And given that at the time Ivankov had no criminal record in the United States, there is a distinct limit to how big a deal one can make of this. One notorious old-school Russian criminal or “thief-within-the-code,” as the old underworld elite was called, even lived in the New York Trump Tower for a while.īut there is no evidence Trump and Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov, ever met. Some proper gangsters have, from time to time, shown up in these Trump tales. There is real organized crime in Russia, just as there is everywhere. There are plenty of reasons to think that Trump’s business model is flawed to the point of being a pyramid scheme, and that his taste in buyers and investors is indiscriminate in the extreme.īut talk of his becoming an ally or instrument of organized crime misses the point.
It seems there is some new claim to link Donald Trump and his business empire with “Russian organized crime” almost every day.
