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Alexei Zitnik is a 19-year-old kid when he's selected in the NHL draft by the Los Angeles Kings in 1991. Born in Kiev in 1972, he had just spent two years playing in the Soviet Championship League and would spend another year there before heading to the States to play in the NHL. Back then, this was a huge deal. The Soviet Union was at its end, and it was home to many amazing hockey players. They'd always dominated international competition.
Those players, while living a decent life, comparatively speaking, to others in the Soviet Union, certainly weren't reaping the benefits of playing for a fast-rising major professional sports league in the West. All these talented players in the Soviet Union were now setting their sights on playing in the NHL. And all these NHL teams were thrilled about the opportunity to acquire these talents. By the end of the 90s, nearly 10% of NHL players would be from the former Soviet Union.
But something else was happening in Russia during that time. As the controls of the Soviet Union fell away and the country opened up, organized crime groups were forming and battling for control as oligarchs took over formerly state-run companies and industries and gangsters battled in the streets. Moscow had 5,000 murders in 1993. It was a crime free-for-all. Where there was money to be made in Russia, gangsters were there. Now we have some naive Russian kid barely in his 20s all of a sudden getting a few million bucks in his pocket?
I mean, you can kind of see where this is going, right? Surely some enterprising gangsters could find a way to get a hold of that new cash. Meanwhile, Alexei is just thrilled to be playing his favorite sport, making more money than he ever thought possible. He wasn't thinking of himself as a target when he showed up to a Russian nightclub in Los Angeles in a brand new car with expensive jewelry and expensive clothes and a beautiful woman on his arm. With some Russian goons in the club, he definitely took notice.
Alexei had also shown up in Kiev, Ukraine, after his rookie season, showing the spoils of a high-paying job in the States, attracting a lot of unwanted attention. He was seen to be doing well, too well. His team, the Los Angeles Kings, had urged him to stay in the U.S. and not go back to Kiev, saying every time he went there, they were worried. A man connected to Russian organized crime by the name of Sasha approached Alexei in the club that night. He made a demand. He wanted to be paid protection money or bad things would happen.
They call it the roof in Russian. But in our El Salvador episode, we called it the rent. But it's all the same extortion. Alexei would later tell the LA Times, quote, I have little problem with Russian mafia. They say things like blow up your car and different stuff, which I mean, like, yeah, man, that sounds like a little problem to me. Now, the Russian NHL players, they didn't really have a lot of options.
They couldn't really go to the police because they feared that if they did, something would happen to their relatives back home in Ukraine or Russia. And as Alexei said, quote, if you pay the first time, the next time you pay much more. But my friends helped me. You see, Alexei had handled things the old country way. First, though, he actually got beat up by Russian mafia goons threatening him under a pier in Los Angeles, allegedly, though he didn't confirm this.
What he did say is that he got some friends to help him, meaning he likely got some bigger Russian mafioso figures to protect him from these smaller guys. And Alexei wasn't the only player in the NHL during the 90s who had to deal with the Russian mafia. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. I am your host, Danny Golds, and I'm here, as always, with Sean Williams. Hey, hey. Summer is in full swing.
Lovely, lovely times out there. It's nice. It's 30 degrees here and I'm just sweating my ass off in a tiny room. Yeah. So it's good. Yeah. Yeah. Not the time for ice hockey or any of the stuff we're going to discuss. As always, we have bonus interviews up on the Patreon, patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. Look for us on social media, Instagram, Twitter, all that good stuff. And the merch. And the merch. Yeah. Oh, and merch. Merch too. The merch should be back up too. Yeah.
Now, organized crime and sports, right, they've always gone together, like peanut butter and jelly and all that. Athletes have always hung around at the same nightclub as gangsters and drug lords with some developing friendships. Others maybe more kind of, you know, testier relationships, if you will. Hell, I mean, in boxing, half the people involved are or were gangsters, like Don King. Probably the most well-known example of organized crime infiltrating professional sports is the Black Sox scandal. What's that?
Yeah, I mean, that's baseball. So I don't know if you'll know too much about it, but we're going to get into that in one second. Yeah, I would also say if people listen to our bonus episode of Sabat Pekka in Turkey, apparently he was making like tons of cash fixing top league football matches. There's the word in Indian cricket, ultras in Italy. There's a lot of good money in the sport. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And one of the guys who figured that out was Arnold Rothstein, who was one of the most innovative and brilliant organized crime figures to ever live.
