Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  Our decision was that we wouldn’t. If Rud was smart, we conjectured, he’d keep a low profile and duck suspicion rather than press on with the ‘debt’ nonsense and risk more investigation. Maybe that would be our unspoken but tacit quid pro quo: We’d all just keep our distance from each other. The bottom line was that we were so angry at Rud that we weren’t about to pay him a red cent in any case, nor in any barter goods, which is essentially what we owed him, his demands for cash notwithstanding.

  So now we dove right back into the pool with the other joint ventures. As awkward as it was to pick up matters with them, given Grigory’s arrest and the uproar it surely caused at 25 Chekhova Street, our business was still quartered there, and we assumed that Grigory was the only bad seed, not the others. Indeed, the assistant director at SovAustralTechnicka, a very nice man named Alexander Ivanov, was supportive. He agreed to come into the office on Saturday and schedule meetings for us with the other JVs.

  Some of them had heard about the kidnapping and were freaked out; they said they would call back to confirm the meetings, but never did, either out of fright or because they thought we were too ‘hot’ to want to deal with us right now, if ever. Others, we found out, had been told by Miasnikov during the previous week that we would be ‘uncontactable,’ which sounded an awful lot to me like another way of saying, ‘Never to be seen alive again.’

  Unlike in America or Australia where newspaper articles about our kidnap and rescue had already begun to appear on Saturday, few people in Moscow had actually heard the story, nor would they. The Russian newspapers were no longer state-controlled, but they were still loath to report anything about the crime epidemic in the country, even if the police had won out. Except for a brief mention in Pravda, it went unreported. Those who did know heard mainly by word of mouth, and apparently the story became a kind of underground legend.

  Thus, when we met with several of the JVs, the directors were more interested in having us recount the saga than talk business. It didn’t help, I suppose, that wherever we went for these meetings—one venue, with acrid irony, was the Spunik Hotel, the very place where we had met the insidious Mr Rud—we were accompanied by three of Andrei Zharov’s armed policemen.

  At these get-togethers, I would try to be cool and businesslike, but often I would break into uncontrollable crying. Consequently, much of the business details were left hanging. All we could do was promise to contact them again, but an ominous complication was that the JVs needed us to revisit Moscow in the future. Though we left it open, I knew full well we would never be back. The very thought made me go stone cold with fear. Once you escape hell, you don’t give the devil another chance.

  Nothing, though, is ever easy in Russia, and even our scheduled departure became something of a hassle when a last-minute hitch developed. Because we had never checked in to a hotel, we did not have a chance to have our visas stamped with our local residential address included. Thus, there was no official confirmation that we’d legally been in Moscow at all. This could have caused a typical long-term delay until the paperwork was taken care of. Colonel Rushailo at the Ministry of Interior cut through the red tape. On Saturday, a letter went out from a Colonel A.A. Nazarenko from the Executive Committee of the Directorate of Internal Affairs to the City of Moscow authorities.

  Because we had been ‘unlawfully detained,’ he wrote, ‘I request that [the Weinstocks] be assisted with an exit visa from the country.’ On Monday, we were officially cleared to go. Now it was nice to have friends in high places.

  The following day, Tuesday, the 21st, we could finally flee Hades once and for all. Mid-morning, Bruce Scott and Andrei packed our luggage into Bruce’s limousine, and, with Andrei following in his car, we drove to Sheremetyevo airport. Once there, Danny and I realised just how attached we’d become to having our own detail of high-level bodyguards the last few days, headed by a police captain. With our flight to Belgrade only minutes away, first Bruce Scott, then Andrei had pressing business to tend to and bade us goodbye and good luck, leaving us alone for the first time since we’d been rescued.

  We sat in the Yugoslav Airlines lounge, feeling like babes lost in the woods, with not a familiar face in sight. Our fears rose. Would an assassin, having gotten his chance, now jump from the crowd of travelers and finish the job on us? Right up until the moment we stepped onto the plane—and even after—we were gripped by the notion.

