His nickname, "Yaponchik" (Япончик), translates from Russian as "Little Japanese", due to his faintly Asian facial features.

[2] Ivankov was born in Georgia to parents of Russian ethnicity,[3][4] when it was part of the Soviet Union, to Olga Gostasvits and Bernard Royal-Ivankov, and lived on Iosebidze Street, in the capital of Tbilisi.

Ivankov was an amateur wrestler in his youth and served his first prison time for his participation in a bar fight, in which he claimed he was defending the honor of a woman.

Though he was sentenced to fourteen years he was released in 1991, reportedly thanks to the intervention of a powerful politician and a bribed judge of the Russian supreme court.

[11] Ivankov arrived in the United States in March 1992, despite having served a prison sentence of around ten years and a reputation as one of the fiercest and one of the most brutal criminals in Russia.

The actual scope of his activities is unclear, since conflicting sources describe his gang on Brighton Beach as around 100 members strong and being the "premier Russian crime group in Brooklyn" to something on the scale of Lucky Luciano's nationwide Mafia Commission many decades earlier.

Ivankov, Slusker and Stanimirović all retained and utilized the services of attorney Robert S. Wolf; the first American lawyer to ever be allowed entry into Russian Gulag prisons in Siberia.

[17][18][19][20] Kislin issued numerous mortgages to investors, who were overwhelmingly associated with countries from the former Soviet Union, in the 2001 opened Trump World Tower.

[23][24] On July 13, 2004, Ivankov was deported to Russia to face murder charges over two Turkish nationals who were shot in a Moscow restaurant following a heated argument in 1992.

25 July 1961 Rustavi, Georgia), who is close to Aslan Usoyan (Ded Khasan) (Russian: Аслан Усоян (Дед Хасан)) and is in the Brothers' Circle, was arrested in Greece in late January 2012 as the main beneficiary in Ivankov's death and for the attempted murder of Ded Khasan.

[39] Living among Israel, Germany and Austria, he headed the Mazutka gang or Mazutkinskaya OPG (Russian: Мазуткинская ОПГ).

[41] Allegedly, he was involved in trafficking narcotics from Central and South America and helped organize the 3 November 1996 assassination of 41 year old Paul Tatum, a co-owner of the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel in Moscow.