He came of age in New York at the beginning of the 20th century, which is, you know, he existed at a time where organized crime was just finding its footing in this country, really. The days of the Lower East Side, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, right before the emergence of the Five Families, when prohibition provided a boon like no other. He was said to be one of the first mobsters to really run things like a business, and gambling was where he really excelled. He was a man who knew how to play the odds and who knew how to turn the odds in his favor using whatever means necessary, legal or otherwise.
Horse racing, boxing, like the fix was in. And we're not going to dwell too much on Rothstein. We'll save his story for another day. But what he was most known for, the thing that guaranteed he would live in infamy, is the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Although till this day, it's not been proven to have been his brainchild. The allegations at the heart of it is that Rothstein's people paid the Chicago White Sox players to lose the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.
The White Sox were highly favored to win. Rothstein bet on the Reds, and he cleaned up. Now, Rothstein himself was never found guilty after a really strange trial. Prosecutors could find no link. But journalists and biographers since then have said that either Rothstein or some other gamblers using his name set the whole thing up.
Eight of the players on the White Sox were banned from baseball for life. It's still one of the biggest scandals to ever touch professional sports in America. In fact, even though it happened 75 years before I ever really came of age, it's something I remember hearing about and learning as a young baseball fan. Yeah, we don't, I guess we don't really have these historic, big historic scandals over here like Shergar the horse, I don't know, but like, worse ones are actually pretty recent. I want to do an episode on some of that stuff, but
I guess there's the hand of God. It's not really a scandal, just really, really great age eating. RIP Diego. Isn't FIFA just like one giant corruption free for all? Yeah. Yeah. And that's exactly an episode I wanted to do. Completely correct. Well, we'll get to that. But right now we are talking about the Russian mafia NHL scandal, though.
It's kind of faded from memory. You know, I definitely hadn't heard about it until I started really looking into Russian mob stuff for a previous episode and started learning about this. And we'll get into why that is. Also, again, the word mafia here, like when I say Russian mafia, it's not one group with a hierarchy, right? We're using the word mafia as a sort of a catch-all to mean organized crime groups. There's no singular Russian mafia here.
We get into all the details about the rise of the Russian mob in our previous episode that we did, I think really early on, called The Russian Mafia Takes Brighton Beach. But I'll just do a bit of background here, focusing on the 1990s as fears of this all-encompassing power of the Russian mafia spread across the US and actually across the globe. The growth of the Russian mafia in the US really took hold in the late 1980s and the early 1990s after the Soviet Union disintegrated and it became far easier for folks to emigrate.
There'd been a few waves of immigration in the decades preceding, and among the many new immigrants were some established criminals. As a tri-state area law enforcement investigation put it, quote, as is true in all societies, people are conditioned by the moral, social, and economic environment in which they live.
Soviet citizens were reared by a government which, although unable to adequately provide basic necessities for its people, lavishly rewarded high-ranking and loyal members of its dominant political party. Thus, to survive, many Soviet citizens were forced to find ways to beat the system without getting caught.
Actions such as bribing an official to do a favor, paying a premium to obtain desired goods, or buying necessities from black market salesmen became common practices accepted by the general population as necessary for survival. Consequently, many Russian immigrants are well-schooled in this type of behavior.
As a Russian mobster told the journalist Robert Friedman in a 1994 New York Magazine article, quote, you have to understand the Russian mentality. In the former Soviet Union, the only way to survive was to scam. He later goes on, in this country, it is easy to make money. I love this country. I would die for it. Now, there is something the founding fathers would have been proud of.
Yeah, that should be, you know, like a political campaign that's launched right now for American pride because it doesn't get much more pro-American than that. Yeah. Anyway, if you want the details about the big timers like Evese Agron and Boris Neyfeld, go listen to the Brighton Beach episode. It's actually a really good one.
But here's a little short summary of that. Around the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the Russian mob of Brighton Beach and its other factions started getting press. And they are hyped up in no small part due to Friedman. It really kicks in after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But even in 1989, the New York Times is now publishing stories on the growth of organized crime there. Take this lead. Quote, a criminal underworld of Soviet emigres, some of them skilled in white collar crime and hardened by Soviet prison and labor camps,
Is that not one of our show bios? That really reads like one.
