TRANSCRIPT – PANORAMA “THE BILLION DOLLAR DON”

TRANSCRIPT - PANORAMA "THE BILLION DOLLAR DON"


BOB LEVINSON
SPECIAL AGENT, FBI, 1976-98
Criminals are coming in who are wealthier and more vicious than any other criminals that you 
or anybody on the continent have ever seen.  As far as I'm concerned, they're the most 
dangerous people on earth.  People are much more afraid of the Russian Mafia than they are 
of even the Columbians, the American Mafia or the Sicilians and Italian Mafia.  He is 
affiliated with the most powerful criminal organisation operating in Russia today.

TOM MANGOLD
What is your business?

SEMION MOGILEVICH
For the past few years I've been selling wheat and grain.

JIM MOODY
FBI DEPUTY ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, ORGANISED CRIME 1989-96
Educated, multilingual - dealing in corruption and the corruption that they deal with goes right 
to the top of the Russian government.  

TOM MANGOLD
Russia - birthplace of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, of the Tsars, of Lenin and Stalin, of revolution 
and huge political ideas - has found itself a new icon: the mobster.  Note if you will the gold 
rings round the finger, the gold chain round the neck, the mobile phone permanently glued to 
the ear, the Versace T-shirt covering the pot-belly.  This little chap is on sale in the tourist 
bazaars of Moscow, a city now ten years into the post-Soviet age but already beginning to 
define itself by tolerance of a dangerous new lawlessness that threatens to become its most 
notorious export.  They call Russia the new Kleptocracy - crime, corruption and violence are 
rampant.  New Russia is still in uneasy transition between the old repression and the new 
freedoms.  But these villains are street hoodlums and pimps, the detritus of any society 
throughout the world.

Although Semion Mogilevich insists on his complete innocence he has achieved international 
notoriety as one of the significant Russian crime figures, a shadowy middle man moving 
effortlessly between the foot soldiers and the powerful Brigade commanders of organised 
crime.  We met on his territory but on our terms, with no questions barred.  Mogilevich, 
camera shy, and not a little intimidating, now seeks to set the record straight in his first ever 
British interview.

I want to ask you a very, very serious question.  The Russian Ministry of Interior files in 
Department Number 6 refer to you as one of the top crime bosses in Russia and an authority 
on Russian organised crime.  Let me quote from the report: you are said to be a financier who 
runs prostitution, gambling and money laundering.  Would your own people, the Russians, say 
this if it is not true?

SEMION MOGILEVICH [through translator]
These are just words, they don't have documents proving that, and the people saying it 
understand nothing.

BOB LEVINSON
SPECIAL AGENT, FBI, 1976-98
He's a sophisticated racketeer who uses the cover of an international businessman to basically 
convince people 'you've got nothing to hide by dealing with me, this is all a mistake and just 
take a look at my bank accounts, and the people that I run with and you'll see that this is all an 
error on the part of the authorities'.

TOM MANGOLD
Half a world away in Florida is former FBI special agent Bob Levinson recently with the 
Bureau's anti-organised crime force.  Levinson now works the corporate crime beat, but 
remains the determined Nemesis of Mogilevich, the man he's hunted for ten years.

LEVINSON
He's dangerous because he'll get anybody who gets in his way.  That is the philosophy that 
you have got to understand is that while people will smile, people will paint themselves as 
legitimate businessmen, anyone who gets in their way becomes a target.

MANGOLD
And it's become just a little personal hasn't it.

LEVINSON
I'd like to finish the job.

MANGOLD
You'd like to see him weighed off

LEVINSON
I'd like to see him brought in, yes.  

MANGOLD
[FBI REPORT]
In May 1995 the FBI, together with Russian, German and Italian officers, produced this 
devastating report on organised crime naming Mogilevich as leader of an organisation with 
some 250 members.  Mogilevich's main activities are listed as arms dealing, trading nuclear 
material, prostitution, drug dealing, oil deals and money laundering.  

MANGOLD
People will be astonished that four nations including your own have got together to produce 
this damning report and I wonder quite seriously why you think that has happened?

