Conspiracy in Kiev (7 page)
A
few hours after the sun rose in Washington, Alex sat in her office at Treasury and received the official word from her boss, Mike Gamburian. She was to reassign every other case on her docket and immerse herself in Ukrainian language and background immediately. She would have two days to wrap up current operations and complete their reassignment to others. Half the cases she was happy to be rid of. And strangely enough, she was quickly coming around on the idea of getting back out into the field.
“As a precaution, you should visit the firing range again,” Michael Cerny had also said, walking Alex to her car earlier in the day. “Colosimo’s. You know the place, right?”
“I know it.”
“Do you still have a weapon in good working order, or should we requisition a new one for you?”She had grown up around long weapons and had trained meticulously with handguns during her years with the FBI. But since she had come over to FinCen, target practice had been an extracurricular that she hadn’t had much time for. Frankly, she had always enjoyed it and had missed not doing it. She was good at it.
“I have a Glock 9,” she said. “It’s only two years old.”
“Excellent. I suppose you use it to keep the squirrels out of the bird feeder in your off hours.”
“How did you know?”
“We know everything. Federal permit still valid?”
“If you know everything, you should know that.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.
“Good idea.”
“Then you’re in business. I doubt that you’ll see anything other than a few ceremonial cannons going off in Kiev,” Cerny said, “but one can never be too cautious. Keep in mind, you won’t be able to travel with your Glock. So if you need one in Ukraine, your control officer will need to deliver it to you.”
“I understand,” Alex answered.
“I do admire your attitude,” he said.
And in truth, with recurring images of the chainsawed auto in Lagos still in her mind, the opportunity to hit the firing range again could do no harm. Might as well pack some heat if she was going to a dangerous place. And during a presidential visit, the more friendly weapons in the area, the safer the president would be. At least, that was the theory.
To end the same day, Michael Cerny took Alex to another room in the State Department. There he introduced Alex to the woman who was to be her Ukrainian language instructor over the next two weeks.
Her name was Olga Liashko, and she was built like one of those Soviet tractors from the mid-1950s. She was a large thick woman, taller than Alex by half a head, wider by the same amount. She was somewhere in her sixties and had grown up during the Soviet era. It stood to reason that she hadn’t led the easiest or happiest of lives. She had been raised in a military family from Odessa and spoke Ukrainian natively.
A mass of gray hair framed Olga’s bulky face. The whites of her eyes were more pinkish than white, and she had heavy bags beneath both. She wore a work shirt like a blazer and had on a pair of men’s painter’s pants. Her stomach was low and chunky like an old man’s. An idle but amusing thought shot back to Alex. A girlfriend in college used to call the condition Dunlap’s disease. Her belly “done lapped”over her belt.
“Olga has been with us since emigrating in 1982,” Cerny said helpfully. “She’s FSI’s top Ukrainian gal,” he said, referring to the Foreign Service Institute. “None better. Knows the language forward and back. Her dad was in the military in the big war. Olga will be your tutor. You start tomorrow afternoon.”
Olga said nothing. Instead, she stared disapprovingly at the younger woman, running her gaze up and down. Alex was six inches shorter, and half her weight.
“Very nice to meet you,” Alex said.
“Be prepared yourself to work hard, study hard, and including nights I advise you,” Olga said. It was clear which language Olga would be teaching and which one she wouldn’t.
The teacher handed Alex a Ukrainian language textbook. More homework. Cerny had arranged a special room in the State Department for the lessons so that they wouldn’t have to go out to FSI in Virginia. He gave the room location.
Alex flicked through the book. It looked even more tedious than she had reckoned. Olga must have read her mind, because she snorted.
Alex looked up. She could tell: Olga didn’t just have a chip on her big round shoulder, she had a couple of chips on each with plenty of room to spare.
Where does the government find these people?
Alex wondered.
Wondered, but didn’t ask.
“I’m looking forward to the lessons,” Alex said.
It was that most unusual of statements for her: an outright lie.
A
t 8:00 that evening, Alex presented herself to Colosimo’s. She checked in with her federal permit and waited for her turn on the firing range. She had not used her weapon for several months. She purchased a new box of nine-millimeter ammunition. She had a respectful relationship with firearms—she had drawn her weapon many times but had never had to fire one against another human being. She prayed that she never would.
But she knew she could, if necessary. Her possession of a weapon in the line of duty for the FBI had been a professional necessity. She might have been dead without it. And tonight, she just plain felt like blasting away at some paper targets.
