The Big Bad Wolf

CHAPTER 47

I HAD NEVER really stopped being a student since my days at Johns Hopkins, and it had

served me well in the Washington PD, even given me a certain mystique. I hoped it would be

the same in the Bureau, though it hadn’t been so far. I set myself up with a supply of black

coffee and started in on the Russian mob research. I needed to know everything about them,

and Monnie Donnelley was a willing accomplice.

I made notes along the way, though I usually remember most of what is important enough

and don’t need to write it down. According to the FBI ?les, the Russian mob was now more

diverse and powerful in America than La Cosa Nostra. Unlike the Italian Maú, the Russians

were organized into loose networks that cooperated with but weren’t dependent on one

another. At least not so far. A major benefit was that the loose style of organization avoided

RICO prosecutions by the government. No conspiracies could be proved. There were two

distinctly different types of Russian mobsters. The “knuckle draggers” were into extortion,

prostitution, and racketeering, and their particular crime group was called the Solntsevo. The

second type of Russian mobster operated at a more sophisticated level, often securities fraud

and money laundering. These were the neocapitalist criminals, called the Izmailovo.

For the moment, I decided to concentrate on the first group, the lowlifes, especially the brigades

involved with prostitution. According to the Bureau’s OC Section report, the prostitute business

operated “a lot like major league baseball.” A group of prostitutes could actually be “traded”

from an owner in one city to one in another. As a footnote, a survey conducted among seventh-grade girls in Russia listed prostitution among the top-five career choices of the girls when they

grew up. Several historical anecdotes had been inserted in the ?le to represent the Russian criminal

mentality: smart and ruthless. According to one story, Ivan the Terrible had commissioned St.

Basil’s Cathedral to rival, even surpass, the great churches of Europe. He was pleased with the

result and invited the architect to the Kremlin. When the artist arrived, his blueprints were burned

and his eyes poked out, thus ensuring that he could never create a finer cathedral for anyone else.

There were several more contemporary examples in the report, but that was how the Red Mafia

worked. It was what we were up against if the Russians were behind White Girl.