The ONLY Gangster the FBI Gave Up Trying to Catch

December 2015.

Inside FBI headquarters, a senior

official updates the bureau's most

sacred list. A name is coming off. No

arrest, shootout, or body. Just a quiet

deletion. For only the seventh time in

65 years, a top 10 most wanted fugitive

is being removed without being caught.

The same agency that hunted Osama bin

Laden across continents [music] that

dismantled New York's five families is

surrendering. The memo lands with

bureaucratic calm. Subject resides in a

country with no US extradition treaty.

The translation, we cannot get him. And

here's the most unsettling part. He's

not hiding in a bunker or a jungle. He's

sipping champagne in a Moscow suburb

protected by Vladimir Putin himself.

The FBI built a 45ount indictment,

exposed a fake billiondoll magnet

company, tracked shell companies from

Budapest to the Cayman Islands, years of

work, witnesses who risked their lives,

and none of it mattered. The white whale

swims free. What kind of man makes the

FBI surrender? And how did a stocky

Ukrainian con artist become untouchable

to the most powerful nation on Earth?

May 13th, 1998.

New Town, Pennsylvania. 47 FBY agents

and tactical gear surround an

unremarkable industrial building on a

quiet street, headquarters of a company

called YBM Magnex International.

On paper, YBM is a Wall Street fairy

tale, a publicly traded magnet

manufacturer valued at nearly $1 billion

[music] on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

The stock has climbed 300% in two years.

Pension funds in Canada bought in. Day

traders in New York chased the momentum.

Teachers, firefighters, retirees across

North America flooded their savings into

this wonderstock. The company's world

headquarters sits right here in Bucks

County. And the FBI has spent 26 months

building a case to tear it apart.

A command crackles over the radio.

Flashbangs detonate. Agents breach the

doors and sweep through offices with

weapons raised. They expect to find a

bustling manufacturing floor churning

out industrial magnets for hard drives

and MRI machines.

Instead, they find silence, a cavernous

warehouse of idle machinery. Fluorescent

lights flicker over an assembly line

that has never assembled anything. The

machines are there, gleaming and

expensive, but they are props staged for

investor tours. The finished products

lining the shelves are dummy samples.

Magnets purchased from legitimate

suppliers and repackaged with YBM

labels. YBM Magnex International is not

making anything at all. Documents cover

every surface. Purchase orders,

invoices, technical drawings, mountains

of paperwork that look perfectly

legitimate. The entire enterprise is a

theater. By the time trading is halted,

the scam has vaporized more than $150

million of investors money.

FBI forensic accountants pick apart the

fraud. Money cycled through bank

accounts from Budapest to the Caribbean

reported as magnet sales that never

occurred. One of the largest financial

crimes in North American history. Yet

the bureau remains unsatisfied. If this

was a pump and dump scheme, who was the

mastermind who cashes out 150 million

and leaves behind a fake magnet factory

as a calling card? Agents trace the web

of shell companies and find an

unexpected name at the center. Seion

Mogalevich,

Ukrainianborn, 51 years old, economics

degree from Lviv University, a ghost

with no US presence, white collar con

artist, rogue financier.

As they dig deeper, a chilling

realization appears. He is far more than

a clever fraudster. He is what organized

crime experts coldly call a global

player. less gently, he is the boss of

bosses of the Russian mafia. The FBI's

routine fraud case just exploded into

something much bigger. But why would a

crime lord running weapons, [music]

drugs, and trafficking operations bother

with a magnet company in suburban

Pennsylvania? A federal grand jury

[music] in the Eastern District of

Pennsylvania indicted Seion Mogulvic on

45 [music] counts, racketeering,

conspiracy, securities fraud, wire

fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering.

