Legends Read online

  Instead of answering, Benny sniffed at the air, which was growing chillier as the car climbed into the hills. Martin kicked himself for having asked. He grasped what professional interrogators took for granted: Each time you posed a question, you revealed what you didn’t know. If you weren’t careful, the person being interrogated could wind up knowing more about you than you did about him.

  Benny delicately changed the subject. “Does your leg give you trouble these days?”

  “I got used to the pain.”

  A grimace appeared on Benny’s prize-fighter’s lips that looked as if they had been in one fight too many. “Yes, pain is like the buzzing in an ear—it’s something you learn to live with.”

  As Benny shifted into second and turned onto a narrow road that climbed steeply, the small talk gave way to a comfortable silence that exists between two veteran warriors who have nothing to prove to each other. Benny had the car radio on and tuned to a classical music station. Suddenly the program was interrupted and Benny reached to turn up the volume. The announcer delivered a bulletin of news. When the music came back on, Benny lowered the volume.

  “There was another pigu’a,” he informed Martin. “That’s a terrorist attack. Hezbollah in the Lebanon ambushed an army patrol in the security corridor we occupy along the border. Two of our boys were killed, two wounded.” He shook his head in disgust. “Hezbollah makes the mistake of thinking that we’re all hanging out in Tel Aviv nightclubs or raking in millions in our Israeli Silicon Valley, that prosperity has drained the fight out of us, that we’ve grown soft and fat and are not willing to die for our country. One of these days we’ll have to set them straight …”

  The outburst took Martin by surprise. Not knowing how to respond, he said, “Uh-huh.”

  Twenty-five minutes after picking Martin up near the shouk, Benny drove into what looked like a rich man’s housing project filled with expensive two-story homes set back from the street. “We’re a kilometer inside the West Bank here,” he noted as he eased the Skoda to the curb in front of a house with a wraparound porch. Martin followed him through the metal gate and along the porch to the back of the house, where Benny pointed out the low clouds in the distance drenched with saffron light. “It’s Jerusalem, over the horizon, that’s illuminating the clouds,” he said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Martin shot back; the word escaped his lips before he knew what he was going to say. When Benny looked quickly at him, Martin added, “It makes me uneasy.”

  Benny asked, “What makes you uneasy—cities beyond the horizon? Clouds saturated with light? My living on the Palestinian side of the sixty-seven border?”

  Martin said, “All of the above.”

  Benny shrugged. “I built this house in 1986, when Har Addar was founded,” he said. “None of us who came to live here imagined we would ever give this land back to the Palestinians.”

  “Living on the wrong side of the green line must be something of an embarrassment for you.”

  Benny punched a code into a tiny number pad fixed on the wall to turn off the alarm. “If and when we agree to the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said, “we’ll have to adjust the frontier to take into account Israeli communities like this one.” He unlocked the door and let himself into the house. The lights came on the instant he crossed the threshold. “Modern gadgets,” he explained with a snigger. “The alarm, the automated lights are Mossad perks—they supply them to all their senior people.”

  Benny set out a bottle of imported whiskey and two thick kitchen glasses on a low glass table, along with a plastic bowl filled with ice cubes and another with pretzels. They both scraped over chairs and helped themselves to a stiff drink. Martin produced a Beedie from a tin box. Benny provided a light.

  “To you and yours,” Martin said, exhaling smoke, reaching to clink glasses with the Israeli.

  “To legends,” Benny shot back. “To the day when they become war surplus.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Martin declared.

  Martin glanced around, taking in the framed Hockney prints over the sofa, the brass menorah on the sideboard, the three blown-up photographs, each bordered in black, of young men in army uniforms on the wall over the chimney. Benny noticed him noticing. “The two on the left were childhood friends. They were both killed in action on the Golan, one in sixty-seven, the other in seventy-three. The one on the right is our son, Daniel. He was killed in an ambush in the Lebanon a year and a half ago. Roadside bomb hidden in a dead dog blew up as his jeep went past. His mother … my wife died of grief five months later.”

  Now Martin understood the source of the pain that Benny had learned to live with, and why he had grown melancholy. “I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say.

  “Me, also, I’m sorry,” was all Benny could trust himself to answer.

  They both concentrated on their drinks. Finally Benny broke the silence. “So what brings you to the Holy Land, Dante?”

  “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.”

  “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.”

  “The Oligarkh’s brother was one of those who immigrated to Israel. His name was Akim Ugor-Zhilov. One fine day in 1993 he turned up at Ben-Gurion airport with a wife and three young children in tow, claiming that he had a Jewish grandmother and had, in any case, converted to Judaism; naturally he had affidavits to prove all this. He has a livid scar over one eye. Claims he was wounded in Afghanistan, though there is no evidence he ever served in the Soviet army. He installed himself in a heavily guarded villa in Caesarea surrounded by a high electrified wall and staffed by Armenians who served in the army and knew how to use weapons. The Russian speakers in the Mossad called them chelovek nastroeniia—“moody people.” One minute Akim would scream insults at the Armenians who worked for him, the next he would be purring like a cat and bragging about his business prowess. Besides the fortress in Caesarea, he has a duplex in London’s Cadogan Place and a house on the Grande Corniche above Nice.”

  “How did he make ends meet in Israel?”

  “He brought in something like fifty million dollars over the years and invested it in government bonds, which earn six or seven percent interest, tax free. He also has a piece of a newspaper delivery service, a hotel in Eilat, half a dozen gas stations around Haifa.”

  “Where does Samat fit into this picture?”

  “Akim and Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov are brothers. It turns out there was a third brother, name of Zurab. He was a medical doctor, a member of the Armenian Communist Party and married to a Jewish woman. When Tzvetan was convicted of shaking down local merchants and sent to Siberia, his brother Zurab was arrested as an enemy of the people—under the Soviet system relatives of criminals usually suffered the same fate as the criminal. Zurab wound up in a Siberian gulag and died there of scarlet fever.”

  “What happened to Zurab’s wife?”

  “After the arrest of her husband, we lost all trace of her. She vanished from the face of the earth. The two brothers, Tzvetan and Zurab, had been very close, which explains, in part at least, why Tzvetan loathed the Soviet system: He blamed the communists for his brother’s death. Zurab left behind him a son named Samat.”

  “Which makes Samat the Oligarkh’s and Akim’s nephew.”

  “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 financ
ial 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.