Yeah, it's pretty close. And like I said, there is some exaggeration, but that's true. I mean, that was going on. And Freeman is important in this because he was the central, most hardcore journalist reporting on the Russian mafia during this era. And I use a lot of work, a lot of his work in this story. One of the things I've grappled with in all this is like on what level Freeman's reporting rings 100% true. Like in the 90s, there was a panic about the Russian mafia gaining a foothold in the U.S.,
And there definitely was a lot of truth to it, right? There were vicious murders, especially all over Brighton Beach, gang wars, multimillion dollar scams. Like it was a whole new iteration of mobsters. And Freeman was right there for it, diving in. He met all the goons. He was getting them on the phone. He was getting legit death threats from them during this, during like all this time he was doing this incredible reporting. But there's also another school of thought that says the problem was hyped up a bit and exaggerated. It's definitely something I want everyone to keep in mind as we dig into this NHL story.
Because you see, the mobsters weren't the only talented Russians now showing up in America to put the skills they developed in the Soviet Union to use making millions. Listen to that. I mean, that is a hell of a segue right there, right? That was good. I've got, yeah, I'm really appreciative of that. Getting to like that NPR level. We're better than them. Yeah. Yeah, screw them. Definitely.
Back in the Soviet Union, athletes were among the most well-treated citizens. They were top dogs allowed to mix with the party elite. The Soviet hockey players, as part of the Red Army team, had dominated international competitions like the Olympics. And until the early 90s, the Red Army team and other internal Soviet hockey teams were well taken care of, at least as far as those living under communism.
I mean, they definitely weren't living like top athletes making multi-millions in the US, but they were doing okay. But as Glasnost hit, that period where the Soviet Union was opening up, money and subsidies dedicated to the hockey program started disappearing.
By 1992, some teams in the Russian Hockey League could barely afford to get sticks. Naturally, by then, a lot of former Soviet Union players, you know, they're looking to make the jump to the US. And by the late 90s, 10% of NHL players are from former Soviet Union countries. That is a crazy stat. I wonder how it compares to the number of Cubans who are in the MLB or something like that. Yeah.
I mean, I guess it's kind of changed around now, right? There's loads and loads of North American players in the KHL, the Continental League, which is like the former Soviet bloc's biggest tournament. I actually went to a game in Minsk a few years ago and it was electric, man. There were like 16,000, 17,000 people in the stadium. Like it was proper, full on. But yeah, back then it seems like it was a completely different ballgame.
Yeah, I wonder what the difference in salaries are now between the NHL. I mean, NHL salaries are, you know, million-dollar salaries. But I wonder, you know, if there's like oligarchs controlling teams like has happened with a lot of soccer teams, if they've just jacked up the salaries there and players are getting paid well. I would thought so, yeah.
Meanwhile, at the same time, the situation in Russia itself, it's just deteriorating as there was an explosion of criminal groups as organizations fought over the spoils of a newly opened economy. As I said before, in 1993, there were 5,000 murders in Moscow, which is just completely insane.
Russia in the 1990s was just, you know, it's just nuts with violence. Aluminum wars, oligarchs rising up, just a power struggle for valuable commodities and industries undertaken by some seriously scary people who put wrestlers, you know, common thugs and former soldiers who fought in Afghanistan on the payroll.
So you've got all this going on and you've got all these Russian players heading to the U.S. to sign multimillion dollar contracts while most of the relatives are still behind in Russia as extortion and criminality flourish. I mean, it's just a recipe for disaster. Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, these are the guys who own half of like Europe's footy clubs these days as well. I'm looking at you, Chelsea. Yeah, I mean, the Brooklyn Nets, right? But oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So also during the 90s, the NHL, and this kind of blew me away because it doesn't seem like that's the case even remotely true right now. NHL was the fastest growing professional sport in America, which just seems crazy. But anyway, in December of 1993, the first report of Russian players in the NHL being extorted by mafiosos makes it into the press. La Presse, a French Canadian newspaper based in Montreal, said,
He publishes a story detailing how Russian players need to pay protection money to mobsters back home to protect their family from threats. The players mentioned, like Slava Fedosov, all deny they've gotten threats, but we'll get to him and his connections in the Russian underworld shortly. The article and many others afterwards, they also detail how hockey in Russia itself was being taken over by criminal elements. That's sort of a background to what was happening with the Russian players in the U.S.,
The Russian Ice Hockey Federation had a choice import license from the government to bring in untaxed cigarettes and vodka. So yeah, I mean, there was a lot of money to be made if you're bringing in untaxed cigarettes and vodka into Russia. That seems a totally legit decision to me. What the hell? I mean, I guess they had to pay for the hockey. They wanted them to have sticks. You know, they had to pay for the hockey somehow. And also the teams in the Russian Hockey League would get hard cash transfers from the NHL teams whenever they signed one of their players.
