One particularly unlucky association for Cherney was his friendship with the late Anton Malevsky, who died in a parachuting accident in 2001. Malevsky was alleged to have run a Moscow mafia group called the Izmailovskaya; at one stage he was sponsored for a US visa by the New York-based Blonde Management Corp., which was run by Cherney and managed by the nephew of his business partner Semyon Kislin (Kislin, who has supported prominent New York Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani, has also been accused of links to mafia figures, which he denies). Malevsky and Cherney both emigrated to Israel, and in 1995 two Israeli hit-men were indicted for plotting to kill them. Cherney and Malevsky continued to be involved in Russian affairs; a 2000 CNN report notes a visit to Israel by former Sports Minister Shamil Tarpishchev:

...press reports have linked the disappearance of millions from the nation's sports funds under Tarpishchev to bribery and organized crime. And soon after Yeltsin fired him in 1996, Tarpishchev was videotaped being met at Tel Aviv's airport by Michael Cherney and Anton Malevsky.

Malevsky was deported from Israel in 1998, as the country had done in the past with mafia figures (most famously Meyer Lansky, an incident depicted in fictionalised form in The Godfather Part II). In 2004, Cherney was pleased to see the forced resignation of Israeli police investigator Moshe Mizrahi, who had been accused of a "witch hunt" against innocent Russian businessmen in Israel on behalf of his friends.

Allegations against the late Malevsky also form part of an up-coming trial in Germany; Der Spiegel reported recently that

Alexander A. and two other defendants are charged with having laundered about €8 million for "Izmailovskaya," a Russian Mafia organization, through real estate deals in Germany. Investigators are convinced that Alexander A., the good Christian, is one of the leaders of the Moscow Mafia syndicate, which they believe has earned a fortune with contract killings and protection rackets.

...A man named Malevsky is believed to have founded Izmailovskaya, named after Izmailovo, a Moscow neighborhood, in those early post-Soviet days. According to the prosecutors, the group specialized in extorting protection money and committing contract killings during the brutal struggles that followed the deregulation of the aluminum industry. They also believe that the organization worked for men who are now among Russia's richest oligarchs and invest their billions in Western construction outfits or companies in the automotive industry. Their brutal henchmen at Izmailovskaya are believed to control assets worth about $800 million today.

According to the prosecutors, Izmailovskaya's leader, Malevsky, moved part of this fortune to the British Virgin Islands, where it was invested in shady companies or deposited into the bank accounts of high-ranking Izmailovskaya members. "The system was designed to conceal the sources of the funds," says Bettina Vetter, one of the Stuttgart prosecutors.

Cherney, meanwhile, was named in a suit brought several years ago by business oligarch Mikhail Zhivilo against one-time Cherney protégé Oleg Deripaska; American Lawyer noted in 2003 that

During the so-called "Aluminum Wars" of the 1990s, rival Russian oligarchs fought violently for control of that nation's second-largest industry. The losers of the Aluminum Wars don't trust Russian courts, so they have carried the fight to tribunals around the world. Their allegations read like a post--Cold War thriller. As the claimants tell the story, billionaire Oleg Deripaska and alleged mafia boss Mikhail Chernoi stripped exiled oligarch Mikhail Zhivilo of the Novokuznetsk aluminum plant by bribing and strong-arming officials to file false murder charges against him (hence his exile), and to make false claims that drove his company into bankruptcy. The claimants are companies that had signed contracts with the Novokuznetsk factory before Deripaska allegedly rigged its bankruptcy and bought it on the cheap. According to Deripaska, the claimants themselves are controlled by Zhivilo.

A 2000 Jamestown Foundation report adds:

The plaintiffs charge, among other things, that in 1995, at the height of a battle for control of the Krasnoyarsk Aluminium Factory, Chernoy ordered the murder of Felix Lvov. Lvov represented the interests of AIOC, the U.S. metals company and Trans World rival. Chernoy, the plaintiffs claim, used Anton Malevsky, reputedly a leader of the Izmailova organized crime group, to carry out the order. According to the suit, Chernoy and Deripaska also sought to wrest control over NkAZ away from MIKOM, a company run by Mikhail and Yuri Zhivilo. Soon after the Lvov murder, Deripaska warned that Mikhail Zhivilo would share Lvov's fate if he refused to cooperate with Chernoy and Trans World. The suit also alleges that, in the fall of 1995, Mikhail Zhivilo was forced to meet with Chernoy in Tel Aviv to discuss "krysha" ("roof," slang for protection payments) for the following year. Malevsky allegedly attended the meeting during which Zhivilo was warned that if he stopped making protection payments he would have to deal with Malevsky "and his partner Yaponchik"--an apparent reference to Vyacheslav Ivankov, the Russian mafia boss jailed in New York in 1996 on federal conspiracy and extortion charges. In March 1996, the suit alleges, an attack was carried out on Zhivilo, after which he received yet another warning from Chernoy. According to the complaint, Zhivilo ran into Chernoy by chance in 1998 at a soccer match in France, and Chernoy again brought up Malevsky to threaten Zhivilo into cooperating with Deripaska (Vedomosti, December 21).

Zhivilo is currently a fugitive in Europe; the case was eventually settled out-of-court (see here). In July, a Zhivilo associate was found guilty by a Russian court of plotting a political assassination.

Another former associate of Cherney has also made serious allegations, as noted by the Hoover Digest in 2004:

Dzhalol Khaidarov, a former close associate of Mikhail Chernoy, a partner of Deripaska's with close ties to organized crime, described, in an interview with Le Monde, how Russian Aluminum became so large: "You ask why Russian Aluminum gained one or another factory. They will say that the shares were purchased. But if you look, you'll find that the former shareholder is in prison, became a `drug addict,' or disappeared. When I worked with Mikhail Chernoy, the group gave bribes of 35 to 40 million dollars every year. It was always possible to buy a judge, a governor, or a law. In the early 1990s, they murdered. Now they prefer to file a case or put someone in prison. They can do anything."

Since then Cherney and Oleg Deripaska have fallen out, and Cherney is currently pursuing Deripaska through the UK courts. Cherney claims that the allegations against him have all been concocted by his enemies, who range from business rivals to left-wing Israelis (see this recent London Observer interview). Deripaska in particular is accused of arranging the supposedly "staged" shooting of Andrei Kalitin, whose forthcoming book Mafia in Black will make further allegations (Cherney is threatening to sue for defamation). Kalitin's shooting comes ten years after the death of journalist Vadim Birukov; according to CNN, he

...was found dead in his garage, his body badly beaten, his mouth taped. Birukov's Business in Russia was the first independent magazine to expose organized crime's role in aluminum in any detail, and he had attacked the Chernoys [i.e. Michael and his brother Lev] mercilessly. The culprits were never found.