Russia’s criminal underworld buried one of its most notorious mafia godfathers today in a funeral attended by hundreds of mourners.

Vyacheslav Ivankov, better known by his mafia nickname of “Yaponchik” or Little Japanese, was buried next to his mother in Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery.

Police and Interior Ministry troops maintained tight security and used sniffer dogs in the grounds to check for bombs amid fears of a gangland attack during the ceremony.

Mr Ivankov, 69, had been the target of an assassination attempt in July when a sniper shot him three times in the stomach as he left the city’s Thai Elephant restaurant. He never recovered from his injuries and died in a Moscow hospital on Friday.

Men in black leather jackets and dark glasses carried his coffin aloft as hundreds of people followed behind, many carrying wreaths sent by gangs of criminal “brothers” from cities all over Russia. A police official told Ria Novosti news agency that “representatives of all Russia’s criminal structures” were attending.

Russian television repeatedly broadcast news reports of the funeral, a sign of Mr Ivankov’s infamy as a mob boss who built criminal empires in the former Soviet Union and the United States during a career that lasted four decades. He was accused of involvement in gun-running, racketeering and drug trafficking.

He spent 11 years in prison in Russia’s Far East city of Irkutsk after being convicted of robbery in 1980, but continued to run his operations from jail. When he was released in 1991, he was flown to Moscow in a private chartered jet for a celebration party at the five-star Metropole Hotel, yards from the Kremlin.

He moved to the United States in 1992, claiming to be interested in film projects, and began to terrorise the Russian community in New York’s Brighton Beach. At one point, he also attended a summit in Miami of Russian gangsters to divide up the US into gang “turfs”.

Mr Ivankov was arrested by the FBI in 1995 and jailed for nine years at the high security Allenwood prison in Pennsylvania for extorting $3.5 million (£2.2 million) from two Russian immigrants and entering into a fake marriage to gain citizenship. He claimed that the men had stolen the money from friends of his in Russia.

He was extradited to Russia upon his release in 2004 and immediately arrested for the murder of two Turks in a Moscow restaurant in 1992 with an accomplice called “Plum”. Mr Ivankov was released at his trial a year later, however, after five witnesses to the shooting, including a police officer and a waiter, claimed never to have seen him before.

The assassination attempt followed a period in which Mr Ivankov had stayed out of the public eye, spending much of his time abroad. Police suggested that he had been in Moscow to try to mediate a dispute between rival gangs over gambling and that one of the parties had objected to his decisions.

The origins of Mr Ivankov’s nickname are shrouded in mystery. One version attributed it to his short stature and vaguely Asian appearance, although he was born in Soviet Georgia, while another claims that he earned the title while serving his criminal apprenticeship in a gang led by a godfather nicknamed “Mongol”.

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