At half past the hour, in a heavy white UCLA sweatshirt, her new basketball sneakers, and a pair of red Umbro soccer shorts, she took her place on a firing line. Trim, twenty-nine, and with long legs that seemed chiseled from all the workouts, she drew the usual set of approving and admiring glances from the predominantly male clientele.
Though flattered, she ignored it. She also made sure she also had her goggles and an anti-noise headset. An agent she knew had once practiced on a range without the ear protection and been cursed with permanent ringing in the ears from then on. Heaven knew there was no apparel sexier than those two items.
She opted for bull’s eye targets, the old-fashioned ones with concentric circles, rather than a man-shaped target. The target was twenty-five yards away. Before shooting, she fiddled with the two adjusting screws across the top sight until they appeared to be fixed just right.
The range was warm. She ditched the sweatshirt and was down to a blue and gold UCLA T-shirt. Much more comfortable.
She hadn’t held the Glock for several weeks. It felt different in her hand, as if it were ready to fight her. She adopted the ungainly squat ting position that had been standard for shooters for the past several decades, raised the pistol in both hands, held it forward, and focused on the sights with her right eye; she didn’t close the left, but paid no attention to what it saw, not that anyone ever can aim a pistol in a quick draw combat situation.
Front sight. Front sight.
That was the key, one FBI instructor had told her once, the rock upon which the Church of Almighty Handguns was built. A shooter had to see the front sight and let the target remain hazy in the background.
Otherwise, might as well call in an air strike.
So, front sight, front sight.
In the notch of the rear sight, a frame, she saw the bull’s eye of the target.
Her hand was steady. She squeezed the trigger, fighting the temptation to flinch. Even under the headset, the blast of the weapon was frightful. The recoil was less than expected, however, and her aim had been near perfect on the first shot. Not bad after a long layoff.
She fired six more rounds quickly and succinctly.
She brought the target forward.
Wow! She was pleased. Pretty good for a chick who hadn’t fired a shot in many weeks. Three hits right in the center. The others were off by less than an inch. She should do this for a living.
She sent the target back and reloaded, firing another seven rounds. Even better. One shot on the perimeter of the smallest circle, the others within it.
A real life shootout didn’t usually allow the luxury of a studied methodical aim, so she quickly graduated to a more challenging shooting pattern. She would raise the weapon quickly, no time to aim, and try to hit the center of the target.
This she did with great skill as well.
She had, in fact, forgotten how good she was at this. She continued on the range for another twenty minutes. Her skills were in excellent shape, she decided. She was more than pleased.
She went through two boxes of ammunition. Seventy-two shots, then stopped. She didn’t want her wrist to be sore the next day. She had done enough. She turned.
An even larger group of guys was watching her, their jaws open in admiration. Must have been a dozen of them. When she caught them looking, she was at first slightly resentful, then almost embarrassed.
Then they gave her an impromptu round of applause and a couple of “good ol’ boy” whoops of approval. She was their type of female, at least for the moment. She shook her head, laughed, and accepted the compliments.
“Beginner’s luck,” she said, carefully locking her weapon in its case.
“Yeah. Some beginner,” one of the younger guys said knowingly.
“Do they all shoot like that at UCLA?” another one asked.
“Only on the basketball court. Have a good evening, boys,” she said.
And she disappeared.
S
he phoned Robert from her car. He was home, following a difficult shift at the White House. Some wacko had breached the security at one of the side fences by climbing over and making a run for the Rose Garden.
The nut case hadn’t gotten more than twenty feet when he was tackled. But such occurrences always ramped up the anxiety level of the entire Presidential Protection Detail. And of course, investigations had to follow and the breach needed to be studied. One never knew whether one small incident was a prelude to something larger. In the post-9/11 world, acute paranoia was the new normal.
“So I’ll bring dinner over. How’s that?” she asked Robert. “We’ll have dinner; then I have to scoot. I have this Ukrainian stuff to study and a final FBI report to read.”
“Dinner would be great,” he said.
She picked up some Thai takeout for dinner after leaving Colosimo’s.
Robert lived at a big apartment complex on Dupont Circle, a building known as the Bang Bang Hotel because there were so many well-armed government security people living there and so many single women. It was two blocks away from the Iraqi consulate.
They split dinner. They lingered together for a while afterward, but Alex was back at her place by midnight.
She showered and spent half an hour looking at her Ukrainian books and working with one of Olga’s CDs. What an unforgiving language. Not like French with its charm, English with its complexities, Italian with its musicality, or Spanish with its history. But the tough parts—the existence of “perfective” and “imperfective” and the whole tangle relating to verbs of motion—were the same as in Russian, so at least Alex wasn’t starting cold.