MOGILEVICH
I'd say they are making a mountain out of a molehill.

MANGOLD
Why is it that all these disparate..  these different people pick on you?  I look at you and I 
don't see a victim, so why do people pick on you?

MOGILEVICH
It's because I smoke so much - Davidoff cigarettes.  

MANGOLD
The report says your organisation operates in central Europe, including Prague, Vienna, 
Russia, United States, the Ukraine, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

MOGILEVICH
If they were saying something concrete, 'in England you did this', 'in America you did this', I 
could say either yes, that did happen, or no, it didn't.  They're saying these things exist.  How 
can you prove they do?  None of it happened.  How can you explain that none of it happened?  
Well, how do you explain it?  It's impossible to explain it.

MANGOLD
The man they call the most dangerous gangster in Russia was born in the Ukraine the son of 
quite well-to-do parents.  He graduated with an economics degree earning himself the 
soubriquet of the Brainy Don.  He was twice jailed in the seventies for minor currency 
offences.  Mogilevich is a self-confessed lifelong and instinctive capitalist.  While in the 
gulags his network included hardened criminals, relationships that have endured to this day, 
the most notorious is with Sergei Mikhailov, reputedly head of Moscow's much feared 
Solsnetskaya Gang.  

LEVINSON
Sergei Anatoliavic Mikhailov, also known as Mijas, is the principal leader of the Solsnetskaya 
Organisation, operates right now out of Moscow, he has a thousand men under him, he has a 
number of brigades, they each have a territory that they're responsible for, they conduct 
extortions, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, prostitution and they launder the proceeds of 
much of these activities through Mr Mogilevich.  

MANGOLD
Ten years of democratic capitalism have brought little change to the streets of working class 
Moscow where violent death remains a frequent and casual tragedy.  Small news.  Little of the 
promised prosperity that was supposed to accompany the economic liberation of New Russia 
has made its way down from on high to the Muscovites scratching for bargains in the capital's 
central market.  Aching poverty remains etched into a society now existing on an average 
wage of two pounds a day.  Any old iron's a bargain here.

GRIGORY YAVLINSKY
RUSSIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
I think that was a deep misunderstanding and miscalculation about Russian reform and the 
main thing which was miscalculated was that there was no understanding that capitalism 
without democratic infrastructure, capitalism without laws, capitalism without civil society 
without moral and ethical limits is a wild animal which is eating itself and everybody around 
it.


MANGOLD
Although the new Russian bear seems less intimidating it is also less inhibited.  With the 
borders now open, Russian crime has slipped its leash and gone transnational.  Semion 
Mogilevich moved West from Moscow to Prague.  Here the collapse of communism ten years 
ago left a vacuum.  As the velvet revolutionaries threw away the hated implements of 
dictatorship they left themselves vulnerable to the new crime infection from the East.  The 
Russians soon made their presence felt.

JAN ZATORSKY
DEPUTY POLICE CHIEF, CZECH REPUBLIC, 1993-98
They were involved in a very wide spectrum of organised crime ranging from racketeering to 
arms smuggling, attempts to smuggle radioactive nuclear materials, all activities connected 
with organised crime.

MANGOLD 
The biggest rip-off in the new unfettered world of Klondyke Capitalism involved multi-
million dollar rackets in oils and petrols.  About a third of all the petrol and diesel pumped 
into their fuel tanks by Czech motorists went untaxed.  The trick was that whereas light fuel 
oil in the Republic was not taxable, diesel drew a heavy excise duty.  So the Russian mafia 
used various frauds to make massive rip-offs.  Sometimes the real rail tanker oil identities 
were carefully disguised, or the actual oil inside the tankers was chemically adulterated to 
change its true characteristics.  This huge racket robbed the Czech government of enough 
revenue to build 50 brand new hospitals.

JIM MOODY
FBI DEPUTY ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, ORGANISED CRIME 1989-96
They're very intelligent - a lot of them have masters degrees - and they love frauds because 
they'll go right after the government which is the biggest money producer around.  So they 
can generate huge amounts of money real fast.

