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Tonight on Frontline, a story about playing.
He would brag about his relationships with NHL hockey players and mobsters.
There were many discussions about murders in the protection racket.
Is the Russian mafia using professional hockey players to infiltrate North America?
These people are saying to them, hey, pay us this or else your family is going to have
a problem.
Before he died.
Correspondent Lyndon McIntyre investigates what the National Hockey League is doing to
stop a power play by the Russian mafia.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the 1999 NHL All-Star Game.
Professional ice hockey is now the fastest growing major league sport in America.
Hockey players are now glamorous in places where people haven't seen ice outside of
a cocktail glass since the glaciers melted.
Soon there will be 30 teams in the National Hockey League.
So many new teams, the scouts are looking far afield to find the talent to play on them.
For the hockey arenas and the frozen rivers and ponds of Europe and especially Russia.
There are so many foreign born hockey stars in the league today, they have their own All-Star
lineup.
Pavel Bure, the Russian rocket now with the Florida Panthers in Miami, exemplifies a new
breed of hockey hero with movie star looks and world class hockey talent.
Playing for Vancouver in the mid 90s, his scoring statistics put him in an elite group
that included a handful of stars like Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux.
The Stanley Cup final in 1997 made the point emphatically.
Detroit won it, but five outstanding Russians including the star defenseman Vyacheslav Fetisov
played a crucial role in the victory.
The league acknowledged that role by letting them take the venerable trophy to Moscow.
Rarely has Red Square seen visitors more popular or an icon more revered.
What was the reaction?
The reaction of people was unbelievable and I'll never forget when it was the opening
night of the soccer stadium, it's 90,000 people, the president of Russia and the prime minister
and all the big shots there and everybody was giving a standing ovation and drinking
champagne from the cup with the prime minister.
What Fetisov didn't know was that as the Russian players celebrated, their movements would
take them in range of an FBI surveillance operation of mafia figures in Moscow, former
agent Bob Levinson.
The information we had collected prior to the Stanley Cup going over to Moscow was that
at least some of the people in the sport had association with one particular organized
crime group.
One of the first unofficial calls the players made with the Stanley Cup was to this disco.
Maybe an innocent visit, but to the FBI the disco had special significance.
I was fascinated about that because that particular discotheque is owned, operated and controlled
by elements of the Chechen mafia.
Hockey, once a pillar of national prestige, has fallen on hard times in post-Soviet Russia
and connections with gangsters these days are almost impossible to avoid.
The once powerful Red Army team struggles to survive, they don't even have enough hockey
sticks for everybody.
The veteran coach, Victor Tikhonov, has led his team to more than a dozen world championships.
Until 1992, players like these benefited from generous government subsidies.
Then the funding stopped and Tikhonov and some other Red Army hockey officials came
up with an unusual idea for raising new money.
Sell a piece of their team called Seska to the Pittsburgh Penguins of the NHL.
In the summer of 1993, a new chapter in the glorious history of Seska was opened.
A historic joint venture between the NHL's finest, the Pittsburgh Penguins and Seska
was created and the Russian Penguins were born.
American Stephen Warshaw was a sports marketing consultant when the owners of the Penguins
approached him to craft a good capitalist strategy for saving the old Red Army team.
Hockey star Mario Lemieux and actor Michael J. Fox were backing the new venture, the Russian
Penguins.
The first challenge was to spruce up the hockey players, no small task after several years
of neglect.
Well, when we first got there, the team was so downtrodden and so bankrupt that they couldn't
even afford to buy jerseys for their teams.
They had one set of uniforms for six different teams.
So one team would come off the ice, their jerseys wringing wet with sweat, and give
it to the next guy and he'd put it on.
And I can't tell you how bad the locker room smelled, I mean you could smell that clear
to Vladivostok on the east coast of Russia.
The new jerseys improved morale as well as hygiene, but the larger problem was the fans'
perception that the good players were all going west, and that Russian hockey wasn't
worth watching anymore.
Well, at the very beginning we had an empty building, so we had to fill it quickly.
There were strippers and other shameless gimmicks, and if that wasn't enough...
Everybody loves beer around the world, so we had a few free beer nights from our big
sponsor Iron City Beer.
It worked.
The crowds came, then the big corporate sponsors, advertising for a potential television audience
of 150 million.
Then it all collapsed.
And what went wrong?
