Legends

“You were the Mossad’s Russian expert, Benny. Who the hell is Samat Ugor-Zhilov?”

“Why are you interested in him?”

“He ran off from Kiryat Arba without giving a divorce to his wife. She’s religious. Without a divorce she can’t remarry. Her sister, who lives in Brooklyn, hired me to find Samat and get him to give her the divorce.”

“To know who Samat is, you have to understand where he was coming from.” Benny treated himself to another shot of whiskey. “How much do you know about the disintegration of the Soviet Union?”

“I know what I read in the newspapers.”

“That’s a beginning. The USSR we knew and loathed imploded in 1991. In the years that followed the country became what I call a kleptocracy. Its political and economic institutions were infiltrated by organized crime. To get a handle on what happened, you need to understand that it was Russia’s criminals, as opposed to its politicians, who dismantled the communist superstructure of the former Soviet Union. And make no mistake about it, the Russian criminals were Neanderthals. In the early stages of the disintegration, when almost everything was up for grabs, the Italian mafia came sniffing around to see if they could get a piece of the action. You will have a better handle on the Russian mafia when you know that the Italians took one look around and went home; the Russians were simply too ruthless for them.”

Martin whistled softly. “Hard to believe anyone could be more ruthless than the Cosa Nostra.”

“When the Soviet Union collapsed,” Benny went on, “thousands of gangs surfaced. In the beginning they ran the usual rackets, they offered the usual protection—”

“What the Russians call a roof.”

“I see you’ve done your homework. The Russian word for roof is krysha. When two gangs offered their clients krysha, instead of the clients fighting each other if they had differences, the gangs did. The warfare spilled onto the streets in the early nineties. The period is referred to as the Great Moscow Mob Wars. There were something in the neighborhood of thirty thousand murders in 1993 alone. Another thirty thousand people simply disappeared. The smarter gangsters bought into legitimate businesses; the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs once estimated that half of all private businesses or state-owned companies, and almost all of the banks in the country, had links to organized crime. The infamous Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, known as the Oligarkh since he appeared on the cover of Time, began life as a small time hoodlum. When he couldn’t bribe his way out of one particularly messy muddle, he wound up serving eight years in a gulag camp. When he finally returned to his native Armenia, Gorbachev was on the scene and the Soviet Union was breaking apart at the seams. Working out of a cramped communal apartment in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, Ugor-Zhilov started offering krysha. Soon he was running his own small bank and his krysha clients were made to understand that they would be smart to use its services. At some point the Oligarkh branched out and bought into the used-car business in Yerevan. But being a big fish in a small pond didn’t satisfy him, so he set his sights on Moscow—he moved to the capital and in a matter of months became the kingpin of the used-car business there.”

“I heard all about his cornering the used-car market in Moscow. He bought out his competitors. The ones who wouldn’t be bought out wound up in the Moscow River wearing cement shoes.”