Prosecutors assemble a dossier spanning

thousands of pages. Witnesses who risked

their lives [music] to testify. Paper

trails tracing millions through banks in

Budapest, Vienna, Cyprus, and the

[music] Cayman Islands. By 2003, they

have assembled what should be an

airtight case. [music] Everything needed

to put Mogulvich away for the rest of

his natural life. Everything [music]

except Seion Mogulvich himself. In all

his years of masterminding this massive

fraud, he never set foot on American

soil, not once. Every fax from YBM's

Pennsylvania [music] office routed

through Budapest. Every phone call with

executives was placed from Hungary or

Russia. Every wire transfer orchestrated

from abroad [music] like a phantom

conductor directing an orchestra he

never joined. The bureau has a 45ount

indictment with his name on it. But they

cannot slap handcuffs on a ghost who

exists only as a signature on shell

company documents. To prosecute him in a

US court, they need to physically get

him into the United States. Extradition

becomes their only hope. And that hope,

as the FBI is about to learn, is fading

by the minute. The agents thought they

had caught [music] a formidable

fraudster. Instead, they have uncovered

a shadow boss of international [music]

crime operating oceans away beyond their

reach. How do you catch a man who lives

in a world without borders? And what

made a crime lord whose empire spans

[music] continents decide to target

American retirees pension funds?

Mogale Levich's criminal empire did not

start with billion dollar frauds. It

started with an old school con in the

1970s Soviet Union in the city of Lviv,

Ukraine. Young Simeon, a stocky

economics student with thick glasses and

a gift for numbers, prayed on his own

community.

Jewish families desperate to immigrate

to Israel or the West needed to

liquidate their assets before the Soviet

government would let them leave.

Mgalevich offered to help, promising to

sell their apartments, furniture, and

heirlooms for fair market prices and

wire them the proceeds once they arrived

abroad. They trusted him. They handed

him keys, deeds, and their life savings.

Mogalevich pocketed everything. When

those families arrived in [music] Vienna

or Tel Aviv with nothing but the clothes

on their backs, they had no recourse.

Many eventually settled in Brighton

Beach, Brooklyn, forming the nucleus of

what would become New York's Russian

mob. Some remembered Mgalevich.

Some would work for him later. He served

two short prison stints [music] in the

Soviet Union for fraud and currency

speculation, emerging each time with

money, underworld contacts, [music] and

a hardened philosophy. Victims do not

matter. Only power does. The scam was

small, but the lesson [music] was

permanent. By the late 1980s, as the

Soviet Union began its final collapse,

Mgalevich saw his moment. He left

Ukraine and relocated to Budapest,

Hungary, a neutral crossroads between

east and west, where intelligence

agencies, arms dealers, and criminals

all converged in the chaos. There he

built his own syndicate from scratch,

one that would operate on a different

level than the street gangs and

extortion rackets that defined organized

crime. He recruited not just thugs, but

exKGB officers and Afghanistan war

veterans as his enforcers. men who had

tortured prisoners in Kbble [music] and

felt nothing. These were not bodyguards.

They were killers with military training

who would not flinch [music] at any

order. He would destroy entire rival

groups, recalls former mob insider

Leonid Reitman, who later testified

about Mgalevich's tactics to FBI

investigators. First the leaders, then

the new leaders who replaced them until

the whole group was gone. Mogulvich did

not cut off the head of a rival

organization. He burned the roots.

Competitors who refused to submit simply

[music] vanished. Bodies surfaced in the

Danube.

By the mid 1990s, he was not just a

boss. [music] He was the boss of bosses.

A criminal who operated with impunity

across a dozen countries while law

enforcement in [music] each one blamed

another jurisdiction. But running street

rackets was only the beginning. What

happens when a man with unlimited

violence and unlimited ambition decides

to go corporate? His portfolio expanded

with terrifying speed. He started with

weapons trafficking. Mogalevich's

[music] network supplied everything from

Kalashnikovs to surfaceto-air missiles.

