Harried by the Mob?

His friends know him as Alik, a businessman who launched himself into the orbit of athletes and entertainers like a satellite.

Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov would get player-guest passes for the French Open tennis tournament at Paris’ Roland Garros, giving him access to off-limits lounges. He befriended Ukrainian tennis player Andrei Medvedev, who gave him a Mercedes-Benz, and Russians Marat Safin and Yevgeny Kafelnikov. He also was an agent for soccer players, among them goalkeeper Ruslan Nigmatullin of the Russian national team.

He liked to live well--he owned houses in Italy and France--and he liked to party, as documented by Russian TV coverage of a 1999 Paris fete whose guest list included NHL star Pavel Bure, Olympic ice dancer Marina Anissina and Russian singer Alla Pugachyova. He was often photographed with Josif Kobzon, a singer known as “the Russian Frank Sinatra.”

Dark-haired and stocky, he doesn’t stand out in a crowd. Vladimir Geskin, deputy editor in chief of the respected Russian sports magazine Sport Express, said colleagues consider him “a rather interesting man personally. He’s a good storyteller.... He’s the kind of person who likes to be near something interesting.”

A card shark and gambler who operated on the fringes of the law, he found fertile ground in post-Soviet Russia and its far-flung sister republics, where government can’t or won’t provide basic services.

“You’re looking at places where the rule of man is stronger than the rule of law,” said Sarah Mendelson, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan institute that focuses on international policy issues.

“Corruption is a part of everyday life from top to bottom.”

Law enforcement officials and those who study crime know Tokhtakhunov as “Taivanchik,” or Little Taiwanese, a nickname given him because of the Asian cast to his features. They believe he’s a heavyweight who has been involved in illegal arms sales, drug distribution and stolen-car sales.

All of which might someday be considered a mere prelude to an alleged crime that has shaken the Olympic movement less for its brazen nature than its implications.

In an unexpected twist to an investigation sparked by suspicions that he was laundering money, Tokhtakhunov was charged July 31 in federal court in New York with conspiring to fix two figure skating events at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Described in the criminal complaint as “a major figure in international Eurasian organized crime,” he allegedly tried to bribe skating judges and officials to carry out a vote-swapping deal that would give Russian-born Anissina and her French-born partner Gwendal Peizerat the Olympic ice dance gold medal.

What he wanted was a visa to return to France, which had expelled him because officials there suspected he had ties to Russian criminals. Born in Uzbekistan, he went to Moscow in the 1970s and met reputed criminals at an Uzbekistan-themed restaurant there. He reportedly had French, Swiss, Israeli and German passports when he was arrested at his Italian home in Tuscany, where he lived with his third wife.

“That a Russian can fix the Olympics when Russians fix sports events all the time is not unlikely,” said Louise Shelley, director of the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center in Washington and author of more than two dozen books and articles on international organized crime.

“To our way of thinking, it might seem illogical. To their way of thinking, it’s not,” added Shelley, who knew Tokhtakhunov’s nickname and believes him to be a crime boss. “It’s a question of how you make things work. What is he going to do to change his position when he wants to live [in France] and has real estate investments there? The French haven’t been doing so well in the Olympics and there’s corruption in their visa process and people are aware they can find holes. It doesn’t seem so entirely strange.”

U.S. and Italian authorities have transcripts of wiretaps in which he allegedly discussed the fix with “a female ice dancer,” her mother, and other conspirators. Tokhtakhunov and Anissina have denied wrongdoing, as have French and Russian skating officials.

“I’ve spoken to several people who are specialists in figure skating and they never heard of such a man before,” Geskin said. “From my point of view, it’s impossible for someone who is not in figure skating to make this [happen]. Maybe sometime he said something about this. He could talk lots, but I’m not sure he could do something. Officials in figure skating in Russia I know, some people say they never heard of him.... In criminal circles, he is a real man, but not in sports.”

But what if those circles overlap?

Rules flew out the window when the Soviet Union broke up and its former republics were thrown into economic chaos.

“Communism vaporized and the only people left standing were KGB [secret police] operatives implanted in the capitalistic West, and empowered criminals,” author Jeffrey Robinson wrote in “The Merger: The Conglomeration of International Organized Crime,” published in 2000. “They were the ones who stepped in to take over.”

Hockey players who flocked to the NHL to make their fortunes, tennis players and other athletes became natural targets of extortion in the lawless society.

“There are so many areas of intersection between sports and organized crime,” Shelley said. “Five years ago, I was on ’60 Minutes’ talking about sports and [illegal sales of] nuclear arms. It was being done through a karate club. Sports people are the only ones allowed out of the country easily.”

The Olympics long ago lost any pretensions of purity, and ice dancing in particular has been a swamp of scandals.

Figure skating appeared to have hit bottom early in the Salt Lake Games, when French pairs judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne said she had been pressured to vote for Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze over Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. She later changed her story, but Sale and Pelletier were awarded duplicate gold medals.

The case was thrown open again by allegations that Tokhtakhunov had plotted to get the French judge to vote for the Russian pair in exchange for a Russian ice dance judge’s vote for Anissina and Peizerat. International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge declared himself appalled and said the results could be recalculated if the allegations were proven. The U.S. Figure Skating Assn. called for the International Skating Union to form an independent ethics board to review the matter.

Although figure skating insiders professed shock, the idea that an Olympic event could have been fixed--or that a criminal or criminal group could have been involved--was no such breach of faith for outsiders.