We did it too well, and the criminal element started to come to our games, started to enjoy
our games, started to evict our corporate sponsors out of their super boxes.
You mentioned seeing Russian Mafia figures at hockey games, that you knew they were Mafia.
How did you know that?
I think the guns were a tip-off.
Remember, it's cold in Russia.
Guns.
Long, sawed-off shotguns down their side of their coats.
They traveled in groups and beautifully dressed businessmen, beautifully dressed, with security
forces, and they'd come in with the limousines, with the dark windows.
And basically our partners said, just back off.
And again, we had no way of knowing if they were getting paid by the Mafia, or if they
too were afraid.
It was 1996, among thousands of gangland murders in Moscow that year, the business manager
of the Red Army Club and a team photographer.
Personally, I had my heart skip a few beats at the end of the second season, when one
of the Mafia partners, with our Russian partners, came up to me and offered me a job with his
company.
And I asked him how much they'd pay me, and then finally, when I told him it wasn't enough
money and started to laugh, he didn't laugh and he said, well, we'll kill you for $6,500.
Kill you for $6,500?
That's all.
Assassination, once exclusively political, became a common crime in the years after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In 1993, Moscow alone recorded 5,000 murders, most related to gang turf wars.
The fighting here in Moscow is very similar to that that occurred back in the 1920s and
1930s in New York City.
Jim Moody, head of the FBI's war against organized crime, was surprised when he got
a call to go to Moscow.
The local authorities needed some expert advice.
I think I was the first FBI agent, as an FBI agent, to ever enter the Soviet Union.
And at that conference, I met either the minister or deputy minister of interior of all the
Soviet states.
Did they tell you enough so that you had a sense of what kind of a problem they had?
Yes.
Yes, they did.
What was your impression of that problem?
Oh, it was beyond their capability at that time.
If there was any doubt about the criminal penetration of the Russian hockey world, it
ended with a sensational murder in 1997 and a dramatic trial early this year.
Members of a Moscow gang were accused of murdering the president of the Russian ice hockey federation.
Valentin Sych had been part of the golden age of Soviet hockey and a friend of North
American hockey stars like Bobby Orr and Bobby Hull.
Sych was ambushed on a lonely stretch of road as he and his wife were driving toward Moscow.
Identifying the likely killers would turn out to be a lot easier for the police than
pinning down the motive.
Sych was probably murdered because of a complex Russian tax deal that, for a while, pumped
a lot of money into hockey.
In the mid-90s, taxes from alcohol sales became a lifeline for sports federations.
The government let them import and sell booze and cigarettes duty-free.
It was worth millions, but not necessarily for hockey players.
Predictably, the Russian mafia moved in on the deal.
Valentin Sych complained publicly about the gangsters and some people think that cost
him his life.
It's awfully hard for a Westerner to understand, but if you have an exemption on paying taxes
on alcohol, how much that is worth in Russia is almost beyond belief because just a few
years ago, almost 30 percent, maybe even more, of the entire Russian federal budget was based
on taxes received from alcohol.
Where there's money, there's mafia.
In the old days, it was the Communist Party.
Today, even the smallest kiosk in the marketplace pays for a mafia protector.
Most places it's called extortion.
In Russia, it's called a roof, or kreshe.
St. Petersburg, the old imperial capital, is now controlled by four mafia groups.
Today, it's virtually impossible to do business here without paying a substantial fee for
protection to one of them.
Bratsky was very serious.
Of course, very serious.
The leader of one local gang agreed to talk about the modern criminal world if we concealed
his identity.
He's a high-end roof, offering high-tech protection for his clientele, for which they
seem happy to pay a high price.
How much they have to pay depends on the business and what kind of roof is required, but it
is going to be a minimum of 30 percent of any profit.
If you see a chain of jeeps following you down the road, that is pretty low-level protection.
A more sophisticated roof like us is going to cost more.
For example, we have a sort of analytical group that listens to all pagers and phones,
and then if we need to take some action, we will go and do it.
But other than that, nobody sees our worth.
It isn't just for locals.
Foreigners, too, quickly learn that business overhead in Russia literally includes a roof.
A foreign businessman who doesn't want to be identified has had a lot of experience
there.
You meet people in restaurants.
You meet people in businesses.
They're there with money, fancy cars.
They have their presence.
They come to every business.
They ask for their share.
They demand to put their own financial people in to supervise the business.
And then they participate in the business and take the profits.
