The Red Syndrome (8 page)

There are numerous other examples. Following European activity on
an unrelated matter, Israeli Mossad operatives were able to inform
President Charles de Gaulle about a plot by embittered French army officers in Algeria to assassinate him in the rg6os. De Gaulle was grateful;
Israel capitalized on that. Israel also knew where Mehdi Ben Barqa - an
exiled, charismatic Moroccan socialist opposition leader - was hiding.
French police picked him up in Paris in 1965, and he was never seen
again. The Moroccan king was appreciative, and Israel was able to pull
more Jews out of Morocco.

From my New York office, of course, we were trading neither information nor anything else. We were simply pursuing absconding bankers
who, on their way out, had helped themselves to their institution's FDICinsured assets, or other major fraudsters and money launderers. Given our
abundance of clients - who didn't seek or even want our services - we
didn't need publicity. So we kept our identity quiet. This arrangement was
just fine with us; it was far more comfortable operating out of a seemingly
private office than from a government building. The facade also helped us send and receive mail; our correspondents never knew if we were good
guys, bad guys, or somewhere in between. We did, however, limit our
activities to locations outside the United States. Local issues were handled by other federal agencies such as the FBI or the Postal Inspection
Service.

"You have some messages," Lan, the Vietnam-born office secretary,
told me. One of the few good things to come out of the close U.S.-South
Vietnam relationship, Lan was loyal, discreet, and, most of all, efficient.

I took the message slips and walked into my office. I sat behind my
desk and gazed through the huge glass windows at the motorboats
foaming and waving in the waters of the East River. Soon it will be
springtime, when nature and people will be emerging from seclusion. But
this didn't mean that every rat who'd run away with someone else's money
would emerge from hiding. Happily for me, nobody runs away with
stolen millions to Albania or Iran. They take their OPM - "other
people's money'- to places where the sun shines.

I recorded a new I'm-out-of-the-ofce message for my voice mail,
packed a few things from my desk, and returned to Lan's reception area.
"I expect to be in the task force office for at least three months," I told
her. "But you're not getting rid of me that easily ... I'll check with you
daily for my messages regarding other pending cases. If I'm unavailable,
please refer all inquiries to David Stone."

Back at 26 Federal Plaza I took the FBI folder from my drawer and
spread out its contents across my wobbly new desk. Some of it was
familiar, including the summary I'd prepared myself before the matter
had become the focus of such attention. Even in this top-secret folder, the
manner in which the intelligence had been gathered was not disclosed.
Indeed, intelligence-gathering means are rarely shared, even within an
intelligence agency, to limit the possibility of a leak that would compromise the source. Compromise? Nice way of putting it. People get killed.

Of course, nobody knew how I'd collected this intelligence anyway.

When I'd first been assigned to this case, it had seemed a simple
attempt by crooks to significantly influence a small New York-based bank by making a huge deposit, thereby rendering the bank more "tolerant" of their wishes, legal or not. But when I'd returned from Germany
with the treasure trove from Oksana's trash can, all hell had broken loose,
the task force had been convened, and, as I should have known, there was
nothing simple about it.

The core document in the folder was an FBI report dated May 23,
2002. The "Background" section told the story of Zhukov and his comrades in mind-boggling detail over four pages. At the top of the report,
in bold type, there was the following caveat:

This background section was translated from Russian. The original Russian document was written by a former gang member as
part of his plea agreement. The vital parts have been crosschecked and verified by other sources. However, if you need to
rely upon any of the facts given here, it would be advisable to
cross-reference with additional sources as well.

I chuckled to myself. This was typical cover-their-asses language. They
gave you a story, called the details "facts," and then advised you not to rely
on them because they might not actually be so factual.

I read the first page, trying to envisage how the dry words of the FBI
report were reflecting reality. It wasn't hard for my creative mind to fill in
the gaps.

oris Zhukov was born in 1945 in Minsk, Belarus. His father, Ivan,
was a shop assistant in a shoe factory; his mother, Alla, worked in a
local towel factory. Boris was the firstborn. When he was six years
old, his sister Ludmilla was born. The family was very proud of a distant
relative, Red Army marshal Georgyi Zhukov, conqueror of Berlin in 1945,
who later became the defense minister of the Soviet Union. Although
there was never any contact between this marshal and Ivan, Boris
Zhukov's father, the family still managed to reap some benefits from their
famous last name.

Boris grew up in a housing project in the outskirts of Minsk and started
his criminal career at the age of fourteen. As the leader of a group of high
school dropouts, he extorted money from other children and broke into
the cooperative department store to steal cigarettes and vodka. In other
words, a capitalist in a communist country. Not an easy status. One day
he was caught and brought to trial. In his plea to the juvenile court, Ivan
Zhukov asked that his son be spared from prison and that instead, he be
sent to boot camp for "re-education" so that he could join the army upon
coming of age, and "follow in the heroic steps of Uncle Marshal Zhukov."
The judge was duly impressed and sentenced Boris to two years of correction in a youth boot camp.

The boot camp near Lydda in northern Belarus was the ultimate survival school. Boris soon demonstrated his leadership skills when he
organized a group of youths, many older than him, to attack their counselor for being too harsh with them. They ambushed the counselor in the
wee hours of the night, threw a blanket over his head, and beat him up.
The counselor was hospitalized for three weeks and then quickly reassigned to another camp.

