Legends

“Samat was taken under uncle Tzvetan’s wing when he returned from Siberia; the Oligarkh, who had no children of his own, became a surrogate father to him. In the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, and especially after Gorbachev came on the scene, the fact that Samat’s father had died in Siberia counted for him instead of against him. Samat was admitted to the elite Forestry Institute, the not-so-secret home of the Soviet space program, where he studied computer science. Later he earned a doctorate from the State Planning Agency’s Higher Economic School. His computer skills must have attracted the attention of the KGB because the next thing we know he was working for the Sixth Chief Directorate, where he learned all there was to know about money laundering schemes and off-shore banks. When the Oligarkh, offering krysha and starting out in the used-car business in Armenia, decided to go into the banking business to service his expanding empire, he turned to his nephew Samat quit the KGB and opened the first bank for Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov in Yerevan. And it was Samat, with a reputation of something of a genius when it came to juggling accounts and obscuring currency trails, who created the money laundering scheme under which dozens of millions of dollars were siphoned off abroad and then squirreled away in off-shore banks and shell holding companies. The Oligarkh’s holding companies are rumored to have financial interests in a Spanish insurance company, a French hotel chain, a Swiss real estate consortium, a German movie theater chain. Thanks to Samat’s sleight of hand, the threads that linked these accounts were untraceable—God knows our people tried. So for that matter did your CIA. Samat’s impenetrable labyrinth of banks stretches from France to Germany to Monaco to Liechtenstein to Switzerland to the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, not to mention Vanuatu in the South Pacific, the Isle of Man, the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Prague, Western Samoa—all of them suspected of being involved in laundering the Oligarkh’s considerable riches. He eventually opened bank accounts in North America, where a third of his empire’s aluminum was marketed. There were shells within shells within shells. Working out of the Oligarkh’s isolated dacha in a village half an hour from Moscow along the Moscow-Petersburg highway, Samat was constantly shifting assets from one shell to another. Wire transfers between banks, some of which consist of nothing more than a single room and a computer on some remote island, are the easiest way to move large amounts of money—one billion in one-hundred-dollar bills weighs something like eleven tons. And it was said that the Oligarkh’s banker never committed anything to paper; the entire structure of his uncle’s off-shore holdings was in his head.”

“Which was why it became urgent to get him out of Russia when the mob war heated up,” Martin guessed.

“Precisely. We didn’t figure out the connection between Samat and the second of his two uncles, Akim, until one of our teams watching Akim’s villa at Caesarea caught them on film—Akim emerged from the villa and embraced Samat as he got out of his Honda, at which point we started looking into the identity of this new immigrant who had paid in cash when he bought a split-level home in Kiryat Arba.”

Benny offered Martin a refill and, when he shook his head no, he poured himself a short one and downed it in one gulp. It was almost as if the recounting of the story had sapped his energy.

Martin said, “Samat’s wife mentioned that he once dropped her on the dunes in Caeserea while he went to see someone. Now I know whom he saw.”

Benny’s pot-luck supper consisted of cold dishes he’d brought back in a doggie bag from an Arab restaurant in Abu Gosh and a bottle of red wine from the Golan. Martin, who didn’t eat meat, made do with the vegetable dishes. Later, Benny broke out a bottle of fifteen-year-old French cognac and carefully poured some into two snifters. “There was an office bash when I retired last year,” he explained. “This was one of my going away presents, along with a jockstrap medal for long and loyal service.”

“How many years?”

“Forty two.”

“Could Israel have survived without the Mossad?” Martin asked.

“Of course. We got as much wrong as we got right. We messed up badly in seventy-three—we told Golda Meir that the Egyptians wouldn’t be ready to wage war for at least ten years. A few weeks later they swarmed across the Suez canal and overran our Bar Lev fortresses stretched along the Israeli side of the waterway.”

“What went wrong?” Martin asked.