Meanwhile, a U.S. team, the Pittsburgh Penguins, had gotten involved in the mid-90s with one of the Russian teams as like a satellite thing. The Russian leagues, like I said, had fallen into disrepair. People had stopped paying attention. But then some clever marketing involving like strippers and t-shirt cannons or whatever else got people interested again. And, you know, people started going. And I know this sounds like a joke, but it's true. Like the strippers and the t-shirt cannons worked.
PBS Frontline actually did a full episode on the Russian mafia NHL scandal, borrowing heavily from a Robert Freeman article from Detail Magazine in 1998. And I, in turn, borrowed heavily from both of them to do the story. Also, I want to give a shout out to Kayla Ennian. She's a grad student. She wrote a fantastic dissertation on all of this, and I used a bunch of that too. But I bring up the Frontline because they interviewed one of the guys who was in charge of this whole thing for the Penguins.
And it seemed like he might have been in a little over his head. His name is Stephen Warshaw, and he talks about how their promotions work too well because the team got successful and started making money. And that brought out the mafiosos who started like straight up kicking out corporate sponsors from their fancy boxes so they could take over.
This leads to this beautiful exchange between the correspondent and Warshaw. The correspondent is Lyndon McIntyre, and she says, you mentioned just seeing Russian mafia figures at hockey games, that you knew they were mafia. How did you know that? And Warshaw replies, I think the guns were a tip-off. Remember, it's cold in Russia. She cuts him off guns, and he says, 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. I don't know. That could be anyone in Russia pretty much. Yeah, I don't know. I think it, I think it might be, I think he might have picked up on things, you know, after, after a couple of trench coats were opened.
I mean, not only that were these guys showing up, but people involved in these leagues were also being killed. Red Army team, photographer, managers, like the whole, the whole thing. Warshaw said at one point, quote, in about a six month period, a player was killed on our team, Alexander Osach, who was a San Jose Sharks pick. The team assistant coach, Vladimir Vuvic was killed. And our team photographer, Felix Oliviov was also killed.
Two of them gunned down mafia style, five bullets to the head in front of their wives. Oh, I mean, what the hell did the photographer do? I mean, I guess Red Army team photographer does sound a bit spy, but wow, that's tough. I mean, maybe he didn't put the camera down when he was told to put the camera down. In 1997, the head of the Russian Hockey League was actually gunned down and killed. The man, Valentin Sitch, had been involved in Soviet hockey for decades and was friends with famous NHLers like Bobby Orr.
He had struck up a crusade against the criminality involved in the league. Schitt spoke out against the officials of the league, saying they are the biggest thieves. Quote, our hockey is now so corrupt that I don't see how we can ever clean it up. Apparently, he was also a former KGB agent who had a lot of enemies, but in all likelihood, it was related to the special cigarette and vodka imports. As PBS Frontline said, quote, 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 Sitch complained publicly about the gangsters, and some people think that cost him his life. So the Russian state's basically saying, we can't pay for your upkeep, like hockey sides, but we'll just let you smuggle shitloads of fags and booze instead. Is that pretty much it?
I mean, not smuggle, right? This is legal. I think it was just they didn't charge them the normal taxes so that they could have a
you know, have a, have a team and, and, and have the proceeds to keep it going, which actually, you know, it sounds decent enough to me. I mean, it doesn't sound too, did they then sell them at their own like games or did they? All right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is what's happening in Russian hockey in the nineties. And it only makes sense that the Russian mobsters would turn their attention to the cash cow of American sports.
The low hanging fruit for this was, you know, just straight up trying to restore these guys who couldn't do much back. They thought like just showing up and being like, hey, give us money or we'll punch you in the face and kill your relatives. Which again, like these aren't criminal masterminds here, but like, I guess it works. Right. So why change a system that works?
Take Oleg Tverdovsky. In 1994, at 18 years old, and from Donetsk of all places, he goes to play for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. Eventually, he signs a contract for $4 million.