MANGOLD
And with those vast profits came the violence and the car bombings as the Russians and 
Czechs fought turf wars for domination of the oil rackets.  Winners took all, losers paid with 
their lives.  By May 1995 Prague had become crime heaven for Russian gangsters.  The 
godfathers, feeling safe and confident here, decided to hold a rare Russian crime summit to 
celebrate successes, and plan a profitable future.  The venue was the U Holubu restaurant, part 
of a valuable down-town Prague centre, owned by a company which had recently been run by 
Mogilevich.  In the basement his Black and White Bar, a famous Czech clip joint which 
boasted girls unlimited.

BOB LEVINSON
In May of 1995 the number two man in the most powerful gang , the Solsnetskaya 
organisation - a man by the name of Victor Averin - was celebrating a birthday.  Traditionally 
the birthdays are used as an excuse to get members of the group together, primarily the 
leaders..  the brigade leaders.  And so a meeting was planned and we got wind of it.

MANGOLD
The FBI saw Averin's birthday guest list as a 'Who's still Who' of Russian organised crime.  
There was Sergei Mikhailov, alleged head of the notorious Solsnetskaya organisation, a gang 
linked by the FBI to Mogilevich.  Gafour Rakamov - the most powerful gangster in 
Uzbekistan, allegedly a major trafficker of heroin into Europe.  Dzhemal Khachidze - 
narcotics, Moscow.  And Aleksandr Sedov, reputedly one of the most vicious killers in 
Russia.

BOB LEVINSON
They were having an elaborate dinner and entertainment, they had a Russian singer and a 
comic and they had some cabaret entertainers, and everyone was having a very good time for 
themselves.  Somewhere in the middle of the performances, ropes from the ceiling came down 
and members of the Czech Republic's organised crime SWAT team came into the restaurant, 
jumped on the stage and with machine guns basically ordered the crowd not to move.  
Everyone was transfixed, thinking it was part of the show.  It was a..  it was an elaborate joke 
at their expense.  Slowly people realised that the men in the black clothing with the machine 
guns were not a joke but the real thing.

MANGROVE
It was also a rotten night out for the girls from the Black and White club as they too were 
hauled off, still in their working costumes, by an enthusiastic SWAT squad.  This was a 
deliberate humiliation designed to warn Mogilevich that even the minor figures in his empire 
were not immune.  

BOB LEVINSON
Everyone was identified.  They were photographed, the cameras were seized and basically to 
get, in effect, an order of battle from this organisation and identify the players.  It was a very 
successful raid.

MANGOLD
But the one man who escaped the indignity, the one man the Czechs and FBI most wanted to 
have a chat with, avoided being in the restaurant that night.  By remarkable twist of fate 
Mogilevich flew in for the party but it appears his plane arrived late.

MANGOLD
Were you intending to go to that party?  

MOGILEVICH 
Yes.

MANGOLD
Why didn't you go?

MOGILEVICH
By the time I arrived at U Holubu everything was already in full swing so I went to a 
neighbouring hotel and sat in the bar there until about five or six in the morning.

MANGOLD
No-one was ever charged, no criminal offence had been committed.  But the message from the 
Czech police to the Russian Brigade Commanders was clear enough.  Get out and stay out.  
The U Holubu Operation was one of those rare successful police strikes against Russian 
organised crime, and it forced some of the mobsters to move south, here to Hungary and 
Budapest.  And they brought their tradecraft with them.  This was Zoltan Seres, a Hungarian 
friend of Mogilevich, whose armour-plated Bentley did not protect him from the anti- tank 
ammunition that took his life.  Seres was the victim of the Russian/Hungarian turf wars which 
have followed the oil rackets as pestilence follows infection.  In Hungary so far over one 
hundred gangland murders, 170 explosions, countless kidnappings, tortures, and 
disappearances.  Mogilevich made Budapest his second home in the nineties.  His public 
profile was of involvement in the exotic night-time world, and he established a local chapter 
of the ubiquitous Black and White clip joint.  But quietly, he also worked at various legitimate 
businesses, and the police left him and his girlie club alone.

MANGOLD
Were there prostitutes in the club?

