RUSSIAN MAFIA THRIVES IN SOUTH FLORIDA

When Russian nightclub owner Oleg Kirillov decided to fly to Miami last
December and spend his New Year's vacation in the sun and surf, the FBI got
ready to celebrate, too.

Pegged as the head of a powerful Russian crime gang, the 31-year-old
Kirillov was arrested by FBI agents soon after he arrived and was charged
with conspiracy to export cocaine from Miami to Moscow.

Yet the bust got little publicity, perhaps because Kirillov was only one of
scores of Russian mobsters who visit South Florida, perhaps because his is
only one of the dozen or so Russian gangs known to operate here.

With little fanfare, Russian-speaking mobsters regarded as the most
sophisticated criminals ever to hit America have turned South Florida into
one of their main U.S. bases, behind only New York and maybe San Francisco.
They are holding internal summits and meeting with Italian Mafia and
Colombian drug cartel leaders, buying luxury condos and running scams,
according to a dozen FBI, DEA and local officials and private
money-laundering experts interviewed by The Herald.

``What elevates Miami to the top of Russian organized crime in the U.S. is
the access to banks in the Caribbean and drugs in Latin America,'' said
Hardrick Crawford Jr., head of the FBI's organized crime branch in Miami.

Some clear evidence of the Russian mob's presence here:

**Sergei Aksyonov, reputed head of Russia's second-largest and most violent
gang -- ``No. 2 with a bullet,'' one FBI official joked -recently bought
several luxury condos on north Collins Avenue through two relatives.

**Anzor Kikalischvili, a Russian businessman denied a U.S. entry visa last
year for alleged ties to crime gangs, bragged in a 1996 FBI wiretap that he
had 600 employees in Miami alone.

**Four of Russia's highest-ranking mobsters met in Miami in 1993 to decide
how their gangs would split up the government-owned hotels and factories
that were privatized that year, law enforcement officers who watched them
say.

``There are definitely a lot of major league players here . . . who want
that Miami Vice lifestyle,'' said Bob Levinson, who retired recently as the
FBI's top expert in Miami on Russian mobsters.

Bosses And Underlings

Law enforcement agents in Miami say they have grown used to seeing lots of
young Russian men in luxury beach hotels, a few of them apparently bosses
who bring bodyguards and even satellite phones.

But most appear to be foot soldiers, athletic young men who sport the
homemade tattoos that denote prison experience and the track suits that are
the virtual uniforms of low-level Russian hoodlums.

``They are on all-expenses-paid vacation, perhaps rewards for a whacking
[killing] well done,'' said Kenneth Rijock, a Miami-based law enforcement
consultant on financial crimes.

The Russians' arrival in South Florida has clearly worried law enforcement
agencies.

The FBI's Miami office created a 13-person ``Russia-Eurasia'' squad last
July after a threat-assessment study put Russian organized crime in fourth
place -- behind Colombians, La Cosa Nostra and ``other Caribbeans'' and
ahead of the Sicilian mob. The FBI has Russia squads in only five other
U.S. cities. Task forces watches mob

That squad is in addition to Odessa, a joint task force of Miami-area U.S.
and local law enforcement agencies, financed with federal funds, that began
monitoring the Russian mob in South Florida around 1993.

Odessa has scored some victories, most notably last year's arrest of Ludwig
Fainberg, Ukrainian-born owner of the Porky's strip club in Hialeah, and 20
others on drug, weapons, counterfeit money, prostitution and stolen liquor
charges.

But both the FBI and Odessa face an uphill battle against mobsters who are
extremely clannish, have rogue KGB veterans advising them on security
precautions, and speak a relatively uncommon language.

None of the new FBI squad's 13 members speak Russian. And the lack of major
indictments since the Fainberg case -- which generated about 15,000
tape-recorded conversations -- indicates the depth of the difficulties.

Russian mobsters -- some law enforcement officers jokingly call them
Redfellas -- come to South Florida for the same reasons as other retirees,
other tourists and other criminals.

``Miami's climate is perfect for guys who have spent a long time in
Siberian prisons,'' said Lee Lamothe, publisher of a Toronto-based
newsletter on financial and organized crime.

A Deal-Making Center

Lamothe isn't talking about just the weather: From their perch in South
Florida, an international banking center and hub of U.S. trade with Latin
America and the Caribbean, the Russian gangsters can negotiate and monitor
all sorts of deals.