To ingratiate herself with her teacher, she made a point of memorizing several phrases in the fifth chapter. She found that she could concoct a primitive conversation with reasonable ease.
Ja vpershe u vashij krajini
. I’m in your country for the first time.
Ne serdytesja na mene.
Please, don’t be angry with me.
Toward 1:00 a.m., she thought she heard a sound at her front door, almost like someone trying the knob. Cautiously, she went to the door and looked through the peephole. She relaxed. It was her neighbor, Don Tomás, the retired diplomat, wandering in, a little tipsy, humming a Lucero tune, his keys clicking against his own door.
She rechecked her own locks. She brewed a decaf cup of tea. She settled down at her kitchen table, positioning herself where she could see the door.
There was one final task at hand for the evening. She needed to read the final file she had been given, the FBI dossier on The Caspian Group.
She settled in and took the first step toward knowing Yuri Federov too well.
FBI Document UK-2008-5AR-2a
Subject: Ukraine> Organized Crime> Overview>
Caspian Group> Federov, Yuri
Initial report date: June 19, 2005
Amended: (7 times, most recently:) March 12, 2008
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington DC
Status: Highly Classified; AA-2
Author: S.A. Diane Liu, FBI, New York, Southern District
The Caspian Group (TCG) is a Ukrainian energy conglomerate doing business with Western Europe and the United States and presumably Asia. The latter market will warrant careful scrutiny in the future.
The unofficial head of operations of TCG is a Ukrainian of Russian extraction named Yuri Federov. Almost uniquely, TCG functions without actual incorporation within Ukraine.
Their assets exceed one billion dollars {See Chart 56-2008a-1}. They invest in all financial sectors common to entities that do business with governments and the military. Additionally, they have positions in all criminal enterprises in Ukraine, including heroin and trafficking in women.
TCG’s young enforcers were trained by veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. They are infamous for their extreme brutality. Their victims are usually business people who have balked at extortion demands. Victims have been known to have been repeatedly stabbed and tortured, then mutilated before they are butchered. Others have been fitted with concrete cinderblocks and thrown live into the Desna River. The wave of terror has been so hideous that it has scared many of the competing crime groups away from doing business in Ukraine….
Since the collapse of Communism,
, “ukrainka mafia,” the Ukrainian Mafia, has become bigger, more brutal, and better armed. It is now as wealthy as any Russian crime cartel. It wields the same worldwide influence as its major counterparts in Colombia. The Ukrainian Mafia traffics narcotics, currency, human sex slaves, handguns, carbines, submachine guns, antiaircraft missiles, helicopters, plutonium, and enriched uranium.
{Editor’s note: In 2006, Deputy Assistant Director Kevin Fosterman, then the FBI’s supervisor in charge of organized crime, warned Congress that the Ukrainian mob, which had 37 crime syndicates operating in 24 North American cities, had “an outstanding chance” of becoming “the most dangerous crime group in the United States.”…}
In the United States, the activities of the Ukrainian mob alarm all law-enforcement agencies. By 1996, the Ukrainian Mafia had supplanted the Cubans as one of the top crime groups in South Florida and has supplanted many established African American and Sicilian interests in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York…
Until recently, the most powerful Ukrainian crime figure in the United States was Yuri Federov. In November of 2004, undercover surveillance {
Note: Court wiretap approved 10/29/04 by Hon. Ira J. Cohen, 2
nd
Circuit Court, Brooklyn, NY …
} Federov boasted of his brutish past, but he also mentioned his charitable activities and described numerous fund-raisers that he had held for Catholic charities at a restaurant and Brooklyn night club he owned called Old Odessa.
Federov is a nonpracticing Eastern Orthodox Christian but holds Israeli citizenship. He insists that he never stole from religious organizations. But according to statements he made to undercover agents for the New York City Police Department, the “overhead” for these events tended to reach eighty cents of every dollar.
Federov has always manifested the qualities of a mobster. He is greedy. He stole tip money from the strippers at his clubs. He is ruthless. He once forced a woman to drink bleach as punishment for an unknown transgression. He is ambitious. He brokered the complicated negotiation involving the transfer of a Russian military submarine to Cali-based Colombian narco-traffickers.