Western intelligence services tracked

shipments to African warlords [music]

and Middle Eastern militias. There were

persistent whispers, never fully

confirmed, of deals involving nuclear

materials from poorly guarded Soviet

stockpiles. Then he went with drug

trafficking. He controlled heroin routes

stretching from the poppy fields of

Afghanistan through Turkey to the

streets of Western Europe, a pipeline

worth billions annually. Human

trafficking. His syndicate ran brothel

across the Czech Republic, Hungary, and

Israel, moving women from impoverished

villages in Ukraine and Muldova to serve

as prostitutes in foreign [music]

cities. Finally, he mastered money

laundering. His financial adviserss,

some with advanced degrees from Moscow's

best universities, created by Byzantine

webs of shell companies to wash dirty

money clean through bank accounts

stretching from Cyprus to Gibralar to

the Channel Islands. Every new venture

added a layer of armor. His wealth

ballooned into the billions, making it

easy to buy [music] friends and

influence. He accumulated at least a

dozen known aliases and multiple

citizenships. He was Semon Yukovich

Telish. one day, Sergey Schneider the

next. Hungarian one week, Israeli the

next. He collected passports like other

people collect stamps. He moved freely

across borders, living in mansions in

Budapest and Dachas outside Moscow. No

single police force could track all his

movements. No single [music] charge in

one country could stop a man who could

vanish into another. [music] In the

FBI's Philadelphia office, Special Agent

Mike Dixon began to grasp the shadow

they were chasing. He's a big man. He's

a very powerful man. I think more

powerful than a John Gotti could be

because he has the ability to influence

nations. Gotti never reached [music]

that stature.

The American mafia dawn could bribe

judges and sway a burrow. Mogalevich

could pull levers that affected entire

countries. Here is where natural gas

[music] appears. By the 2000s, Mgalevich

had insinuated himself into Eastern

Europe's energy trade. Through proxies,

he became a hidden player behind a Swiss

registered firm called Razuko, the

middleman for Russia's natural gas

exports to Ukraine and beyond. Russia's

gas feeds furnaces and power plants

across Europe. Control the gas flow and

you have a chokeold on nations during a

winter freeze. Mgalevich did not need to

be a politician or a general to wield

geopolitical power. He just needed to

control a company everyone relied on but

few understood. With a phone call, he

could turn off the heat in millions of

homes. What kind of criminal makes

himself essential to a superpower's

foreign policy? If you find this story

as disturbing as I do, consider

subscribing. The more people who

understand how men like this operate,

the harder it becomes for them to hide.

This is the man behind that empty magnet

factory in Pennsylvania. a man whose

power transcends the underworld [music]

and starts to rival legitimate states.

The FBI's 45ount indictment now feels

like trying to lasso a tornado.

Mogalevich's empire is global,

diversified, and cloaked behind layers

of political protection that no RCO

charge can pierce. Standard law

enforcement playbooks will not be

enough. To catch Mogvich, they need the

cooperation of foreign governments. They

need him to slip up and travel somewhere

within reach. They need a miracle. So

they reach for their biggest lever,

international exposure. If Mogvich

cannot be quietly extradited, maybe

public pressure will smoke him out. It

is time to write Seion Mogvich's name on

the FBI's most infamous bulletin board.

But would plastering his face across the

world finally force him into the open?

Or would it reveal something far more

troubling about who was protecting him?

October 21st, 2009.

FBY headquarters, Washington DC.

In a woodpanled conference room,

officials finalize a decision that will

echo across international law

enforcement. The 10 most wanted

fugitives [music] list is about to get a

new name, one that few Americans can

pronounce and fewer have ever heard of.

Since J. Edgar Hoover created the list

in 1950. It has maintained a 94% capture

rate. 463 of 523 people listed have been

apprehended or located. The list works

because it turns every customs agent,

every airline employee, every citizen

with a television into a potential

informant. When a fugitive goes up to

that rogues gallery, the world takes

notice. Borders become harder to cross.

Airlines flag passports. Tips flood in

from every continent. The heat becomes

inescapable.

