Legends

“The used-car racket was the tip of the iceberg. Look, Dante, you put your life on the line for Israel once and I’m going to return the favor. What I’m about to tell you isn’t public knowledge—even the Sixth Chief Directorate of the KGB, which was supposed to be keeping tabs on the Oligarkh, didn’t know it. For Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the used-car dealerships were merely a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Russia happens to be the world’s second largest producer of aluminum. When the Soviet system collapsed, Ugor-Zhilov branched out into the aluminum business. He somehow raised seed money—I’m talking billions; his used-car dealerships were bringing in cash but not that much and to this day it’s a mystery where he got the money—and used it to make lucrative deals with smelters. He did all this through a holding company in which he was a silent partner. He bought three hundred railroad freight cars and built a port facility in Siberia to offload alumina, the bauxite extract that’s the principal ingredient in aluminum. He imported the bauxite tax free from Australia, processed it at the smelters into aluminum and exported it, tax free, abroad. His profits soared. In the West aluminum brought five dollars a ton profit, in Russia it brought two hundred dollars a ton profit to the people who exported it. By the early nineties, as Yeltsin’s privatization swept across the Soviet republics in an attempt to transform Russia into a market economy, the Oligarkh presided over a secret empire with the vast profits from aluminum at its base. His holding company expanded into other raw materials—steel, chrome, coal—and eventually bought into factories and businesses by the hundreds. He opened banks to service the empire and launder its profits abroad. Naturally he kept the skids greased with kickbacks to people in high places. At one point there were rumors that he’d paid off Yeltsin himself, but we were never able to pin this down.”

“Did the CIA’s Soviet division people know about this?”

“We were the ones with assets in Moscow. We shared enough of the take with them to convince them we were sharing all of it.”

The phone rang. Benny raised it to his ear and listened. Then: “As a matter of fact, he is … He’s doing what he was doing at Kiryat Arba, trying to pick up the trail of Samat Ugor-Zhilov so his wife can get a divorce … Actually, I do believe him, yes. Let’s not forget that Dante Pippen is one of the good guys … Shalom, shalom.”

When Benny had hung up, Martin said, “Thanks for that.”

“If I didn’t believe it, you wouldn’t be sitting here. Where was I? Okay. A certain number of Russian mafiosi were Jewish. When the mob wars broke out in Moscow in 1993, Israel became a safe haven for some of them. Here they were far away from the day to day mayhem. Even some of the gangsters who weren’t Jewish came to Israel under our Law of Return—they concocted new identities claiming a Jewish mother or a Jewish grandmother and slipped into Israel along with the seven hundred and fifty thousand Russian Jews who came here in the nineties. As new immigrants, the gangsters were able to bring in large sums of money without anybody asking where it came from. When our Shabak people finally wised up to the danger, we tapped their phones, we infiltrated their entourages, all the time looking for evidence that the Russians were engaged in criminal activities here. But they were careful to keep a low profile. They didn’t spit where they ate, as the saying goes. We used to joke that they wouldn’t cross an intersection on a yellow light. Using Israeli banks as conduits, they continued their illegal activities, but always abroad. They smuggled uranium yellow cake out of Nigeria and sold it to the highest bidder. They bought into the diamond business, smuggling uncut stones out of Russia to Amsterdam. They could get you a diesel submarine in mint condition for a mere five-and-a-half million dollars, not counting a crew of Baltic sailors to run it—that was extra. They sold Soviet surplus tanks with or without ammunition, jeeps, half-tracks, portable bridges to cross rivers, anti-aircraft missiles, radars of all sizes and shapes. Payments had to be in U.S. or Swiss currency deposited in numbered accounts in Geneva, delivery guaranteed within thirty days of the payment being received. All contracts were concluded with corporate affiliates in Liechtenstein.”

“Why Liechtenstein?”

Benny bared his teeth. “They have strict banking secrecy laws.”

“Uh-huh.”