One day, out of the blue, a former coach of his from the Soviet Union shows up and starts demanding some of the cash. Now, when Freeman is describing this extortion attempt, he's going into details on some of the more persuasive Russian mafia tactics at the time involving, you know, acid, cutting off fingers, murdering family members. But this guy, Oleg, he's not having it. He says no. Fast forward, January 1996. Four thugs wait outside a relative's apartment in Ukraine and kidnap his mother. And then
and then send a ransom note demanding $200,000. Oleg is freaking out, but he can't talk to anyone, not police, not his teammates, not other Soviet hockey players, because he fears that if the word gets out, his mother will be killed. Eventually, though, he does talk to Russian law enforcement. And while that's not usually a useful thing to do during that era, a couple of days later, on the way to make the exchange for the cash,
Russian law enforcement raids a train and arrests the goon squad. His mother gets out free and he swiftly moves his parents to California. Fair play, Oleg. I mean, that's pretty crazy bold, but I guess he got away with it.
Yeah. It's definitely an anomaly. I think maybe you came in one other player who I'll get into in a little bit where the only ones to actually talk to law enforcement, but it's generally seen, you know, this is also one of those things that, that because they came from the Soviet union, that society, you didn't really go to the police. Right. Yeah. So I mean,
I mean, that and having your relatives threatened and all that, like it's kind of makes the idea of talking to law enforcement like it's a no-go zone. Yeah, playing NHL hockey with like eight fingers doesn't sound too great either. No, no. The world of true crime is seductive. We're detached from the reality of horrific stories happening in strangers' lives. And we feel safe when we listen because we never think it will happen to us until...
It does. I've seen some of the most beautiful homes on Long Island and I've seen the worst in Joel Rifkin. In 1989, I was an eyewitness to the execution of Ted Bundy. I'm Tara Newell and I killed Dirty John. I'm Jim Jones Jr. I was raised in the Jones family. There was 300 bodies under the 500. Everyone was dead. For people that are
are so quick to tell me to get over it. He slit my brother's throat. I'm Jack Vanek. I'm Billy Jensen. And I'm Alexis Linklater. And we are The First Degree. And every week, we're talking murders, serial killers, and cults, all told through the eyes of a guest who's one degree away from the story itself.
Right. It's not just Oleg getting extorted. Alexander Mulgini and Sergei Fedorov, all stars and dudes I used to just rip shit with on NHL 95 on PlayStation. They had extortion attempts made on them as well. I love that game. That was like totally 100% my only interaction with ice hockey until I like hit my late teens.
Yeah, I mean, the Rangers had a good run in the 90s, so I pay attention to that. But NHL 95 is the reason I know all these players' names. And like, as I was going through this, I was just having fond memories of skipping school to play my brothers in that game. It was it was that little cheat thing you could do where you went around the goalie and he got stuck on another player and you could score. I mean, it just. Yeah, yeah. And you could just I mean, you could just run into people and beat the crap out of them, right?
Yeah, yeah, it was solid. So Friedman goes further and he says that according to a congressional investigation, or I think it was a congressional inquiry, half the former Soviet players had to pay protection money. But again, we don't know if that's 100% the truth, but there's definitely truth there. An associate general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs has told press it was a huge problem, players being roughed up by mafiosos for cash. It was even discussed, like we said, at this congressional inquiry in 1996. This, I mean...
I don't know American sport that well, but this kind of sounds like the stuff with Yasiel Puig, right? Wasn't he in the pocket of the Zetas or something? Didn't they bring him over to the States? I don't know that story. What's the background for that? I think he tried to leave Cuba like a dozen times and he got caught every time and then the Zetas brought him over to Mexico or something. And then there was some rumor when he was playing for the Dodgers that he was part owned by them or he had to pay the massive, massive amount of his fees. And the Dodgers were trying to figure out how to get him out of that. But...
Yeah, maybe that's another episode. Yeah, for sure. So, Mugimli, just like Oleg, actually did something about the attempt made on him. And it resulted in the only arrest involving the NHL stuff in America.
All right. It's the only one, right? Yeah.
So we have some of the NHL players getting extorted and are threatened by Russian organized crime figures. But there's others that were maybe a bit too chummy with them. Slava Fedosov was one of the first Russian NHL players, an Olympic gold medalist, an older player who was super popular in Russia. He was also seen as a leader among the former Soviet Union players, someone who doled out good advice. You know, he was older in his late 30s when he entered the NHL and his nickname was the Godfather. Okay. Yeah. Not suspect. Right.