Seion Mogvich's mugsh shot joins the

ranks of notorious outlaws. His balding

head and heavy jowls positioned

alongside Osama bin Laden's gaunt face

on the roster of America's most wanted.

The bureau publicizes the $100,000

reward on his head, later raised to 5

million. Press releases emphasize just

how dangerous this man is. International

con artist, boss of bosses of an Eastern

European mafia super network, threat to

the global financial system. In law

enforcement terms, this is the nuclear

option. They are pulling every

diplomatic string, activating every

partner agency from Interpol to the

Royal Canadian Mounted Police, deploying

every trick in the book to smoke Semon

Mogale Levich out of whatever shadow he

is hiding in. At first, there appeared

to be a breakthrough. In January 2008, a

year and a half before the top 10

listing, Mgalevich was unexpectedly

arrested in Moscow by Russian police at

an upscale restaurant. The charge seemed

almost comically minor. Tax evasion at a

chain of cosmetic stores he owned. But

there he was in handcuffs in custody on

Russian soil. The FBI's hopes surged.

Could this be the opening they needed?

Would Russia actually cooperate? perhaps

in exchange for some diplomatic

concession. Agents in Philadelphia and

Washington knew it was a long shot.

Russia had never shown any interest in

helping America prosecute Mogvich. But

the mere fact that he was behind bars in

a Moscow detention center was

encouraging. Maybe the years of

pressure, the Interpol read notices, the

diplomatic cables were finally working.

18 months later, those hopes were

brutally dashed. In July 2009, a Moscow

court quietly orders Mogalevich released

from jail. The official reason borders

on absurd. A Russian Interior Ministry

spokeswoman explains that the charges

are not of a particularly grave nature.

So investigators had no particular

reason to keep him imprisoned. Not

grave. The man the FBI suspects of

trafficking guns, drugs, humans, and

possibly nuclear material. The man whose

fraud robbed North Americans of $150

million.

Released because Russian authorities

classified his case as no big deal.

Mogulvich posts bail and walks out the

door. Free. The FBI realizes something

terrifying. Mgulvich is not just hiding

in Russia. He is being sheltered. The

top 10 listing, the publicity, none of

it made a dent. Moscow either does not

get the memo or does not care. The very

next month, as the FBI is adding him to

the most wanted list with great fanfare,

Mgalevich is reportedly settling back

into life in Moscow, dining at upscale

restaurants as if nothing happened.

International pressure was supposed to

make him persona nonrada. Instead, it

barely ruffled his feathers. Inside the

FBI, frustration gives way to cold

realization. The usual formula, making

the world too hot for the fugitive to

hide, is not working. Mogvich's name on

a wanted poster does not scare a

government that willingly set him free.

Why would Russia protect a mob boss? Why

thumb its nose at a US indictment and an

Interpol red notice for this man? The

answer has nothing to do with lack of

evidence or lack of effort. It has

everything to do with power. What did

Mgalevich give the Kremlin that made him

worth protecting from the full weight of

American justice?

To understand the invisible barrier the

FBI keeps slamming against, consider the

timing of Mogale Levich's rise. He built

his empire in the 1990s, the wildest and

most lawless decade in modern Russian

history. The Soviet Union had just

collapsed. State assets worth hundreds

of billions were being privatized, often

to whoever had the cash or the

connections to grab them. Organized

crime groups and former KGB officers

were indistinguishable in many cases.

And in St. Petersburg, a mid-level exKGB

officer named Vladimir Putin was serving

as deputy mayor, cutting deals with

businessmen of questionable background,

getting a crash course in how organized

crime could intertwine with politics,

commerce, and state power. Putin's later

rise would be built partly on mastering

that gray zone. [music]

