The Trouble With Being a Mobster

The Semyon Mogilevich story is becoming more intriguing. Over the weekend, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy at the Guardian in London weighed in with a long piece linking the notorious alleged mobster to the assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko.

Mogilevich, who has been on the FBI most-wanted list for years, was arrested last Thursday on tax charges in Moscow. Russian authorities said they had long been looking for Mogilevich, who has lived for years in plain sight in the Russian capital. There is much conjecture on why he was arrested just now. Some of it involves supposed efforts to unwind the shadowy natural gas trade between Russia and Ukraine, in which Mogilevich appeared to have a role.

The Guardian story is quite an involved piece of journalism. The top half is background, but it then picks up with a tale of Litvinenko investigating Mogilevich, who according to the piece griped about it to his FSB pals, who got angry at Litvinenko … well, you get the picture. It all ends with Litvinenko having polonium 210 dropped into his tea in November 2006.

I have to note the remarkable coincidence of two huge Mogilevich stories breaking at precisely the same time. First his arrest, and now the accusation of involvement in one of the biggest murder cases of recent years.

One can be certain that the FSB is scouring its voluminous unsolved case file for items to hang on the unsympathetic Mogilevich.

Why Has Russia Arrested Semyon Mogilevich?

Semyon Mogilevich has been the former Soviet Union's most notorious gangster for a decade and a half. He's on the FBI most-wanted list for his activities in the United States. He's persona non grata in the U.K. But he's traveled without interference in Ukraine and Russia -- until yesterday, when he was arrested in Moscow.

The Russians announced today that a 50-man police squad detained the 61-year-old Mogilevich along with a cosmetics company owner named Vladimir Nekrasov on tax evasion charges. Mogilevich was using the pseudonym Sergei Shnaider.

Mogilevich is deserving of a Hollywood script. In a hilarious 1999 interview with BBC's Panorama, here's how he responded when asked why he registered one of his companies in the Channel Islands: "The problem was that I didn't know any other islands. When they taught us geography at school, I was sick that day."

Come on Semyon. We've seen gangster movies, too.

The question remains: Why now? Who did Mogilevich cross to end up detained? Is this a warning? Is Vladimir Putin trying to recover some of his image after his catastrophic handling of the Alexander Litvinenko affair?