“It’s naive to assume professional sports is untouched by this,” said Mark Heeler, assistant director of the Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime and Corruption at Canada’s York University.

“I don’t think it’s entirely surprising. It’s not unknown in the sports world in the past. It’s probably a product of figure skating being such a lucrative business. The popularity of figure skating has grown in the last decade. It makes more sense now from an organized crime perspective.”

Said Mendelson, “Why would you think it would be outlandish? Of course it’s totally possible. Everything we know about the Olympics suggests there’s a fair amount of corruption. It’s news, but the story to me is corruption in the Olympics, not that the Russian Mafia is involved.

“The Olympics are about politics and they have been for a long time. Politics is ultimately a struggle over resources. That Russia is involved is symptomatic of the corruption [in Russia] and in the Olympics.”

Tokhtakhunov is known to have associated with reputed crime figures, including the singer Kobzon. But it’s unclear whether he’s tied to what is loosely called “the Russian Mafia,” which experts say isn’t exclusively Russian and isn’t very structured. Robinson called Russia “a full-fledged mafiocracy,” with more than 12,000 criminal organizations that have nearly 100,000 members.

“There are no pyramid organizational structures, no family ties to unite them, no commission to oversee their activities,” he wrote. “Instead, these groups are more like collections of friends and associates who band together for certain crimes, going their own way for others. As a group they may target a specific industry, or just hold onto a specific territory. The term they use is ‘zones of influence.’ ”

Alleged incursions into sports by mobsters are impossible to document because fear scares most athletes into silence. But mobsters’ existence is well enough known for former German tennis star Boris Becker to have planned to fight a paternity suit last year, after he’d had a sexual encounter with a Russian model in the broom closet of a London restaurant, by claiming the Russian Mafia had stolen his sperm. He scrapped that defense when he admitted paternity and settled before trial.

In a more serious vein, Robinson lists NHL players Alexander Mogilny, Vladimir Malakhov, Oleg Tverdovsky and Alex Zhitnik as having been targeted for extortion by reputed mobster Vyacheslav Sliva in the 1990s. He also linked Viacheslav Fetisov, a distinguished player who coached Russia’s Olympic team at Salt Lake City, to a company that allegedly laundered money for Vyacheslav Ivankov, a reputed crime kingpin now in jail for extortion. Fetisov was chairman of a company owned by Ivankov, known as “Yaponchik”--little Japanese--but denied any illegal activities.

“The NHL took its time before admitting there was a problem,” Robinson wrote. “And then, a 15-month investigation by the United States Senate suggested that the extortion of Russian players in the NHL was more widespread than the league was willing to ‘fess up to. Since then, Senate investigators have spoken about extortion of Russian basketball players in the NBA and Russian tennis players on the professional tour.”

NBA spokesman Brian McIntyre said his league knew of no threats against its Eastern European players or threats by the Russian Mafia.

Details magazine and a “Frontline” TV documentary produced by PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. also found links between NHL players and suspected Russian criminals. They also questioned Bure’s relationship with Anzor Kikalishvili, labeled a top crime boss by the FBI. Bure called him a friend and denied he had been blackmailed or had paid protection money.

NHL spokeswoman Bernadette Mansur said league executives investigated the extortion rumors and found only two proven cases, neither of which involved mobsters. She also said NHL security personnel have toured training camps each year since 1993 to warn players about associating with people they don’t know.

“There was no instance of any involvement or intelligence about any ties with the Russian Mafia,” she said.

Mogilny paid $25,000 to silence threats from countryman Sergei Fomitov in 1994, but Mansur said Fomitov was a friend, not a crime figure. Tverdovsky was a target in 1996 when his mother, Alexandra, was kidnapped in Kiev, Ukraine, and held for $200,000 ransom. A former coach of Tverdovsky’s was arrested for allegedly ordering accomplices to kidnap her.

“I was worried about these things at the time,” said Tverdovsky, who was recently traded by the Mighty Ducks to New Jersey. “Usually, when this kind of stuff happens, it was serious people. If that was the case with me, I don’t know how it would have ended. In my case, it was a group of people who tried to make easy money. They didn’t know what they were doing. That made it easier for [them to be caught]....

“I think it is way better now. The country is changing from those times seven, eight years ago when things were out of control. The country is being put back together.”

Yet, fears remain. Duck forward German Titov lost his father and brother within five months during the 2000-01 season after each died in what he said were “falls from a balcony,” although he didn’t use the word “suicide.” Beyond that, though, he was reluctant to discuss what had happened.

Said a Russian player who requested anonymity, “You can’t go to Russia and ask these questions. If you do, you don’t come back.”

In the meantime, Tokhtakhunov sits in a Venice, Italy, jail, proclaiming his innocence and vowing to fight extradition to the United States, which will prolong a resolution of the case.

“It was maybe a little surprising he was involved in figure skating,” the Nathanson Centre’s Heeler said, “but maybe making inroads there is easier than in other sports.... It will be interesting to find out later how many people are involved.”

And whether this was the Olympics’ first brush with alleged criminals. Shelley, traveling in Europe last week, said newspapers there gave the story extensive coverage and ran pictures of Tokhtakhunov with reputed mobsters.

“The Olympic process has been so corrupt,” she said. “There needs to be a lot more oversight of organized crime and the Olympics.”

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Times staff writer Chris Foster contributed to this report.