Zhukov didn't have much time to celebrate his victory, however. Three
of his gang members were also transferred to other camps, and Zhukov
himself was put into solitary confinement, or the "Box" as everyone called
it. On the outer edge of the camp, a four-foot-square trench was dug in
the ground, and covered by a tin sheet with four holes in it for air. The
prisoner was then pushed into the trench and the tin cover bolted into the
ground with stakes. The prisoner was allowed out once a day for five minutes. The only food and drink was half a loaf of bread and two cups of
water thrown daily into the box. One blanket was given to the prisoner
for use at night, although temperatures in the spring were only barely
above freezing.

Spending a week in the Box was a lesson Boris never forgot. But he also
didn't forget Nikita Kerchenko, the superintendent who'd ordered him
into the Box. A month later, during a melee in the dining room, Nikita
was stabbed to death with a sharpened spoon. No one saw who'd stabbed
him, and of course there were no witnesses, although there were more
than one hundred "campers" in the dining hall. The investigation led
nowhere and the case was closed. But the message was clear: Boris
Zhukov was now the uncrowned leader of the camp and all obeyed him,
including the instructors. Soon after his discharge from the camp "for
good behavior," Boris returned to Minsk. When he'd first left Minsk,
Boris was just a troubled youth. When he returned, he had become an
angry young man with leadership skills, a criminal propensity, and a ruthless nature.

The underworld of Minsk wasn't exactly waiting for him to take the
lead. The city was already ruled by two rival crime groups; there was no
room for a third, no matter how angry and competent its leader might be.
But Boris wasn't deterred. If he had to fight two rivals at the same time,
that was fine with him, even if it meant he couldn't trust anyone. The
name of the crime game was smuggling, theft, and extortion.

Boris lured three members from each rival gang and started his own
operation. But business was lagging. There's only so much you can rob
and extort from a population that barely makes ends meet. Boris's first
big opportunity came when American investigators came to Minsk fol lowing the Kennedy assassination to make inquiries about Lee Harvey
Oswald and Marina Prusakova, his wife, who'd lived in Minsk between
196o and 1962. Along with the investigators came many others: journalists and intelligence agents from half a dozen countries trying to make
sure that JFK's assassination had not been part of a Soviet conspiracy to
eliminate the leadership of the free world. Boris, as an up-and-coming
local power, was approached by one of these newcomers and was asked
if he could get a copy of the KGB report on Oswald and Prusakova. The
price tag was very tempting: ten thousand dollars in cash. Boris's father
was, at the time, making thirty dollars a month working ten hours a day,
six days a week.

Boris was up to the challenge. Within two weeks, he'd handed over a
copy of the report that the KGB had prepared after the JFK assassination. This report found its way to the FBI.

Zhukov used the money he earned cleverly. First he paid fifty dollars to
the KGB cipher clerk who'd slipped him a copy of the report. That concluded his personal investment in the project, not counting several bottles of
local vodka and Boris's reputation for belligerence, which were also part of
the effort. Boris then looked for ways to transfer the rest of the money, as
well as himself, to the West. This was not a simple task. Foreign-currency
smugglers and black-market profiteers were labeled enemies of the Soviet
state and were considered lucky to escape a firing squad and to be exiled to
Siberia instead. But where there's a will, there's a way. Although Zhukov's
position among the crime rings in Minsk was good, he was still just a local
power. He needed to go international and the launching pad was in
Moscow, five hundred miles away. So Zhukov received a permit from the
city commissioner to travel to Moscow. Zhukov never questioned why a
Soviet citizen would need permission to travel from one city to the other
within his own country; he just accepted it.

Carrying nearly ten thousand dollars in cash was dangerous even for
Boris. He wasn't worried about being robbed on the train; he could handle
anyone. Rather, Boris was concerned that he would be searched by the
police. Carrying such a large amount of hard currency, or Valuta as it was
called, could send him to Siberia, and Boris had never liked cold weather. So he left for Moscow, leaving the money stashed in his apartment's
chirdak - a small storage area built into the hallway ceiling that generally
contains the hot-water boiler and can also be used to store small objects.

On a hot July morning, Boris arrived in Moscow for the first time in his
life. Although he'd felt like a king in Minsk, where everyone feared him,
in Moscow he was the poor relative from the countryside. He was tired
after the twelve-hour train ride, but still walked down the wide Moscow
boulevards, looked at the old glories of the Soviet capital, and become
confirmed in his belief that he was meant to climb higher than Minsk.

Boris went immediately to see Volodia, a freckled red-headed young
man he had met at the boot camp. Not having any immediate alternatives, Boris took Volodia up on his invitation to stay with him.

Two cramped days later, which had been spent in the three-room
apartment his friend had been sharing with two other families, Boris
wanted out. At night Boris succumbed to the shy but persistent looks that
Nina Tertsova, Volodia's neighbor, was sending in his direction. So he
paid her a personal visit while her husband was toiling on a night shift at
the textile factory. But the experience was not too rewarding; Nina was
eager, but she lacked the goods and the expertise.