Semion Yudkovich Mogilevich is a Ukrainian-born organized crime boss, believed by European
and United States federal law enforcement agencies to be the "boss of bosses" of most
Russian Mafia syndicates in the world.
Mogilevich is believed to direct a vast criminal empire and is described by the FBI as "the
most dangerous mobster in the world".
He has been accused by the FBI of "weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion,
drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale."
Mogilevich's nicknames include "Don Semyon", and "The Brainy Don".
He is said to control RosUkrEnergo, a company actively involved in Russia–Ukraine gas
disputes.
Based in Moscow, he has three children and is most closely associated with the Solntsevskaya
Bratva crime group.
Political figures he has close alliances with include Yury Luzhkov, the former Mayor of
Moscow, Dmytro Firtash and Leonid Derkach, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine.
Oleksandr Turchynov, who was designated as acting President of Ukraine in February 2014,
appeared in court in 2010 for allegedly destroying files pertaining to Mogilevich.
Biography Mogilevich was born in 1946 in Kiev's Podol
neighborhood to a Jewish family.
In 1968, at the age of 22, Mogilevich earned a degree in economics from Lviv University.
In the early 1970s, Mogilevich became part of the Lyuberetskaya crime group in Moscow
and was involved in petty theft and fraud.
He served two terms for currency-dealing offenses.
During the 1980s, tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian Jews were emigrating to Israel
on short notice and without the ability to quickly transfer their possessions.
Mogilevich would offer to sell property – their furniture, art and diamonds – on behalf
of the prospective émigrés, promising to forward the money on to Israel.
The money was, instead, used to invest in black market and criminal activities.
In 1990, already a millionaire, Mogilevich moved to Israel, together with several top
lieutenants.
Here he invested in a wide range of legal businesses, while continuing to operate a
worldwide network of prostitution, weapon, and drug smuggling through a complex web of
offshore companies.
In 1991 Mogilevich married his Hungarian girlfriend Katalin Papp, moved to Hungary, and had three
children with her, obtaining a Hungarian passport; at this point, Mogilevich held Russian, Ukrainian,
Israeli and Hungarian citizenship.
Living in a fortified villa outside Budapest, he continued to invest in a wide array of
enterprises, including buying a local armament factory, "Army Co-Op", which produced anti-aircraft
guns.
In 1994, Mogilevich group obtained control over Inkombank, one of the largest private
banks in Russia, in a secret deal with bank chairman Vladimir Vinogradov, getting direct
access to the world financial system.
The bank collapsed in 1998 under suspicions of money laundering.
Through Inkombank, in 1996 he obtained a significant share in Sukhoi, a large military aircraft
manufacturer.
In May 1995, a meeting in Prague between Mogilevich and Sergei Mikhailov, head of the Solntsevo
group, was raided by Czech police.
The occasion was a birthday party for one of the deputy Solntsevo mafiosi.
Two hundred partygoers in the restaurant "U Holubů" were detained and thirty expelled
from the country.
Police had been tipped off that the Solntsevo group intended to execute Mogilevich at the
party over a disputed payment of $5 million.
But Mogilevich never showed up and it is believed that a senior figure in the Czech police,
working with the Russian mafia, had warned him.
Soon, however, the Czech Interior Ministry imposed a 10-year entry ban on Mogilevich,
while the Hungarian government declared him persona non grata and the British barred his
entry into the UK, declaring him "one of the most dangerous men in the world".
Both Mogilevich and his associate Mikhailov ceased to travel to the west in the late 1990s.
In 1997 and 1998, the presence of Mogilevich, Mikhailov and others associated with the Russian
Mafia behind a public company trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange, YBM Magnex International
Inc., was exposed by Canadian journalists.
On May 13, 1998, dozens of agents for the FBI and several other U.S. government agencies
raided YBM's headquarters in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
Shares in the public company, which had been valued at $1 billion on the TSX, became worthless
overnight.
As to Mogilevich himself, government law enforcement agencies from throughout the world had by
now been trying to prosecute him for over 10 years.
But he had, in the words of one journalist, "a knack for never being in the wrong place
at the wrong time".
Until 1998, Inkombank and Bank Menatep participated in a US$10 billion money laundering scheme
through the Bank of New York.
Mogilevich was also suspected of participation in large scale tax fraud, where untaxed heating
oil was sold as highly taxed car fuel – one of the greatest scandals that broke around
1990-1991.
Estimates are that up to one third of sold fuels went through this scheme, resulting
in massive tax losses for countries of Central Europe.
In the Czech Republic the scandal is estimated to cost the taxpayers around 100 billion CZK
and involved, besides others, murders and assassination attempt of a journalist writing
about the problem.
In 2003, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation put Mogilevich on the "Wanted
List" for participation in the scheme to defraud investors in Canadian company YBM Magnex International
Inc.
Frustrated by their previous unsuccessful efforts to charge him for arms trafficking
and prostitution, they had now settled on the large-scale fraud charges as their best
hope of running him to ground.
He was, however, considered to be the most powerful Russian mobster alive.
In a 2006 interview, former Clinton administration anti-organized-crime czar Jon Winer said:
"I can tell you that Semion Mogilevich is as serious an organized criminal as I have
ever encountered and I am confident that he is responsible for contract killings."
Mogilevich was arrested in Moscow on January 24, 2008, for suspected tax evasion.
His bail was placed, and he was released on July 24, 2009.
On his release, the Russian interior ministry stated that he was released because the charges
against him "are not of a particularly grave nature".
On October 22, 2009, he was named by the FBI as the 494th fugitive to be placed on the
Ten Most Wanted list, where he remains today.
In spite of the warrants issued against him, he still lives freely in Moscow, according
to the FBI.
See also FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives
Thief in law Russian mafia
References
External links Mogilevich's FBI Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitive
Alert Mogilevich's profile on America's Most wanted
US Senate testimony of FBI Assistant Director, includes Mogilevich
"The Billion Dollar Don" Papers from Annual Conference of the European
Society of Criminology, Helsinki, 2003 Semyon Mogilevich, the 'East European mafia
boss', captured in Moscow http:archive.ishttp:www.forbes.com05bin-laden-joaquin-guzman-dawood-ibrahim-business-world-most-wanted_slide_5.html