How close to you personally have they come with their killing methods?
They've killed members of my staff.
I sat in meetings called resborka, negotiations, the mafia word for negotiations, where you
try to negotiate your situation, and in there I was told I was going to be killed.
The foreign businessman took the warning seriously and has survived so far.
An American businessman didn't and paid dearly.
His name was Paul Tatum.
That's him on the right, and in the mid-90s he bought into the Radisson Hotel in Moscow.
Many of the high-priced new hotels have criminal ties.
Tatum decided he didn't really like Russia's unique business culture.
He got into an argument over the control, the ownership, and got into a very, very quiet
fight with the Chechen organized crime group that was controlling the hotel.
When he began making so much noise in the media, there was a decision made to basically
shut him up permanently.
Eleven bullets at close range as he walked towards a subway station not far from his
hotel, and Paul Tatum became another case study of how not to deal with Russian gangsters.
In Washington, the Russian mob scene now has the attention of the assistant undersecretary
of state specializing in crime and terrorism, Jonathan Weiner.
Corruption used to be a local matter.
It's not a local matter now.
When somebody or something, an institution is corrupt in one country, it draws together
other bad things like a magnet, and those radiate outward as a result of globalization.
So it's not local anymore.
When Russian organized crime went global in the early 90s, one of the first North American
stops was Toronto.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, working closely with the FBI, were monitoring a number
of Russian organized crime figures who were hanging out in a North Toronto club called
the Ambassador.
In 1995, the Mounties noted a new arrival who seemed to get a lot of attention from
the regulars.
His name, Piatyoslav Sleva, who had connections to top Russian crime figures in the U.S. and
Moscow.
Sleva set himself up in regal style in a Toronto condominium and seemed to be on the phone
most of the time to people in Denver, Los Angeles, and New York.
In charge of the surveillance was an RCMP undercover officer, Sergeant Reg King.
There were disagreements on the protection rackets and who should be paying and who shouldn't
be paying and what to do if they did not pay.
There were many discussions about murders.
And in the wiretaps, the Mounties heard surprising references to hockey players.
He would brag about his relationships with certain NHL hockey players.
And according to wiretaps, Sleva was especially friendly with one hockey player in particular,
Valeri Kamensky, now with the New York Rangers.
Kamensky declined to talk to Frontline about Mr. Sleva, but according to government files,
he played a key role in getting Sleva into Canada.
Kamensky's hockey team, then the Quebec Nordique, officially requested a visa for Sleva, explaining
that Sleva, quote, is a friend of one of our players.
I interviewed Mr. Sleva for many hours.
He told me that he knew Mr. Kamensky in Russia before he ever arrived in North America.
So the relationship, I think, is a close relationship.
But I want to clarify, I do not know if that's a criminal relationship or not.
But the Mounties were determined to nail Sleva and got him on an immigration technicality
and deported him back to Russia.
Many of Sleva's intercepted phone calls were to the Brighton Beach area of New York City
and to a man police officials believed to be the Russian godfather in North America,
Vyacheslav Ivankov.
In just a few years, he'd managed to grab a substantial piece of the American dream
and the attention of the FBI.
We targeted him, we finally found him, and we went after him.
And he's like any other criminal, professional criminal, organized crime guy.
With time, you can always develop a criminal case against them, because that's what they
do.
They're always involved in crime.
From the time he left home in the morning, the FBI was monitoring Ivankov, following
him and taking photos of anybody he met and recording the conversations they'd later
used to shut him down.
What kind of stuff were they getting into?
Primarily it was extortion of legitimate businesses.
Old-fashioned protection?
Protection racket.
And they were, we believe they were involved with narcotics.
This was the address of record for Ivankov's company, 6A Neptune Avenue, Brighton Beach,
now a pet store.
It was called Slavic Incorporated, and in a sworn affidavit, the FBI claimed that Ivankov
was using Slavic Ink to launder money.
In June 1995, fearing that a murder in Russia would lead to a cover-up, the FBI arrested
Ivankov on extortion charges that would eventually lead to a 10-year sentence in a federal prison.
We had to bring the case down sooner than we really wanted to, because we didn't know
the full impact of his organization or everything that he was involved in.
But we were able to arrest him and get him convicted of extortion.
The reason we had to bring the case down early is we thought other people may get killed.
With the Slavic front office shut down, investigators discovered another startling link to the world
of ice hockey in company records.