MOGILEVICH
I think unlikely, it was a topless bar.

MANGOLD
Did the girls go to bed with clients?

MOGILEVICH
There weren't any beds there.  It was a standing bar, with tables.

MANGOLD
But could money have come in which came from prostitution, perhaps without your being 
aware?

MOGILEVICH
It is unlikely.  The vice police, who control the club and who gave it a license, have a 
representative there on a permanent basis.

MANGOLD
And policemen never take bribes?

MOGILEVICH
Not the Hungarians.  I've heard they do sometimes in England.  In America they always accept 
bribes.

MANGOLD
Another plausible denial.  But this nervous Hungarian gangster seen questioned here by 
detectives may have been the first person with evidence to indict Mogilevich on the oil 
rackets.  This is Tamas Boros, telling all he knows.  There had been a dispute with the 
Russians over the oil rackets and they'd threatened him.  Suddenly, detectives heard a familiar 
name - Seva - the nickname for Semion Mogilevich.

TAMAS BOROS [Police interview footage]
Everything started with a man called Seva, I think he's the one, he's unapproachable, and I 
think that he's involved in the oil scam right up to this very day.  People I know have been up 
to his office on many occasions, but I've never taken part in any of the meetings.  I knew they 
brought away with them a million dollars - one hundred, two hundred, seven hundred 
thousand dollars, sums like these.

Q: Who is Seva.

BOROS
He is an older guy from Kiev.  I have only seen him once, he's a big fat man with a big belly.  
As far as I know he is the main link outward.  He is a businessman who settled here, who has 
excellent contacts in Russia, particularly the Ukraine - he has very serious connections there.

MANGOLD
From this interview on, Boros was already a dead man.  A car bomb - the familiar smoke and 
flames and chaos and death.  Tamas Boros and his lawyer assassinated.  Two passers by killed 
by the blast.  It happened in the middle of the tourist section of Budapest.  The murderers must 
have known there'd be innocent victims.  Last July, as Boros was passing a white Fiat, his 
mobile phone rang.  When he answered, the Fiat primed with nine pounds of TNT exploded in 
his face.  An early suspect was identified by a prime witness as merely a Ukrainian born 
Russian gangster.  Circumstantially that description fitted the Billionaire Don.

BOB LEVINSON
Each group has a signature.  Some groups use a sniper rifle to take out their enemies, some 
use a machine gun, some use a pistol.  The group which Mr Mogilevich is associated, their 
signature is the car bomb.

MANGOLD
Did you wish him dead?

MOGILEVICH
I was totally indifferent to him.  I didn't know him.  I haven't even met him.

MANGOLD
Were you angry that he was giving police information about you.

MOGILEVICH
I only found out about that after his death.  But in addition to myself, there were 20 politicians 
and 50 other people who also figured in the case.  So why was it me who killed him and not 
one of the other people?

MANGOLD
Was it in your interests that he died?

MOGILEVICH
Look, I didn't know the man.  It wasn't my line of business - Boros and his friends were 
selling oil products in Hungary.  I was selling wheat.

MANGOLD
Did you have anything to do with his murder?


MOGILEVICH
Of course not.

MANGOLD
It's true that Mogilevich didn't have a personal hand in the death of Boros, but he didn't need 
to.  There are two hundred armed Russian gangsters in Hungary, any one of whom knew only 
too well how to dispose of a dangerous informant.  Mogilevich's denial of direct personal 
involvement in the horrific car bombing of Boros does stand up to investigation.  Here in 
Budapest we've discovered there is indeed another Ukrainian-born brigade commander, a 
much-feared mobster with over a hundred men under his control.  He happens to run bomb 
factories.  Furthermore, we've been told that he was Mogilevich's right hand man in 
Budapest.  The truth is this city remains infected with Russian organised crime problems; a 
grim warning to the rest of Europe.  Hungary wants to join the European Union in three years.  
Those Russian mobsters who gain citizenship will then be able to cross the EU's boundaries 
with impunity and take their deadly trades with them.  Hungary is the last barrier, but the 
police remain gloomy.

