On June 13, 1991, Leonard “Leib” Yermolkin / Yarmolkin registers FNJ Trade Management Corporation on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. FNJ is a shell company for laundering money between Semion Mogilevich’s U.S. associates, like Yermolkin, and his criminal operation overseas.
Three years later, the California Secretary of State’s office shuts it down. This doesn’t bother Mogilevich. His associate opens a second business, K & O Trade Management.
The registration for K & O lists Yermolkin and another individual, Sergei Kriveutchev, who is impossible to research. This could be a pseudonym for Sergei Krushchev, the son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The younger Krushchev moved to the United States in 1991.
By 1994, Mogilevich’s other criminal enterprises are also active in the land of the free. He has killers, spies, drug traffickers, and arms dealers in the country, and some of them begin mingling with Republican officials. (Mogilevich’s drug trafficking operation at this time is only exporting, not importing, cocaine and heroine to Russia from the U.S. and Canada). Helping his operation are Monya Elson and Vyacheslav Ivankov, two Russian mafia leaders who also operate their own crime syndicates. Both men have moved to the USA, and Ivankov lives in Trump Tower.
In 1996, the FBI identifies over two dozen U.S. businesses with connections to Mogilevich’s transnational crime syndicate. One of those businesses is led by Jacob Bogatin, the brother of David Bogatin, whose money laundering scheme was aided by Donald Trump in 1984.
By 1998, Mogilevich has funneled over $30 million into the United States to fund his operation and even sneaked into the country a few times.
This is a brief overview of Semion Mogilevich’s U.S. operations in the ’90s. The most significant events will have their own pages on Trump File.
External Sources
FNJ Trade Management (Archived)
K & O Trade Management (Archived)
Rober I. Friedman, Red Mafiya, p.243
Illustration by Trump File