The FBI learned that the president of Slavic Ink was none other than Slava Fetisov, the
man who'd helped lead Detroit to the Stanley Cup and who'd taken the Cup to Moscow.
Today he's with the New Jersey Devils as an assistant coach.
On the ice, he was rated as one of the top defensemen in modern hockey, but nothing raises
his defenses quicker than a question about the Russian mafia.
It means every Russian who makes a business, somehow it's a criminal, right?
Or every Russian who's in a government position is a criminal also?
I think it's wrong.
Big time.
What was your understanding of the business for Slavic?
What did you think Slavic was in business for?
It was trading.
A trading company.
Slavic Ink is my understanding among the things that they were doing was ensuring that criminals
could come into the United States getting L-visas, business visas, you know, unlimited travel
back and forth for up to seven years with renewal.
Pretty good deal.
Yeah.
In fact, there were flyers on the street in Moscow offering the service for like $5,000.
And that's part of what Slavic Ink was set up for.
Fyatya Slavik Ivankov is in jail now.
What's your reaction to that situation?
What situation?
Mr. Ivankov being in prison.
What kind of reaction is supposed to be?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, he was involved in Slavic also, wasn't he?
He never was involved in any Slavic situation.
Ivankov ran Slavic Ink and Fyatya was the president of it, listed as president of it.
That's my understanding.
Slavic Ink went out of business in 1997, but Fyatya's involvement in the company was one
of the highlights of a report in Details Magazine, an expose that raised serious questions about
dubious ties between Russian mobsters and hockey stars.
The report had a lot of the elements of old scandals in other sports, baseball, football,
basketball.
Many saw it as a wake-up call for the NHL.
The NHL saw it differently.
League officials issued an indignant statement.
The league is absolutely stunned by how ludicrous, how inaccurate, blatantly inaccurate the article
is.
We are exploring legal avenues as necessary.
That was their public position.
Privately, they went to an expert for an assessment of the problem.
The NHL was worried enough to hire none other than Jim Moody, the now retired former head
of organized crime investigation for the FBI.
What Moody found out alarmed him.
You look at some of the players, Slava Fetisov and some of the people that he's associated
with, Ivankov, I'd have great concern as a league with the people that he's associating
with.
I think Kamensky had him associated with some thieves-in-law, which is old Soviet Union's
closest thing to the mafia.
But today at NHL headquarters in New York, league officials still aren't convinced that
there was anything wrong with the ties Fetisov and Kamensky had with known and suspected
criminals.
The league's chief legal counsel, Bill Daley.
I don't think it can be established that Mr. Fetisov personally has had that association
with Mr. Ivankov.
I think maybe his company may have, and he claims not to have been involved in his company.
Well, the corporate documents say otherwise.
There are a lot of...
The president of the company is involved.
There are a lot of corporate niceties involved in setting up a corporation.
A lot of people lend their name to shell organizations.
Should he have been more diligent as to what the operation was doing?
Maybe.
But that's an error of omission, certainly.
We looked into the situation, we investigated the situation, we were satisfied.
There was no personal association at all.
You had another hockey player by the name of Kamensky who was associated, again, through
legal document with an apparent criminal figure from Russia.
Again, we couldn't establish a real association between Mr. Kamensky and the individual you're
referring to.
The legal document you're referring to is something that the individual submitted to
the government, not that Mr. Kamensky ever submitted to the government.
What was even worse than that, from your point of view, the hockey team, Quebec Nordique
submits a document to the Canadian authorities on the strength of an endorsement from a hockey
player that gets them a visa.
And we looked into it and found that there was no real association.
Friendship.
No real friendship.
So Mr. Kamensky lied to the team and the team lied to the government of Canada?
I'm not prepared to conclude one way or the other on what Mr. Kamensky did.
The Canadian Mounties investigation revealed that there was an intimate association with
Kamensky making friendly phone calls to the suspected gangster, Sleva.
And as for Sleva?
He bragged to me about his relationship with Kamensky.
He told me about how Kamensky went to his apartment many times for supper.
How many of these kinds of relationships are you aware of?
It's more than five and less than ten other NHL hockey players and the association to
organized crime.
These are relationships that concern you beyond just optics?
It's not a hockey fan, hockey player relationship.
Business relationship?
It may be a business relationship.
I'm unclear of what those relationships are.
But they're too close for comfort.
Yep.
What are the practical concerns here?