Freeman had seen an FBI file that detailed Fedosov's connections to the mob. Apparently, he got into some trouble with a mafioso in Russia in 1989 before he came to the US when he used his status as a hockey player to import a car for a mafia figure, then sold it to somebody else instead. That didn't sit too well with the mafia guy, and the man threatened Fedosov's father. Fedosov ends up getting wrapped up with this mafioso as sort of a business partner extortion victim.
But like many a Russian gangster in the early 90s, the original mafia guy gets murked. And the man who slid into his role was none other than Vyacheslav Ivankov, better known as Yaponchik, who we talked about quite a bit in the Brighton Beach episode. Yeah, that guy. That was a banging episode, guys. Like, people should definitely download that now if they've not already heard it. I mean, like, download it, listen to it five times, 10 times, 50 times. Get those ratings up.
Yeah, please do that. So some background on Yaponchik. He was said to be a famed vory zakon or thief-in-law, of which there are very few left in Russia, maybe a couple hundred. But they're the legendary Russian criminal figures you've heard about with all the tattoos telling their stories of their lives. And not every Russian mafia figure is a vory. In fact, very few are. It's sort of dying out in a way, and it comes from the Soviet-era prison system.
Yaponchik was also rumored to be former KGB and started off as a brawler getting arrested in bar fights before he moved on to black marketeering and document forgery, burglary, all the basics. He got arrested and sent to a Russian prison where in 1974, he got crowned or made into a vore. He was arrested again in Russia in 1982 for drug trafficking and guns. He got released in 1991 and was in New York in 1992. When Yaponchik shows up, people are terrified.
Friedman says he came in with an army of killers, former KGB and special forces guys like real killers, and he was there to oversee Russian organized crime in Brighton Beach in the US and bring it under order to become the godfather of the US faction, the Russian mob, and that this was allegedly ordered by all the VORs in Moscow at the time.
By 1993, Fedosov is playing for the New Jersey Devils, and him and Yaponchuk become fast friends. So much so that when Yaponchuk starts a front company for money laundering called Slavic Inc., real name Slavic Inc., in New York, Fedosov signed the incorporation papers and gets listed as the president. Yaponchuk doesn't last long. He eventually gets locked up only a year or two later for an extortion plot. But that doesn't stop Friedman from pressing Fedosov in the locker room after a game one night about their connection. Like, imagine your
You're exhausted after a long game and you're sitting at your locker looking to get asked, what do you think of the defense? Like five times by different reporters. And instead you get this guy just badgering you about mafia connections. And what I love most about Freeman's article is that he's just constantly getting these guys on the phone or doorstepping them while, you know, they're not actually admitting anything. They just sit through with his questions as he's just, you know, completely harassing them about the Russian mafia. Yeah.
Frontline ends up getting him on camera, Fedosov that is, and he says, quote, the Russian who make business, somehow it's a criminal, right? Or every Russian who is in a government position, criminal also. I think it's wrong. Big time, big time.
And like, you know, I love it. You got to imagine that in a Russian accent. I'm not going to bother to do that for the show. But like, just imagine him saying that in it. And he's just like, my friend, Yiponchik, was simply a waste management consultant. How dare you stereotype him? Man, they really came down hard on Baroni sanitation too, right? Anti-Italian racist. Anti-Italian discrimination. Anti-Russian discrimination. One day you're going to do some of these quotes, by the way, in like a Yakov Smirnoff accent. I'm waiting for it.
I'm going to get there. I'm going to get there. But yeah, this actually reminds me, you know, I think it was two summers ago or two or three years ago, I did a big story for Sports Illustrated on David Ortiz, the famous big time all-star for the Boston Red Sox who got shot in the Dominican Republic. I went down there about a month later to dig into it and there was tons of rumors about
I think all unproven about Ortiz's relationships with big narco traffickers in the DR, allegations that he used some of his businesses for money laundering and all that sort of stuff. Again, nothing was proven with this, you know? But that was definitely something that was floating around the country and floating around press circles when it came to Ortiz, who, you know, by all accounts is just like a stand-up great dude. And,
Who knows? I mean, he might be involved. You know, I couldn't prove it. I don't think anyone else has proven it. But at the same time, this is a guy who gives a ton of money to cancer wards and that and takes care of kids. And that was sort of the gist that you got from the public in the DR. They were like, look, we love Davey no matter what. He saved my neighbor's kid.
got him taken to a surgery. He gives back here. He's such an upstanding guy. Is he involved with money laundering? We don't know, but it doesn't matter because he has our hearts. Yeah, you should put that story on the reading list for this show, actually, because there's a great story. Yeah, I will. It's a good one.
