eggs. Don Semën activates his network of contacts and within a week he hires two internationally noted Russian sculptors. He promises them a lot of money and steady work. Sure, they’ll have to remain in a shed on the outskirts of Budapest for the next few months, but it’s still better than what they can find back home. Original Fabergé eggs in need of restoration arrive at the Budapest factory from collectors and museums all over the former Soviet zone. The two sculptors produce perfect copies, which are sent back to Russia. Meanwhile, the real eggs find their way to London and are sold by Sotheby’s auctioneers, who unwittingly constitute the final link in the chain.

Mogilevic has always had a talent for swindles, and he’s pulled off a few of gigantic proportions, such as the one where he stole billions of dollars from the public treasuries of three Central European states — the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia — by selling them gasoline disguised as heating oil, thus avoiding those states’ extremely high taxes on auto fuel. Instead of being paid into those countries’ coffers, the monies filled Don Seva’s and his organization’s pockets. When a Hungarian gangster involved in the deal started collaborating with investigators and named Don Seva, the response was unequivocal. A car bomb exploded in downtown Budapest, killing the canary, his lawyer, and two passersby, wounding another twenty-odd people, and reducing that popular tourist street to a scene of wartime devastation.

Mogilevic decides to stay in Budapest even after his wife’s death in 1994. As for all the Mafija, one of the pillars of his fortune is arms trafficking. But now he makes an astonishing leap forward. He obtains a license to legally buy and sell arms, and thanks to his controlling a Hungarian weapons factory, Army Co-op, he manages to buy two more factories: Magnex 2000, which produces magnets, and Digep General Machine Works, a former state-owned factory, now privatized, that makes projectiles, mortars, and firearms. He is now in de facto control of the Hungarian military weapons industry. He sells arms to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. He supplies Iran with material purloined from East German warehouses for several millions of dollars. Mogilevic is now the lord of war.

• • •

Another photo from the Russian album. Ivan’kov, the Little Jap, looks older now. Receding hairline, gray hair and beard, a little stoop shouldered even. He’s put on a few pounds and looks tired. But his eyes, those two slits that earned him his nickname, are still the same. And his blue-tinted glasses can’t hide their fury. Mogilevic has been busy, but Ivan’kov hasn’t been wasting his time either. He’s used his connections, reputation, and experience to set up international arms trafficking, gambling, prostitution, extortion, and fraud and money-laundering operations, with more sophisticated and modern methods than what the New York Russians were used to. He’s established links to the Italian Mafia and the Colombian drug cartels. And to make sure he’s protected, can fight, and intimidate, he formed an army of almost three hundred men, most of whom served in the Afghan war. He quickly gained control of the Russian Jewish mafia in New York, transforming it from a bunch of neighborhood shakedown artists into a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. And the old-school gangsters, frightened of him and his reputation, have to accept him. According to the American authorities he’s the most powerful Russian mafioso in the United States. He’s the one who expands Mafija business in Miami, where he supplies the Cali cartel with heroin and money-laundering services in exchange for cocaine, which he then sends to Russia. The former Soviet Union starts hungering after white powder, and the Little Jap wants to corner the market. And he doesn’t hesitate to use whatever arms are necessary. Up till then Russia’s cocaine trade was run by two criminals from the former Soviet Union: the Georgian vor Valeri “Globus” Glugec and Sergej “Sylvester” Timofeev. The first was a pioneer drug importer in Moscow; the second, after a brief interlude with Solncevo, began collaborating with Ivan’kov. The Little Jap wanted their slices of the market. He kept trying to convince Globus and Sylvester that from then on he, the Little Jap, was the one in charge of the cocaine business. But in the end he was forced to kill them both: Globus was shot dead near one of his Moscow clubs, while Sylvester was blown to bits when he started his car.

The competition is over; Ivan’kov has won. His activities soon attract the attention of the FBI, who till then had mostly been used to dealing with the Italo American mafia and weren’t really equipped to deal with the Russians yet. In 1995 Ivan’kov has an extortion on his hands, or rather “a debt collection” of $3.5 million. Aleksandr Volkov and Vladimir Vološin, two Russian businessmen with mysterious pasts working on Wall Street, founded Summit International, an investment company in New York in which the Chara Bank of Moscow invested, $3.5 million. But Volkov and Vološin’s company is nothing but a gigantic Ponzi scheme: The two of them promise creditors, for the most part Russian immigrants, a 120 percent annual interest rate. But in truth they don’t invest anything, spending the money instead on women, travel, and gambling. When the president of Chara Bank asks them to return the money they had “invested,” the two managers refuse. So the Moscow bank asks Ivan’kov for help, and he takes it upon himself to get the money back. In June Ivan’kov and two of his thugs nab the two traders at the New York Hilton bar and take them to Troika, a Russian restaurant in New Jersey. They threaten them — if they don’t agree to sign papers promising to give back the $3.5 million, they won’t leave the restaurant alive. The traders agree — what else can they do? — and so they save their skins. The Little Jap has won again, or so he thinks; he doesn’t yet know that the two kidnapped traders, once they are released, alert the FBI. A few days later, at dawn on June 8, 1995, they arrest Ivan’kov at Brighton Beach while he’s asleep with his girlfriend. That same day several members of his organization are picked up, including his right-hand man. Even in handcuffs, even surrounded by FBI agents, the Little Jap is arrogant and cocky. He screams, curses, kicks.

He’s found guilty of extortion and sentenced to nine years and eight months in the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Four years go by, by which point it’s clear that the Lewisburg jail isn’t enough for someone like the Little Jap, who has no problem getting drugs delivered to him, and according to the FBI, sending orders to his men on the outside. The bars of the maximum security penitentiary in Allenwood await him.

• • •

At about the same time as Ivan’kov’s arrest in the United States the forces of order in the Old World start getting serious about stifling the exuberance of certain Russian expatriates. On the evening of May 31, 1995, an endless stream of customers enters the U Holubů restaurant in Prague, for a special evening. No one notices the two big refrigerator trucks parked outside. They’re all white, no signage, and anyone who looked at them more closely would have noticed that the tires show no trace of wear. But maybe the guests are in a hurry to get inside. It’s a dinner in honor of a friend, and the Russian cabaret performer is supposed to be really hilarious. A few hours earlier, at the Czech Republic’s organized crime squad headquarters, a diligent employee made a rather extravagant request: “I’m going to need a couple of refrigerated trucks, and I need them fast.”