So I mean if I was to say so what, so why should I be concerned about a hockey player
or a ball player or whatever, consorting?
You have to worry about the downsides of how they could affect your league or your reputation
of your league.
And the biggest concern would be them using or influencing the people to bet on the games
or to fix the games.
The gambling factor.
Right.
Which the Russians aren't really into yet.
They will be.
The temptation will be hard to resist.
Gambling on sports is already big in places like Las Vegas.
Chasers have only recently begun to take hockey seriously, but interest is growing.
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we've got third period betting on the Chasers, Canadians and
Panthers.
We got them picked, minus 130 on the Panthers, the total minus one and a half over minus
130.
That's for the third period only in the Canadians and Panthers.
Gambling generates new enthusiasm for the game, but it can also breed corruption.
Estimates of illegal gambling on sports in North America range between 10 and 50 billion
dollars, a jackpot the Russians have already showed interest in as the FBI found out.
Bob Levinson.
Sometime around 1995, there was a failed attempt by Russian organized crime elements in New
York to form an alliance with one of the families, particularly the Gambino family, in an effort
to do something on international sports and international sports betting.
The plan never got off the ground.
That does not mean that these same elements may decide, there's something in it here,
and let's get back into it.
Illegal gambling made a lot of money for Michael Franzese, who used to be a lieutenant in New
York's Colombo crime family.
He has mended his ways, but hasn't forgotten the lessons he learned when he was a senior
mafioso.
Being an organized crime, we had major gambling operations that we ran, and sports figures
were attractive to us because of what they represented to our gambling business.
We wanted to get to them, we wanted to get close to them, they were targets for us, and
we wanted to use them.
The Mafia's most tempting target is an athlete who is vulnerable to blackmail.
There have already been documented cases that illustrate the perils confronting young Russian
hockey players.
Alexei Zhitnik, believed to have been the victim of an attempted shakedown by Russian
thugs in 1992.
Oleg Tverdovsky, now in Anaheim, was earning more than a million dollars a year in Winnipeg.
Russian goons kidnapped his mother and wanted $200,000 for her safe return.
Russian police eventually rescued her.
Tverdovsky's parents now live in California.
Alexander Mogilny, subject of a $150,000 shakedown in Buffalo.
The police caught the extortionist, an old acquaintance named Sergey Formachev, who had
ties with organized crime groups in the old country, Russia.
And hockey players, like Mogilny, with family still in Russia, are the most vulnerable.
That's a whole other situation and adds a whole dimension to the problem, and I really
feel for those guys.
I've had the opportunity to speak with a number of NHL players, and they referred me to other
players in the NHL that were having problems with the Russians.
But these were other Russian players.
And to me, the problem is serious because, you know, oftentimes their families would
be in Russia or somewhere other than the United States.
And you know, the Russian organized crime people would, you know, would have them do
things and threaten them with the lives of their family, the welfare of their family.
The kind of vulnerability that you describe among the Russians creates relationships that
could turn into a gambling relationship or some other kind of relationship.
I mean, how real is that danger?
Well, I think that's very real, because, I mean, I would have loved to have had that
information at the time, because if I was dealing with one of the organized crime figures,
Russian organized crime figures, I would tell them, listen, get this hockey player to throw
a game for us.
I mean, we can win a lot of money that way, you know.
Well, let him do it over a period of time.
So I think it's certainly something that could lead into a gambling situation, a gambling
problem, as it could lead into other things.
What is extraordinarily frightening to me today is seeing online internet gambling begin
to develop as a phenomenon.
It's transnational.
Anybody can do it.
It's impossible to regulate right now, possible to control, and it provides every opportunity
for corrupt activity, for money laundering and financial crime.
Not to mention the corruption of professional sport itself.
It has that risk as well, because how are you going to know who's placing bets for how
much where?
How are you going to know when somebody's throwing a game, because they've got an offshore
account somewhere that they've got a huge amount of money riding on?
It is a very substantial threat.
That general threat, combined with the potential for extortion against particularly vulnerable
sports stars like young Russian hockey players, raises serious issues for the NHL, according
to the man they hired to investigate the problem.
If they sign multi-million dollar contracts, and it's published in the papers over there,
which it will be, that they are very, very vulnerable to being extorted.
In fact, I would bet on them being extorted.
What would that mean for your typical hockey player?
Number one, he can pay the extortion.