LT COL ZSOLT BODNAR
HEAD OF CRIMINAL INTELLIGENCE
HUNGARIAN POLICE ANTI-ORGANISED CRIME SQUAD
They settle in Hungary because they like it here.  As they get older and have families, it's 
possible that they won't need to commit crimes, especially if their legal enterprises provide 
them with sufficient income.  The question is whether a younger generation of gangsters will 
come over to replace them.

MANGOLD
That's a very grim outlook for the future?

BODNAR
That's the reality

MANGOLD
An even more pressing reality is the inexorable progression of Russian organised crime from 
street to the boardroom and big white collar frauds.  Mogilevich a born capitalist and ruthless 
entrepreneur has spent his life taking risks.  Russians like him were just waiting for the 
historical moment to back their hunches, study capitalism's short cuts, and get very rich, very 
quick - whatever it took.  YBM Magnex in Pennsylvania, a lively company that had factories 
in Hungary and Britain making industrial magnets.  Typical of the kind of nineties financial 
opportunity that savvy investors turned to in their thousands.  The company's glowing claims 
and blue ribbon board of directors (many unaware of the truth) propelled YBM's shares from 
a few cents at their launch on Canadian stock exchanges to over $20 in only two years.  
Everyone started making money - on paper anyway.  A year ago, Adrian du Plessis was a 
talented young financial securities investigator who was asked to take a close look at YBM 
Magnex.  Today he's back in his original career, his first love, promoting pop music 
throughout Canada.  What he discovered last year about YBM was startling.

ADRIAN DU PLESSIS
FORMER FINANCIAL SECURITIES INVESTIGATOR
What I was able to determine about YBM from the documents was that Semion Mogilevich 
was an original founder and a controlling interest and in a sense, the brains or the eminence 
grise behind the construction of YBM Magnex.

MANGOLD
Du Plessis knew all about Mogilevich's reputation.

DU PLESSIS
One thing no-one has accused Mogilevich of being is a fool.  To find him on paper itself is a 
surprise, and then the fact that we could document him as a shareholder of YBM was a sort of 
a slip-up.  He'd allowed himself to be caught on paper which usually doesn't happen in these 
cases.

MANGOLD
Once Du Plessis had burrowed deep into the paperwork, the true pattern of YBM's dealings 
became clear

DU PLESSIS
YBM was a mix of reality and fantasy, illusion, a sham that at its core had some businesses 
but was also engaged in a range of things that were entirely fictitious and in other ways very 
dangerous and illicit.

MANGOLD
After Du Plessis published his findings the FBI raided the firm's HQ, the company soon 
collapsed and went into receivership.

DU PLESSIS
In early l998, YBM was valued at almost a billion dollars Canadian.  That paper is all 
worthless now.  The bottom line is the public lost tens of millions, maybe hundreds of 
millions, in YBM.

MANGOLD
I'd like to talk to you about YBM Magnex.

MOGILEVICH
As much as you like.

MANGOLD
You are identified as a company founder and a significant share-holder to YBM Magnex.

MOGILEVICH
I was indeed the founder of the company but I sold all my shares in 1996.

MANGOLD
Once the auditors went in and looked at the books they found tremendous evidence of money-
laundering and old-fashioned hanky panky.

MOGILEVICH 
Well if they found old-fashioned hanky panky, it's up to them to prove it.  Unfortunately I 
don't have access to FBI files.  

MANGOLD
We've obtained confidential reports from accountants which point clearly towards 
malpractice.  Companies affiliated to YBM conducted transactions which raised the spectre of 
money laundering and were "highly suspicious".  The firm did business with companies that 
were "shells, shells within shells," or simply "did not exist".  Some of the company's original 
shareholders were members of a Russian organised crime syndicate.

DU PLESSES
A company like YBM with the white collar fraud and the millions of dollars lost to investors 
and pensioners brings with it the importation of the organised crime elements that are engaged 
in far more, to the average person, serious crimes.  The drug dealing, the prostitution, the 
extortions, the murders, the more violent nature of organised crime is part and parcel with the 
white collar crimes.

