Russian Immigrant Gets Life Without Parole in Killings

A Russian immigrant was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Tuesday in the executions of two of his countrymen, whose fingers and thumbs were chopped off in a failed attempt to prevent identification of their bodies.

Serguei Ivanov, 31, listened intently to an interpreter as Superior Court Judge Nancy Brown told him he will spend the “rest of his natural life in prison, unless there is a change in the law and I don’t envision that.”

Brown also ordered Ivanov to use his prison job earnings to pay a $10,000 fine into a fund for victims of violent crime.

An accomplice, Alexander Nikolaev, 33, has served two years in prison as an accessory after the fact for helping Ivanov dismember and try to dispose of the bodies. He is in the process of being deported back to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Ivanov, Nikolaev, and the victims--Andrey Kuznetsov and Vladimir Litvinenko, both 28--shared the home in West Hollywood where the slayings occurred on Jan 26, 1992.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ann Ingalls said all four men were part of a crime ring that dealt in high-priced check kiting and credit card fraud and used other Russians as operatives.

At the time of Ivanov’s and Nikolaev’s arrests on the day of the slayings, police found in their home a trove of still-boxed computers and other valuables believed to have been stolen or illegally bought.

One of the victims, Kuznetsov, is believed to have been the mastermind of the fraud ring. He was described as a charming, suave, Hollywood-handsome immigrant who arrived in the United States two years before his death after serving four years in a Soviet prison camp for criminal activity.

He is believed to have become a millionaire from his illegal activities in Los Angeles and New York, and moved in chic circles.

Ingalls said Tuesday that the motive for Kuznetsov’s and Litvinenko’s executions may never be known.

She said, however, that reports that the men were linked to a Russian Mafia were creations of the “the media and the defense.”

The prosecution did not seek the death penalty against Ivanov, Ingalls said, because it did not believe a jury would “send someone to death when the victims are less than saintly.”