Friedman brings up another guy, Vyacheslava Sliva, says he's Ivankov's right-hand man who was running his own extortion ring super squad and was sent to Canada to take over like Yaponchik was taking over Brighton Beach. This is 1994, but dude first needs to get into Canada, right? Which was tough for him to get a visa for. He needs to be vouched for by a respected citizen. So he gets an NHL player, Valerie Kamensky, to get the president of his team, the Quebec Nordiques, to write a letter to the embassy.
Sliva gets the visa and gets to work doing the typical Russian mafia things, you know, extorting, drug dealing, death threats, money laundering, the usual, all while being buddy-buddy with Kamensky. Kamensky, meanwhile, is also talking on the phone more than 100 times, according to the feds, with an Armenian Vorey Zakon named Petrosov, who heads up the Russian mob in Denver, which like all things considered is kind of lame, right? Like that's the bottom of the barrel shit.
LA, Miami, Vegas, New York. And you're like, yeah, I run the rackets in Denver. So I don't know. I guess it's like being the hottest stripper in Ohio. Ouch. Which is, which is,
Yeah, we're going with some Ohio slander today on the podcast. Anyway, that's what I thought, but apparently there's a big Russian immigrant population there, and the mobsters use the relatively crime-free, competitively speaking, environment to launder cash. And according to Friedman, they try to blend in, like they dress tastefully and they drive Toyotas, which I mean, like, that's kind of amazing, you know? It's like a sitcom plot. Oh, man, they're going to be Priuses, too. Maybe now, but in the 90s, I'm sure they were like, you know, Mazda minivans, Toyota Camrys, things like that. Yeah.
Jim Moody, who's the former head of the FBI Organized Crime Unit, said, quote, you look at some of the players, Slava Fedosov and some people that he's associated with, Ivankov, I'd have great concern as the league with the people that he's associating with. I think Kamensky associated with some thieves-in-law, which is the old Soviet Union's closest thing to the mafia.
So we have NHL players getting stewarded by the Russian mafia, and we have the NHL players that might be partners on some level with the Russian mafia. And there's growing concern that maybe, maybe it fixes in with some of the games, and that would be a huge deal. Wait, actually, let me do one more NHL player partner situation because it's a really good one. Pavel Bure, who, let me tell you again, absolutely just dominated in NHL 95 like no other, is
was one of these players who was said to be a little too close to people who were a little too dangerous. Bure was so mobbed up that his team, the Vancouver Canucks, told him in 1993 to stop associating with mobsters. Bure, the guy he's closest to in Moscow, is this Georgian mobster whose name has like six I's in it, and I'm not even going to, well, I'll try to pronounce it, but it's going to be wrong. Anzor Kikulishvili. Yeah, nice. Georgians, yeah, it wasn't bad, right? Yeah.
Georgians, like Jews and Chechens, were totally marginalized in the former Soviet Union. And like Jews and Chechens, they have an outsized representation in organized crime in the former Soviet Union for that reason. Yeah, I've been to Georgia a couple of times and, oh man, it's like one of the most beautiful countries I've ever been in. Maybe the most beautiful country, but...
I kind of danced around that world a little bit, but it was the only thing I really know is that their gangsters have these insane, like photo realist pictures of them on their tombstones. It's like, it's pretty wild. There's loads of stuff online. You should look it up.
Yeah, I was actually talking to these Georgians, like DMing with some who wanted me to come out and spend some time with them. But we lost contact. And guys, if you're out there, like holler at me. Let's go eat some, what's it called? Yeah. Yeah. And the cheese bread. Oh my God, that stuff is the naughtiest food. Oh, it's the best. Yeah. But it'll knock you out.
Anyway, Bure's best friend, Kikulisvili, he's now a billionaire oligarch and at one point expressed interest in becoming a Russian president. But his Georgian heritage, unfortunately, was problematic. The feds eventually banned him from entering the U.S., but that didn't stop Bure and him from starting a watchmaking company together. Kikulisvili became head of the Russian Youth Sports League and eventually the Russian Olympic Committee. Oh, OK. So I guess that's going to kick off 30 long years of...
Spotless Russian Olympic standards, yeah. Yeah. Following the story in details that Friedman wrote, Bure held a press conference in Moscow to deny he was connected to the Russian mob. Quote, the worst thing for me in this whole affair is trying to deny something I have never done or been associated with. He was quoted as saying that in the Moscow Times and standing alongside Bure during this press conference is Kikulishvili.
