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 reason for arriving in America 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, soon 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 run 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 many 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 MDC (Manhattan Detention Complex) in Manhattan and then Otisville FCI. Ivankov was incarcerated with his cousin Eugene Slushier, who was also charged in the case. In prison he became an associate of Pavle Stanimirović, son of Vojislav Stanimirović. Ivanov, Slusker and Stanimirović all used the services of attorney Robert S. Wolf; he was the first American lawyer to be allowed into Russian prisons in Siberia.