(
Note
: See
www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/history/1999-2003.html-2006-03-07
)
The unwavering point here is that there is no transaction
too large or too small
{Italics mine—Diane Liu 092507} to escape his interests if a profit can be obtained. Special attention should be paid to his emerging business connections with a shell corporation named Park Enterprises, based in Taipei,
believed to be a conduit for business with North Korea
…. {Italics again mine—Diane Liu 092507}
Federov was born in 1965 in Odessa, a Black Sea port that was once the Marseilles of the Soviet Union. When he was three, he moved with his mother and his father to Rivno, a small city in the western Ukraine. He sang in a boy’s choir and participated in a boxing program set up by the Soviet military. His father was a professional thief and prosperous dealer in the Ukrainian black market. He’d trade stolen merchandise for choice cuts of meat, theatre tickets, and fresh vegetables. His father’s brother was a successful actor in Moscow.
In 1980, when Federov was fifteen, his father had the word “Jew” stamped in the family’s passports even though they weren’t Jewish. Then he managed to move the family to Israel and gain Israeli citizenship. Before leaving Ukraine, the Federovs converted their money into diamonds. They stashed some in shoes with hollow heels and hid the rest in secret compartments in a specially built piano, which they shipped to Israel.
In the late 1970s, the Soviet government was under diplomatic pressure to let Jews freely emigrate. In response, the Brehznev government searched their Gulag for Jewish criminals and allowed them to leave for America. Many were “recent converts.” More than forty thousand Russian Jews settled in Brighton Beach, a section of Brooklyn, New York. Most were sound citizens. But the criminals among them resumed their careers. By the time Federov arrived in 1992, Brighton Beach had already become the seat of the
Organizatsiya
, the Russian Jewish mob. Using his Russian ties, Yuri Federov fit in immediately and flourished….
In addition to his “normal” criminal activities, Federov has a habit of brutalizing women.
“This is cultural,” he once explained to an undercover FBI agent, following an arrest in 1996. “In Russia, it is manly to beat women. In the stories of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Gorky, to beat a woman is normal. Then you do something like that in America, something that you grew up with, and you’re arrested for domestic violence!It makes no sense.”
In an incident taped by the FBI and the DEA from a surveillance apartment across the street from Old Odessa, Federov once chased a girlfriend out of the club and hit her repeatedly with a hammer. On another occasion, he allegedly pounded a female dancer’s head against the door of his black Cadillac Escalade until the window broke and the vehicle was covered with blood. No charges were filed in either case.
Federov regularly abused his two daughters and his common-law wife, Tanya, an Estonian Jew whom he met in Israel. When the police arrived at their home in response to 911 calls, the wife was sometimes found huddled inside a locked car with her daughters or hiding in a closet. Tanya later vanished and is presumed dead. His daughters have changed their last name and live with a second cousin in Toronto…
Following one instance of domestic violence in Brooklyn, Federov was arrested. The arresting officer, who knew who he was, referred to him as “a filthy (
expletives deleted
) Russian Jew gangster.” Federov, though handcuffed, bit off the upper half of the officer’s ear. He beat the domestic abuse charge when his wife disappeared. But for assaulting a police officer, he drew four years in a New York State prison. {See NY Criminal Docket #98-CD-456-2} It was the first time Federov had been convicted of a felony….
Criminals with Israeli passports have a sanctuary that other criminals don’t. It is extremely difficult to extradite Israeli nationals, Israel being the self-proclaimed “land of opportunity,” at least in theory. It is
not difficult
, however, to deport Israeli citizens (e.g.,
USA vs. Meyer Lansky
, usdj 020472).
Thus in 1999, the United States government confiscated Federov’s traceable assets in the United States (estimated at two million dollars) and deported him to Israel.
But as he departed, his enthusiasm for the land he was leaving was undiminished. “I love America!” Federov said to a federal marshal who escorted him to his departing flight. “The people are stupid, the government protects rich people and the police are corrupt. It is so easy to steal here! Even your big elections are stolen!”
Federov stayed in Tel Aviv for one month, then moved back to Ukraine. {
Note: Surveillance conducted by French and Israeli intelligence partnerships. See CIA File No. 2006-SF-345-c.
} He quickly became the guiding force behind The Caspian Group. He has survived several attempts on his life since 2003 from various competitors and other parties who might have a positive interest in his death. He has also always been known to strike back forcibly at those who have struck at him….
Through his normal tactics of terror, extortion, and intimidation, he has become wealthy again. The company (TCG) keeps no official records. Reputedly, Federov has a highly disciplined mind and a photographic memory. He keeps all financial records in his head….
The extent and degree of Yuri Federov’s influence in Ukraine, particularly in government circles, is unknown at this time but is also considered to be almost without limit….
Federov should be considered dangerous at all times. Under no circumstances should he be underestimated….
Attention should be paid to the fact that Federov, while on top of the Ukrainian underworld, has many competitors who would benefit with his demise and who might have an interest in his premature death….