And this is another quote that he has. It's very easy for people to print all sorts of totally unfounded rumors about myself, but it's very difficult for me or for anyone else for that matter, trying to clear your name after such false information. He added, it's like trying to wash yourself off from all this dirt. And Bure, you know, he's been called the Michael Jordan of Russia. He's a celebrity. He led the national team. He was just an amazing NHL player. So he was like high society and high profile all over Russia.
Now, Kikulis really had taken over a company called the 21st Century Association from a mobster who had just been assassinated. Biray denied he had any position with the company, but there were all these billboards on Moscow with him on them saying, the future belongs to 21st Century Association. So it's kind of hard to like deny that when there's literally a picture of your face next to the company in an ad.
And yeah, the one thing though, I mean, the major fear besides this extortion stuff, but was that because of all these relationships between mafiosos and hockey players, whether friendly or most certainly not, the fear was always at the fix was in. And that's, that's a big deal. I mean, that that's the kind of thing that can almost bring down a professional sports organization. And it had happened in hockey games in Russia and in Europe, but there was never any real evidence. It happened in the U S yeah.
And that's where all these articles and documentaries, they kind of hint at it. They're all kind of heading at it. You know, they're just asking questions, but again, they don't have any proof that this happened. Anyway, Freeman frontline, a few others established these friendships and partnerships. And the question is, is the NHL actually doing anything about it? But I mean, I kind of feel like, like it doesn't seem like they can, right? Like if the feds can't shut this down,
And there's not enough proof that these mafiosos, like they don't get convicted besides getting banned from the US. Can you really rein in these friendships and partnerships? Freeman makes the case that the NHL doesn't do anything because they need a pipeline to Eastern block players and everything over there is mob controlled. So they really just can't. Yeah. I mean, these sports groups just kind of do whatever gets them the most business, right? I mean, like the NBA in China, NFL, Kaepernick, like it's happened in England, loads and loads with the Premier League.
These are not the guys you need to be relying on to kind of take a stand on this stuff. Yeah, I mean, this is a little different, right? Because there is a threat on the... Like the Kaepernick thing, the NBA in China. I mean, those are more business dealings, right? There's a...
True. This is like, although I guess the Xinjiang thing, there's people under serious harm and threat and genocide there. But here it's like, you know, it's their own players being threatened. So you would assume that they would care a little bit more. But apparently the NHL was in denial or just not helping the feds, even when there was a congressional inquiry into the matter. This is when Friedman really gets going. And he says that the feds themselves fear the possibility of games being fixed.
But the NHL chief counsel, he says to PBS Frontline, quote, well, I guess we're very confident that fixing hasn't happened. And I think, you know, the FBI has told us that they've looked into it and they have not only not been able to establish any effect on our games, but any attempts to affect our games. And I'll leave you with a great quote Kikula really gives to Frontline when they interviewed him. He says through an interpreter, quote,
Okay. Wow.
Wow. Draw your own conclusions about who he was and what he was involved with and all that. Yeah, that is a crazy, crazy tale. I had no idea that hockey was so infiltrated with all this stuff at all. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. The story didn't really continue on. I frontlined this documentary in 98, and I guess it was a big story in the mid 90s, but it kind of died down. Yeah.
And we never really heard about these stories or this stuff, like, again. Like, again, I'm someone who, you know, reports on all of this stuff and really looks into it and reads up on it. And I had no idea. Though I did, I was talking to a Canadian friend who's a reporter. And when I kind of brought this up, he was like, oh, yeah, I remember that. But, you know, Canadians hockey, like, they...
They probably know a lot more about it than or paid more attention than than the US did. Yeah. I mean, I'd like to know if people want more of these kind of stories about sport and crime, actually, because there's so much of it going around. Like FIFA is the big one. But there's there's like the Italian mafia and football. That was like only a few years ago. Indian mob is like fixing games and cricket. It's like so I mean, it's everywhere. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, we, we, there's plenty of stuff for us to do involving that as well. So yeah. Thank you guys again for tuning in as always. Patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. Please give us ratings too on, I guess we're supposed to, we've been supposed to ask for that, right? iTunes and Spotify five stars, right? Something nice about Sean. He needs it. And, uh, yeah, that's, uh, that's it until next time.