Second, he can go to another organized crime group and negotiate with them the kershia,
Russian word meaning roof or protection.
The third thing they can do is they can go to law enforcement.
If it goes back into Russia, the Russian authorities, I believe, working with the FBI, will address
the problem right then.
The problem of it is after that, is that they may ultimately be extorted by the law enforcement
authorities.
You see, it paints a grim picture of virtually every Russian hockey player in the NHL today.
That's right.
If big NHL contracts mean danger for Russian hockey players, then you'd guess that the
Florida Panthers, Avel Bure, who earns more than $9 million a year, lives with constant
peril.
But curiously, when we met Bure at his Florida condominium, he seemed to live in a world
far above the fears that haunt so many of his countrymen.
There's been a suggestion that Russian hockey players are in danger of things like extortion
and pressures, right?
He checked it out.
Oh, yeah, well, you know, it just makes me laugh right now.
You know, for you to understand, you have to be born in Soviet Union and Russia to understand
the whole society, the whole mentality of the people, which you never will.
I can explain you, but it just never would make sense for you.
Well, try.
I've been there four or five times in the old days and in the modern times.
Tell me about the Krisha, then.
Tell me what you understand by the notion of Krisha, which is part of the mentality
that you're talking about.
About what?
Krisha.
The roof.
The roof?
The protection.
Protection from who?
What's the point, you know?
I can't really explain you that because I don't have a roof.
I don't need a roof.
The source of Bure's remarkable nonchalance about the threats that face Russian hockey
players can be found back in his homeland.
Here he enjoys celebrity status and the fawning attention of some of the most powerful people
in the country, like the man on his left, a Moscow mogul called Anzor Kiklishvili.
Kiklishvili calls himself Bure's spiritual father.
They move in the highest circles of cultural and political power, wealth and celebrity
fused in one of Moscow's most influential alliances.
Yeah, he is my friend and I really like him as a man.
I think he's a really generous.
I think he helps people a lot.
You know, I've seen how many times he helped poor people and singers and actors and like
he's helping a lot to people.
The Intourist Hotel on Moscow's Ulitsa Tverskaya.
Way up on the 20th floor, Anzor Kiklishvili manages a vast and mysterious business empire.
I was a man of the year in all categories.
Politics, art.
Kiklishvili is much more than a successful businessman.
Among other assets, he has his own political party and clearly aspires to political power.
Perhaps even the presidency.
My party is called the Russian People's Party.
And we will certainly be putting forward a candidate.
I didn't choose politics.
The people asked me to come into politics.
So it's the will of the people.
Our main interest is to stop world hunger.
Anzor Kiklishvili has come a long way in the new Russia since his more modest days as a
functionary in the old Soviet order.
But far away from the chorus of admiration that surrounds him in Moscow, there is another
darker view of Pavel Bure's powerful friend.
Back in the United States, a lot of people, including former FBI agent Bob Levinson, think
that Anzor Kiklishvili got where he is by becoming one of Russia's top crime bosses.
He first bumped into him in the Miami area back in the early 90s.
One of our sources told us, the place you want to go, the place you want to watch is
a entertainment bar, topless bar, called Porky's.
We were told if you go to Porky's, you will see all kinds of Russian mobsters coming in
and out of there.
And we began our observations at that point, surveilling the location, and starting from
square one, figuring out who was in town.
A businessman named Anzor Kiklishvili seemed to be in town quite a lot.
He was attempting, as far as I'm concerned, to portray himself as a legitimate businessman
who had really no ties to Russian organized crime.
The FBI's suspicions deepened in 1994 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when they infiltrated
an unusual conclave of influential Russians.
Anzor Kiklishvili was one of them.
To the FBI, there was little doubt why he and the others were here.
There was a meeting of Russian organized crime figures all getting together in Puerto Rico
to describe and work out how they were going to work on an international basis to conduct
illegal activities.
And how important was that meeting?
It's almost like going back to Appalachian in 1957.
When you got your first real look into the Italian mob.
The organized crime in the United States, yeah.
American, La Casa Nostra.
Kiklishvili and his business partner, Russian singer Joseph Kobzon, also spotted in Puerto
Rico, have both been named in a congressional hearing as organized crime figures.
This is a mistake.
Yes, it's true I was in Puerto Rico, it's true.
I was invited by my friend Kobzon, who was vacationing with his family, wife, daughter
and son for a party.
I was there only one day.
Not even that.