``If you're a Russian crook, you get a condo in Miami and a bent bank in
the Caribbean and you're in heaven,'' said Mike McDonald, the IRS's top
money laundering expert in Miami before he retired early this year.

Russian criminals began arriving in America after President Mikhail
Gorbachev relaxed emigration controls in the late 1980s. But they were
largely petty thugs running low-level scams that police call ``disorganized
crime.''

Russian organized crime gangs blossomed only after the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, sparking powerful alliances among traditional mobsters,
corrupt bureaucrats and even KGB veterans.

Their penetration of America began after top mobsters met near Moscow in
1992 and voted to send one of their own, Vyacheslav Ivankov, to explore
opportunities in New York's huge Brighton Beach emigre community.

Within months, Ivankov was spotted in Miami. And soon afterward, the mob
began popping up in other U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago,
Detroit and Philadelphia.

Exposing Russians' Role

The FBI's Miami office had infiltrated Ivankov's gang by 1994 and literally
``wrote the book on Russian organized crime'' -- a report detailing the
names and practices of a group until then all but unknown in the West.

``It was like the Valachi case in the Mafia -- the first real look inside
the organization,'' said Levinson, who now works for Decision
Strategies/Fairfax International, a private U.S. security consulting firm.
Joe Valachi was the first Italian Mafia member to break its code of silence
and give law enforcement a rundown on its inner workings in the 1960s.

Ivankov was arrested in 1995 and sentenced to nine years in prison for
trying to extort money from two Russian businessmen. But others have since
followed his path to Miami.

The head of Russia's single largest crime group until his arrest in
Switzerland last year, Sergei Mikhailov, and other top mobsters met in a
luxury Miami Beach hotel in 1993 to divide up Russian properties about to
be sold to private investors, law enforcement officials said.

An FBI affidavit in Kirillov's case file described him as head of the crime
gang in Nishni Novgorod -- a powerhouse industrial city that manufactures
everything from nuclear submarines to MiG warplanes.

Convicted of fraud in Russia, he is awaiting trial here on charges that he
conspired to buy nine pounds of cocaine a month from Peruvian dealers in
New York, bring the drugs to Miami and smuggle them to Moscow. ``Totally
unfounded charges,'' said Kirillov's lawyer, Alan E. Weinstein.

Vyacheslav Sliva, deported from Canada to Russia last year as a top
mobster, and the reputed bosses of Russian gangs in Los Angeles and Denver
have all been spotted in Miami in recent years, Lamothe said.

And the wife and daughter of Aksyonov, reputed head of Moscow's powerful
Ismailova gang, have bought several condos here even though he has been
denied a U.S. visa.

The dozen Russian gangs in Miami have been spotted running health insurance
frauds, counterfeit money and prostitution rings, visa scams and extortion
attempts on Russian emigres.

But while Russians and Colombian drug smugglers have been spotted meeting
several times in Miami, Drug Enforcement Administration officials believe
the cocaine is destined for Europe, not the U.S. market.

``Presently we do not feel the impact of any Russian influence as far as
the narcotics industry in South Florida is concerned,'' said William
Mitchell, the DEA's South Florida office chief.

Other law enforcement officials in Miami admit, however, that they still
don't know as much as they would like to about the Russians. ``I'm not
embarrassed to say we are still learning,'' Crawford of the FBI said.

Among the puzzles: A growing number of Russians are working in the
janitorial staffs of area hotels, stores and office buildings -- jobs the
mob has sometimes used for large-scale thefts in cities like Chicago and
Los Angeles.

When police raided a Russian mob-linked shop in Chicago last year that was
selling luxury goods such as Armani clothes and Coach handbags, many of the
items turned out to have been stolen in the Miami area.

When federal prosecutors in New York charged 25 Russian emigres in 1995
with pocketing $140 million in fuel sales taxes due the U.S. government,
the main firm involved turned out to have an office in Miami.

When Ukrainian police arrested two British men who tried to cash
counterfeit bank drafts worth $7 million in January, the documents carried
the name of a nonexistent ``Florida's Ocean Bank.''

And after reputed mobster Eugene Susker pleaded guilty to tax fraud in Ohio
in 1995, he asked for leniency in sentencing because he was working on a
big business deal: a floating casino based in a Florida port he never named.

``The real problem is that we're not seeing 99 percent of what [the Russian
mob] is doing in Miami right now,'' consultant Rijock said.

Added Levinson: ``They are weaving their webs right now, testing authority
to see what they can do. We are learning, but they are learning, too.''