Police swooped on Semyon Mogilevich when he emerged from a business meeting at Moscow's World Trade Centre. They formally arrested him on Thursday, together with his business partner Vladimir Nekrasov, a millionaire Russian businessman. Mogilevich's arrest appears to bring to an end one of the most colourful and picaresque criminal careers of modern times - involving money-laundering, trading in drugs, prostitution, smuggling uranium and stolen icons, and international banking fraud.

FBI officials claim the 61-year-old Ukrainian-born Russian citizen is a major figure in the international mafia world. He is wanted in the US on numerous charges, including racketeering, securities and mail fraud.

Yesterday Russian police said Mogilevich had been detained under one of his many aliases, Sergei Schneider. The mafia boss uses 17 other names and holds passports from several different countries, they added, including Ukraine, Russia and Israel. Russia's interior ministry told the Guardian: "We have been pursuing him for 15 years. We arrested him as Sergei Schneider in connection with tax evasion. It was only after his arrest that we realised who he was. He has many different personalities and aliases."

Photos in yesterday's Russian papers reveal Mogilevich to be a thick-set man in late middle age. A photo in Vremya Novosti newspaper shows him fiddling with a pen, a giant waistcoat encasing his considerable girth.

A Moscow court approved his formal arrest on Thursday. Police launched their operation as part of an investigation into alleged tax evasion by the owners of Arbat Prestige, a lucrative chain of Russian cosmetic stores.

Around 50 balaclava-wearing police commandos grabbed Mogilevich on the street near a supermarket along with Nekrasov, Arbat Prestige's majority owner. The two men, who were accompanied by bodyguards, surrendered without a fight.

Mogilevich's alleged criminal CV is a lengthy one. According to international investigators he is believed to control the world's largest Russian mafia syndicate.

Born in Ukraine, and nicknamed The Brainy Don - he has an economics degree - he apparently joined a Moscow crime gang in the early 1970s, and was jailed twice for petty theft and fraud.

In the 1980s Mogilevich allegedly bought up the properties of Russian Jews emigrating to Israel, promising to send on the funds. The money, however, never arrived.

He lived and worked in Britain, the US and Canada. In the 1990s he apparently transferred the base of his criminal operations to Hungary. Here, Mogilevich was allegedly involved in a network of prostitution and smuggling, living in a fortified villa outside Budapest.

His syndicate was also allegedly involved in trading art and antiques taken from museums and churches across the former Soviet bloc. He apparently even bought a factory producing anti-aircraft guns.

Much of his money was allegedly laundered via London. In 1995 the British authorities closed down his UK operation - describing him in one classified report as "one of the world's top criminals", with an estimated £50m fortune.

Mogilevich's most sophisticated alleged fraud took place in Russia in 1994 when he took control of Inkombank, one of Russia's largest private banks. It collapsed in 1998 under suspicions of money-laundering. The FBI put him on its most-wanted list in 2003. The US charges stem from a 2003 indictment in Philadelphia in which he is accused of manipulating the stock of a Pennsylvania-based company, YBM Magnex Inc.

In an interview with a Russian paper in 1999, Mogilevich denied the FBI's claims, describing them as "delirious ravings".

Yesterday a spokeswoman for the Moscow bureau of Interpol, Tatiana Trunayeva, said that Mogilevich had been arrested - but not in connection with the US charges.

"This arrest was not made at Interpol's request," she told the Guardian.

The alleged mafia boss is now sitting in Moscow's Matroskaya Tishina prison. TV footage yesterday showed him apparently unsurprised by his arrest. He climbed meekly into the back of a police van and calmly lit a cigarette.

In recent years Mogilevich appears to have lived a semi-open life in Moscow. It is not clear why Russian authorities failed to arrest him earlier.

Yesterday's Russian papers say he has been living in the Ukraine hotel - a vast Stalin-era edifice visible from across the Russian capital. Russian TV said until 2005 he lived in a suburban Moscow villa.