I arrived for dinner and flew out the next morning.
Zanzar Kiklishvili tells us that that was nothing more than a social gathering.
A social gathering of infamous Russian criminals all getting together.
It was our understanding it was all Russian criminals getting together to divide up the
world.
But in Moscow, there was little doubt about his ties with Russian organized crime, especially
since April 1994, when the man who started the company he now heads was rubbed out in
a gangland hit.
His name was Otari Kvantrishvili, a foreign businessman who we interviewed knew him well.
How did he die?
He was assassinated.
He was walking from the banya, from the sauna, to his bulletproof Mercedes 600 and he was
surrounded by guards, but he was shot from a fifth story window by a sniper.
Two bullets in the head, one in the heart.
Law enforcement officials say Kvantrishvili had turned his company into a vast criminal
enterprise.
It was called the 21st Century Association.
With his death, a lot of people wondered who could possibly fill his shoes, but they weren't
wondering for long.
Who runs 21st Century Association now?
Zanzar Kiklishvili.
Anyone deduce from that that Mr. Kiklishvili is also in the criminal hierarchy of Moscow?
It's generally recognized, yes.
You don't cross ends or Kiklishvili.
Or you die.
This is a big mistake.
It's a misunderstanding of the facts in regards to the association.
It's as if everything they say about it is misunderstood.
Never did Otary Kvantrishvili have any real link to the association or its organization.
They have always mixed up our names because they are similar.
Kiklishvili, Kvantrishvili.
You're dealing with people who understand that if you say a lie long enough, it becomes
the truth.
I don't agree with what he says.
He has been identified by the FBI and by the Russian authorities as being the co-head of
an organized crime group in Russia, and I don't see any change to that at all.
He's been labeled a mafia boss.
He's no longer allowed to enter the U.S. because of alleged criminal ties, and yet he remains
a VIP in Russia, a political contender, a high-profile benefactor of struggling artists
and athletes, including the Russian Olympic team.
He collects celebrity friends the way small boys collect baseball cards.
These people who are involved in criminal activity love to get their photograph taken
with people of importance.
But his vanity collection is impressive.
The famous magician David Copperfield, Ross Perot, the presidential candidate, a former
Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, the tennis star Steffi Graf, even the American media
mogul Ted Turner.
Visual character references hanging on his wall.
Whenever anybody asks them something, they'll point it out.
They're very proud of it.
See, I've got all these friends.
Look at all these photographs here.
The politicians are in my pocket.
The more photographs like this they have, the more they can lie about their importance
or their connections, and then they use it.
And what about this picture of the rising NHL hockey star Pavel Burey?
In Russia, he has the fame of a Michael Jordan.
He's from a family of prominent athletes.
In a country where hockey is a national passion, he was a star before he ever went away, and
today he's captain of the Russian national team when he's not playing for the NHL.
He has the makings of a contender for real power.
He has been given awards by the president of our country.
He has met all the leaders of all the political parties.
He is so famous that presidents of other countries visit him.
And even a dictator like Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, better known at home
as Batka or Big Daddy, Burey is on hand to give Big Daddy a warm welcome.
It's the kind of access to celebrity and credibility that Anzor Kiklishvili enjoys all the time
through his friendship with the Russian rocket.
Pavel Burey consorts quite openly with Anzor Kiklishvili in Russia.
What do you make of that as a law enforcement person?
I'm still trying to figure it out myself.
I don't understand why someone would run with a person who's been excluded from the
United States and who's been identified as an organized crime figure.
Yeah, I know all those rumors about him, but it's rumors and my, I guess, my point of view
on that, because I have so many rumors about myself and trust me, I have so many rumors
which doesn't make sense at all.
And I just said to myself, I'm going to judge people, how they're treating me, how they're
treating other people when I'm around and I want to see that.
And the rumors, and just the rumors.
Anzor Kiklishvili can say, I have never been convicted of a crime.
I am a legitimate businessman.
The authorities have made all this stuff up.
Oh, I'm here to say that nobody made this stuff up, that there are people out there
and he knows who they are, who have been basically hurt or threatened, that there are people
who know his stature in the underworld and his association with people in the underworld.
So I can't explain the reason why people are associating with one another, I can just say
I think it's a shame.
Pavel Bore says he's checked out his friend with the Russian government and found no reason
to avoid him.
They've not only remained close, but Bore is also said to have taken a top position in
his friend's company.