MANGOLD
But even as the YBM scam was up and running, Mogilevich had turned his business interest 
to London.  His very presence prompted a pre-emptive strike by British police against the 
Billionaire Don.  In early 1995 when he was suspected of being behind a huge money 
laundering operation the National Criminal Intelligence service launched Operation Sword, a 
close look at his curious UK business.  One of the British companies controlled by 
Mogilevich was Arigon Ltd, an offshore, off the shelf Channel Islands number with 
worldwide money-laundering connections.  Arigon was owned by YBM Magnex and in turn it 
owned Mogilevich's Black and White sex club in Prague.

BOB LEVINSON
Arigon was probably the principal of a number of front companies used by Mogilevich we 
believe to launder money that was the proceeds of extortion, arms trafficking, probably 
prostitution as well.  Arigon is one of a number of companies that were used to get this money 
into the mainstream of commerce, to disguise it, to make it legitimate.

MANGOLD
Why did you set up companies in the Channel Islands?

MOGILEVICH
The problem was that I didn't know any other islands.  When they taught us geography at 
school, I was sick that day.

MANGOLD
What made you choose that location?

MOGILEVICH 
I didn't choose it.  I bought an off-the-shelf company.

MANGOLD
And it happened to be an off-shore company.

MOGILEVICH
No, I wanted an off-shore company.

MANGOLD
Why?

MOGILEVICH 
To pay less taxes.

MANGOLD
Did you try to launder any money through that company?

MOGILEVICH
No, of course not.

MANGOLD
Operation Sword established that over thirty million pounds had passed through various 
accounts in London in a three year period.  Two million pounds from Arigon, found at the 
Royal Bank of Scotland, originated from dubious sources in Russia.  Warrants of arrest for 
conspiracy to handle stolen goods were obtained against Mogilevich, but then everything went 
wrong.  Operation Sword was finally blunted here in Moscow when the Russian police failed 
to deliver evidence to Scotland Yard that the money had emanated from criminal activities, 
that it was dirty money.  So the investigation collapsed, allegations were withdrawn, 
compensation was paid.  But shortly afterwards, Mr Mogilevich received a polite letter from 
the Home Office telling him his presence was no longer welcome in the United Kingdom and 
he remains personae non grata to this day.  But in Russia he still gets the VIP treatment and is 
rarely without a bodyguard who chauffeurs him in his £200 thousand pound armour-plated 
bomb-proof limousine.

PROFESSOR JIM FINKENAUER
US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
I think he personifies the unusual situation in Russia where you have this symbiotic 
relationship among business, government and crime.  And as a result of that it's difficult to 
know who the players are, who's wearing what hat at what time.  But it also means that 
somebody who's primarily involved in criminal activities doesn't necessarily perceive them 
that way.  They perceive this is as business, and business is sort of on a spectrum, some of it is 
a little more illegal than others, but it's basically all business.  It's just a sort of a kind of 
rampant or Wild West kind of capitalism that has not yet been reined in and brought under 
certain controls - legal controls or others.

MANGOLD
Nothing better illustrates this paradox of controlled anarchy than the corruption and farce 
currently surrounding a scandal that goes to the very top of Russian political life and touches 
President Boris Yeltsin and his two daughters.  It all began with this man, Yuri Skuratov, the 
powerful Russian Federal Prosecutor and the man nominally responsible for stamping out 
Russian organised crime.  Skuratov, never far from the headlines, conducted this task as well 
as he could, but by 1997 he was being overwhelmed.  There had been a series of contract 
killings of bankers and investigative reporters - some 13 have been murdered in Russia.  The 
funerals focused world anxiety on what was happening to Russia's fragile freedoms.  In 
response President Yeltsin summoned Skuratov to the Kremlin.  Skuratov was honoured until 
he realised he was the scapegoat.

BORIS YELTSIN
Yuri Ilich, I would like to express my dissatisfaction about the state of your department.  
Firstly, the leadership of the department is not being conducted in a proper way.  The middle 
and upper ranks of prosecutors are ignoring you and simply not obeying your orders.  

