The Billion Dollar Don December 6 1999

The Billion Dollar Don
Monday 6 December 1999
Reporter Tom Mangold
Producer Toby Sculthorp

A transcript of this programme is not available

Click here to access Tom Mangold's entire 3 1/2 hour interview with Mogelevich

Panorama investigates the international dimensions of Russian organised crime focusing on the most notorious of alleged gangsters: Semion Mogalevich.

Bob Levinson.

Reporter Tom Mangold travelled to Moscow where he spent a day with the `Billion Dollar Don' riding in his bombproof Mercedes, and challenging him to a game of backgammon in the street, before inviting him to a three-hour television interview to explain his actions; the first time Mogalevich has talked to a British journalist.

Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union the new Russia is emerging as a criminal state - 40% of its economy controlled by organised crime; its natural resources looted by crime oligarchs; contract murders at an all-time record; billions of dollars illegally laundered in Western banks and offshore havens.

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Police raid the U Holubu club, Prague

Panorama also travelled to Florida to meet the former FBI special agent Bob Levinson who spent the last decade of his career with the bureau tracking Russian organised crime, and Mogalevich in particular. He is Pat Garret to Mogalevich's Billy The Kid, and despite his retirement from the FBI, remains determined to see Mogalevich behind bars for his alleged crimes.

Mogalevich claims he is merely a humble wheat dealer. However the truth about his activities is infinitely more complex. The programme follows the trail of Mogalevich's businesses from multi-million dollar scams in North America to tawdry clip-joints in eastern Europe, and from lawyer's offices in the City of London to crime summits in Prague.

In Switzerland Panorama investigates allegations that corruption has spread into the Russian White House itself, and in Moscow, Mangold talks to the Russian Federal Prosecutor who was caught with his trousers down in a honey trap, the moment he began to launch enquiries into allegations against Boris Yeltsin and his family.

Panorama takes Britain's first comprehensive look at Russian organised crime , the men behind it and the men who are fighting back,and paints a grim and disturbing picture of a phenomenon that has already spread across the world.

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Related links:
The YBM Magnex Files by Adrian du Plessis, Investigative Research Analyst

National Criminal Intelligence Service

FBI

Related News Stories:
The rise and rise of the Russian mafia

So who are the Russian Mafia?

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