Now there's been controversy about your business arrangement with Anzori.
Can you tell me, what is that?
What is your position in his company, 21st Century?
There's no position at all and I think I said this to everybody like two, three years ago.
I said I'm going to play hockey for now and that's what I've been doing.
So people keep asking you and you don't answer it, but are you an executive officer of the
company?
No, I said no.
A figurehead?
No.
You have nothing to do with that?
No, that's what I'm trying to explain to you.
That's what I said to you two, three years ago.
I said I want to concentrate on the hockey and I am a hockey player.
He denies his role in 21st Century Association when he's in Florida, but on the streets of
Moscow scores of billboards declared the future belongs to 21st Century Association and there
seemed little doubt who the 21st Century Association belonged to.
Well, they have a very close working relationship is my understanding and the 21st Century Association
has kind of changed around, so Bure is the president of it and here is basically a conglomerate
that's made up of entertainment companies, they're going to work as agents for all the
athletes coming out of Russia, Soviet Union, they have their own distillery, they have
their own bank and stuff like this and Bure is going to be a very, very important man
now and in the future in Russian sports and entertainment.
But as president of an organization that's considered by law enforcement officials here
and there as a criminal enterprise.
That is what we consider it, that's what they considered it over in Russia.
But regardless of how he's considered, even his detractors point out Kiklashvili has never
been convicted of a crime.
He like Pavel Bure has won high honors in his own land.
He scoffs at the idea he's a crook.
If I have any links to criminal elements, then I would not be sitting in this office
today.
I'm only 100 meters from the Kremlin and the president of our country.
All these windows and doors are always under scrutiny.
If I am not considered a criminal in my own country, then how can I be considered a criminal
in another country?
A few weeks after our interview, somebody tried to remove him from that office by planting
a bomb.
Authorities there believe it was part of a gang turf war, which raises the stakes for
people who keep company with the intended target, Anzor Kiklashvili.
Pavel Bure is associated with a man who is considered to be a criminal.
Does that not bother you?
That does bother us.
And what are you doing about it?
Well, I think if we ever got to the point where we thought his relationship was problematic,
either to the image or the integrity of our sport, we would act on it.
But what's it going to take?
I'm not going to, that's a hypothetical question.
There's nothing hypothetical about the relationship between Pavel Bure and Anzor Kiklashvili.
Joe Namath had a restaurant that crooks used to come to, and he had to sell the restaurant
or give up his football career.
I'm reading an NHL rule here that says the player shall agree to conduct himself on and
off the rink according to the highest standards of honesty, morality, fair play, and sportsmanship.
And to refrain from conduct detrimental to the best interests of the club, the league
or professional hockey general, a lot of people would say that Pavel Bure has already broken
that rule.
That's a slippery slope.
I told you it's a relationship we're concerned about and a relationship we're monitoring.
Monitoring this relationship shouldn't be difficult, emblazoned as it is along the streets
of Moscow.
And it may yet attract the attention of an even higher power than the NHL, according
to Jim Moody.
I think the hockey players, the Russian hockey players, themselves should be worried about
is that their associations could lead to their visas being pulled.
What if it threatened your visa?
What if it threatened your status in the United States?
Well, we'll deal with it.
I don't know, because there's no reason.
And I don't think it's going to happen because, well, actually it could, but we'll deal with
it.
I don't know.
Pavel Bure is working hard at hockey these days, seemingly unconcerned about what anyone
thinks of his off-ice relationships.
Paris, just this past July, the unlikely locale for a ceremony that inducted an unlikely individual
into an ancient Russian religious order.
The man being honored is Alemzhan Toptakunov, AKA Little Taiwanese.
Police officers in Europe and America say Little Taiwanese is a key member of Russia's
extended family of crime bosses.
The man anointing him with the sword is Joseph Kobzon, who has been barred from entry to
the United States because of his alleged criminal associations.
The guest list also includes Anzor Kiklisvili, also banned from the U.S. for alleged criminal
associations.
And still undaunted by the mounting criticism of the company he keeps, the NHL hockey star
Pavel Bure.
For more of this report, check out Frontline's website for reports on Russian organized crime
in North America, a look at the rise and fall of Russian hockey, a glossary of Russian mafia
slang, a selection of the interviews with key figures, and much more at PBS.org.
Next time on Frontline, they're young, they're affluent, and they have secret lives.
Because America lost its children, watch Frontline.
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