Mgilevage with his immense wealth, his

international banking networks, and his

ability to move money and goods across

any border without attracting attention

was exactly the kind of figure who could

prove useful to ambitious men in that

world. He was not a patriot. He was not

an ideologue. He was a tool, a very

expensive, [music] very effective tool

that could be deployed when the state

needed things done that the state could

never officially do. Years later,

curious evidence of that utility

emerged. In 1999, a Ukrainian

presidential bodyguard named Mikola

Milnenko began making secret recordings

of President Leonid Kuchima's private

conversations. The tapes, later

authenticated by US intelligence,

captured hundreds of hours of candid

discussions. In one leaked snippet, a

voice identified as Coochma casually

mentions that Mogvich has a good

relationship with Putin. The implication

was clear. This was not just street

gossip. This was coming from a head of

state who would know. Around the same

time, [music] XFSB agent Alexander Lit

Vanenko, who had defected to Britain and

was cooperating with British

intelligence, made claims that

Mogalevich had been an informant and

asset for the KGB since the 1980s,

continuing his relationship with its

successor agency, the [music] FSB. Lit

Vanenko was poisoned with pelonium 210

in London in November 2006, [music]

almost certainly on Kremlin orders,

which lent a grim credibility to his

accusations.

Ukrainian intelligence chief Ehor

Smeeshko independently reported to

[music] US officials that Mogalevich

enjoyed protection at the highest levels

in Moscow, effectively operating as an

instrument of Russian security services

when needed. Mogalevich was not just a

mafia boss doing his own thing. He was

entwined with the Russian state. By the

2000s, as Putin consolidated power and

became Russia's president, Mgalevich

moved openly about Moscow. He bought a

lavish daca in an elite suburb. He dined

at high-end restaurants. He appeared to

fear no Russian law enforcement. If he

had been a valuable resource to Russian

intelligence, someone who could

facilitate the laundering of billions

through offshore accounts or broker

illicit arms deals the Kremlin wanted

deniability on or manage that critical

gas trade, then turning him over to the

Americans would be out of the question.

The gas angle exemplifies [music] how

Mogich made himself untouchable by

making himself useful. Through Rosukra

Nurggo, he had indirect [music] control

over a significant slice of Russia's

energy exports. That gave him leverage

not just over gangsters or businessmen,

but over governments. [music] The

Kremlin could use Rosuko as a lever in

negotiations with Ukraine, and

Mogalevich's cut kept him rich and

loyal. A US diplomatic [music] cable

later revealed that the Ukrainian

oligarch nominally running Rosku,

Dimmitro Fert, admitted privately that

he needed Mgalevich's approval to

operate. Mogvich was literally a

gatekeeper in the energy sector. In

Putin's Russia, if you help the state

[music] project power or make money and

ideally do both, you become part of the

club. Mogalevage delivered on both

counts. Picture the scene from the

perspective of an FBI agent in 2010

trying to strategize the capture of

Semon Mogalevich. Extradition treaty

with Russia. None. Russia's constitution

forbids handing over its citizens, and

Mogvich now holds Russian citizenship.

Secret snatch operation on foreign soil.

That would be an act of war if attempted

in Moscow. Lure him out. They tried that

with the most wanted list, hoping he

would slip up and travel. He did not.

The man is comfortable, protected by

Russian security services. An Interpol

notice is just a piece of paper to a man

who sits under the Kremlin's umbrella.

The FBI keeps Mogvich on the top 10 list

for 6 years, hoping against hope. They

chase down rumors and whisperings, a

sighting in a Moscow cafe here, an

unconfirmed trip to Hungary there, but

nothing pans out. Mogalevage is not like

other fugitives who stay on the list for

decades while hiding in a jungle or a

mountain. He is hiding in plain sight

under the protection of a major world

power. Barring a sudden regime change in

Moscow or a one ina- million deal, there

will be no perp walk. By 2015, the FBI's

leadership faced [music] a grim choice.

Leave Mogale Levich on the top 10 list

indefinitely as a symbolic [music]

gesture, knowing they cannot touch him

or make a rare and painful exception,

acknowledging publicly that this is one

fugitive they simply cannot capture. It

is an admission [music] no agency ever

wants to make. especially not the FBI

with its pride on the line. But the

truth is [music] inescapable. Mogale

Levich has engineered immunity to

American justice by outsmarting

investigators.

