Michael Schwirtz reported in the The New York Times of 13 October, the death of Vyacheslav K. Ivankov.
Vyacheslav K. Ivankov, a Russian crime boss who survived tangles with the K.G.B., the F.B.I. and other violent criminals in a bloody career that spanned decades, was laid to rest at a Moscow cemetery. Hundreds attended the funeral.
Mr. Ivankov died on Friday in a Moscow hospital from complications stemming from a gunshot wound he received apparently in an assassination attempt in July. He was 69. His death has set off fears of a mob war in Moscow like those that bloodied the streets of major Russian cities in the 1990s.
Photo by Andrei Stenin/Reuters. The coffin of Vyacheslav K. Ivankov carried at Vagankovskoe Cemetery in Moscow.
In Russian Mafia in America: Immigration, Culture, and Crime
, James O. Finckenauer and Elin J. Waring hypothesized that “Yaponchick,” while a serious criminal, was not the leader of a large, sophisticated criminal organization – but rather portrayed as such by United States government officials and the press. (Previous citation to Google Books; excerpt published on PBS/FrontLine website linked here).
Finckenauer and Waring aren’t likely to have been in a position to have known that Ivankov would be extradited to Russia for murder and then been acquitted; one’s general impression of the Russian judicial system is that acquittals don’t generally happen when the government wants a conviction.
If Ivankov was sufficiently well-connected that the Russian government was willing to risk losing face being seen conspiring a weak case in order to extradite and then release him, it seems fair to infer that he was, in fact, fairly high up in Russian criminal-political circles.