MANGOLD
Stung by this humiliation, a re-energised Skuratov began investigating a huge scandal 
involving alleged backhanders for multi-million dollar cleaning and renovation contracts for 
the Kremlin and other top government properties in Moscow.  The lush contracts had been 
awarded to this man, the boss of a Swiss company called Mabetex.  He has denied paying 
bribes to top people near the Russian Presidency in order to get the work.  One claim involves 
an alleged payment of $1 million into a bank account in Budapest believed to be controlled by 
Yeltsin.  Furthermore, Swiss investigators have uncovered credit cards in the names of 
Yeltsin's two daughters.  Russian law forbids citizens from holding foreign accounts.  The 
Kremlin denies all allegations.  But investigators in Geneva have now discovered that the 
cards exist and have actually been used in Switzerland.  Furthermore over 40 Swiss bank 
accounts are now being examined by magistrates in connection with possible money 
laundering offences.  President Yeltsin himself is above prosecution, his two politically-
powerful daughters are not.  It was the then Swiss Federal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte who 
brought the original tip on the potentially explosive scandal to Moscow earlier this year.

YURI SKURATOVE
RUSSIAN FEDERAL PROSECUTOR
The Swiss prosecution twice informed me of the matter.  They provided me with both verbal 
information and documentary evidence.  The prosecutor in charge of the Mabetex affair 
carried out a painstaking examination and confirmed that the allegations in Switzerland were 
true.

MANGOLD
At this sensitive stage, Skuratov suddenly appeared on television again.  A Moscow station 
showed him flat out on the job but more informally dressed than usual.  Skuratov was brutally 
compromised on hidden video - a low blow even by Russian standards.  He remains deeply 
embittered.

MANGOLD
Do you believe you were set up.

SKURATOVE
There is no doubt that I was the victim of an orchestrated plot.

MANGOLD
What has happened to your investigation since your removal?

SKURATOVE
I have to say that initially, just after I left, the investigation was progressing more or less 
smoothly.  But then, when the Kremlin administration realised the implications of the 
investigation, it began its attempts to sabotage it, to change the investigator and ultimately to 
close the case.  

MANGOLD
Is it a coincidence that Skuratov was trapped and the film shown publicly at the very time that 
he is investigating the Mabetex affair?

PROFESSOR JIM FINKENAUER
No it's definitely not a coincidence - I mean this was the danger.  This guy was like a loose 
cannon.  He was liable to do something that was going to seriously damage the family and 
seriously damage its standing in the Kremlin and in the government and so on, and this cannot 
be tolerated.  

MANGOLD
Since these events Skuratov has been fired by Yeltsin more times than a circus cannon, but 
Parliament won't endorse the dismissal so Skuratov remain in place in limbo and in disgrace.  
Meanwhile the Mabetex investigation remains stalled.  All very neat.  As communism bows 
out, the West's determination to maintain Yeltsin and his fragile democracy has begun to 
extract a high price.  Russia is still experimenting with capitalism, but for many the journey to 
the promised land is taking too long and there are just too many mountains to climb.  The 
looting of Russia's vast wealth could yet provoke a popular backlash against a criminal elite.  
Russia has been there before.  Semion Mogilevich may have begun to set the fashion for the 
new Russian bad guy, but that confident swagger could be a front.  He knows he's banned 
from Britain and the United States, while in Budapest government accountants are crawling 
all over his financial records.  Meanwhile his sworn enemy remains relentless.

BOB LEVINSON 
I've not given up.  I continue to talk to as many of my sources, old sources, new sources and 
get that information in the hands of the proper authorities so that the special agents and the 
investigators can basically build a case.

MANGOLD
But even the downfall of the Billionaire Don would be a small victory in a war rolling 
relentlessly West.  Russian crime, organised, ruthless, violent and greedy is on the move.  The 
Russians are coming.  And this time there's no wall to hold them back.

BOB LEVINSON
Russian organised crime leaders, their members, their associates, are moving into Western 
Europe, they are purchasing property, they are establishing bank accounts, they're establishing 
companies, they're weaving themselves into the fabric of society and by the time that Europe 
develops an awareness it's going to be too late.