How does one man outsmart the most

powerful nation on Earth? And what

happens when the hunters finally admit

they have become the hunted?

December 2015. A brief press statement

crosses the wire services, largely

unnoticed amid the holiday bustle of

shopping reports and year-end

retrospectives. The FBI announces it is

removing Semon Mogalevich from the 10

most wanted fugitives list. The wording

is dry, almost bureaucratic. Mgalevich

is known to be residing in a country

that does not extradite to the United

States, and he no longer poses an

immediate threat to the American public.

No fanfare, no press conference, just a

quiet deletion and a handful of

paragraphs explaining the obvious.

Everyone who has been paying attention

understands [music]

the subtext. The most powerful law

enforcement agency on Earth has conceded

defeat in the face of immutable

geopolitical reality. Mogile Levich

becomes only the seventh person in 65

years to be removed from the top 10 list

without being captured or killed.

The FBI spent years and millions of

dollars [music] on this case, they

proved the crimes. The 45-count

indictment still stands, sealed in a

filing cabinet in the Eastern District

of Pennsylvania, gathering dust. They

know [music] exactly who Semon

Mogalevich is and what he has done.

defrauded investors of their retirement

savings, [music] ordered the deaths of

rivals, trafficked women from Ukrainian

villages to brothel in Tel Aviv,

brokered [music] arms deals to warlords

in Africa. They did everything by the

book to bring him to justice. None of it

mattered because the book has a last

page. American jurisdiction stops at the

borders of a sovereign state that

refuses to play along and Russia will

never play along. The FBI's addendum

that they do not believe Mogalevich

poses an immediate threat to the

American public rings hollow. It is a

face-saving formulation, a way of saying

he is not actively defrauding Americans

on American soil at this particular

moment. The man himself, nearly 70 by

then, was living comfortably in Moscow's

wealthiest suburbs. a free man. He has

never spent a single day in US custody,

never seen the inside of an American

courtroom, never answered for the

devastation of YBM's collapse or any of

his other alleged crimes. The investors

who lost everything got no justice. The

civil settlements from the YBM case

after years of litigation recovered

perhaps 15 cents on the dollar for

victims. The witnesses who bravely came

forward to testify against one of the

world's most dangerous mafia bosses did

so at immense personal risk. Some

entered witness protection. Some fled

their home countries and ultimately

their testimony led nowhere. FBI agents

like Mike Dixon and Peter Cowenhovven,

who devoted the prime years of their

careers to this case, retired with that

one name still nagging at them, the one

that got away.

Seion Mogalevich celebrates [music] his

79th birthday this year, likely with

family and fine champagne, perhaps at an

opulent villa outside Moscow. A free man

with blood on his hands and money in the

bank. The FBI's white whale swims on in

waters where they cannot follow. The man

who made the FBI surrender is still out

there living proof that if you become

valuable enough to the right people, the

rules stop applying to you. The FBI's

capitulation is not just about Mogvage.

It is a stark admission that there is a

limit to what justice can reach [music]

when faced with certain realities. It is

easy to believe that no one is beyond

the law. That given enough time and

effort, even the worst criminals [music]

will be brought to heal.

The story of Semon Mogalevich forces us

to confront a far more uncomfortable

truth. Above a certain threshold of

wealth, power, and political protection,

the law is not absolute. Mgalevich found

that threshold. He exploited it. He is

living proof that sometimes justice for

all comes with an asterisk. He is still

out there. And his story forces one

unsettling question. If one man can

place himself above the law by making

himself useful to a superpower, how many

others might be doing the same right

now? You might remember El Chapo,

another figure who seemed untouchable

for decades. The difference, Mexico

eventually broke. Russia never will. And

that difference is the reason Semon

Mogvich remains free while El Chapo rots

in a Colorado supermax.