  Somewhere over Yugoslavia, we finally relaxed a little. Just a little. Now our thoughts turned to home. The kids. The house. Our own bed. A crush of publicity. Unaware of when we’d be returning to Melbourne, reporters had begun to camp out on the street in front of our house in Brighton on Cole street. Susan told us she had to sidestep them—including some who thought she was me—when she took the kids to school. Requests for interviews were streaming in to the Video Technology office and our mailbox at home.

  On Monday—two days after The New York Times broke the story worldwide—front-page stories about us had run in The Herald-Sun, The Australian, and The Age, and on the Australian TV news shows. Among those quoted, Alexander Ivanov certainly had the understatement of the year. ‘In the old Soviet Union today,’ he said, ‘we have many racketeers and Mafia structures. [The Weinstocks] met some unfortunate people.’

  To control the circus-like atmosphere of our return, we called the only newspaperman we knew, to act as our point man with the media in sorting out interview requests. Even doing this much was difficult, since we really weren’t emotionally ready to talk about what had happened to us. Eventually we decided to do only one print interview when we got back—for a three-part series in The Herald-Sun, one of Australia’s biggest newspapers—and two television interviews, for A Current Affair and for the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Foreign Correspondent.

  We had a lot of time during the day-and-a-half progression of homeward-bound flights to ponder a terribly uncertain future and to relive in our minds the terror of those eleven days. Most of those hours in the air I did little but sit slumped in my seat crying. On the first stopover, in Belgrade, a flight attendant who had overheard me talking about the horrors personally took Danny and me into the VIP lounge and maternally told me to lie on a couch and try to rest.

  We would receive more special treatment when in the early afternoon of Wednesday, January 23rd, we landed at last in Melbourne. As soon as we were off the plane, half a dozen members of the Australian Federal Police met us at the gate. After we collected our luggage, they whisked us through customs, and then took us out a back exit to avoid the media that had gathered at the airport. Three cars escorted us home to Brighton. We had to slow to a crawl because of the media people out front on the sidewalk before going up the driveway and into the house.

  We had a wonderful homecoming. My parents, Billie and Wally were there, and the four of us fused in a circle of hugs and kisses. Later, Danny’s parents would arrive, and Susan would bring the kids home from school. Ian and Wendy called to tell us they’d be in on February 4th and that Jonathan would finally return home in March. It was supposed to be a day of reverie, to eat, drink, and laugh long into the night, willfully and blissfully keeping both the recent past and the impending future out of our consciousness. But while the others had a good time, I could not manage to get into the spirit. I said goodnight early, went to my bedroom, fell into the bed I’d sorely missed, and sobbed quietly. That was the first clue that everything I would now do to try to restore normalcy in my life would produce cruel reminders that nothing would be normal for me again. My constant companion was the trauma of reliving the nightmare over and over again.

  To do that for the public record, in the series of articles that appeared in The Herald-Sun, absolutely twisted me into a thousand knots. I’m sure that reading the grisly details of the story as laid out by the reporters had the same effect on many people. When the first installment ran on Saturday, January 25, the start of the Australia Day holiday weekend, accompanied by a huge headline reading: ‘THEY WANTED T
O HANG ME: TORTURE HELL IN MOSCOW,’ our friends were shocked, perhaps most of all by the photographs that ran with the articles. In those, I was barely recognisable, looking sickly and emaciated, and there was a Russian police shot of Danny, half-nude, bruises all over his body. Hell, indeed.

  If doing that interview wasn’t difficult enough, we felt victimised again in some of the media coverage. When we appeared on A Current Affair, for example, we faced an inexplicably hostile reporter, who seemed adversarial, as if she didn’t believe our story. As well, some of the other newspapers covered the story in ways that were less than sympathetic to us. One paper—widely regarded to be anti-Semitic—snidely put quotation marks around the word kidnapped in the headline, as if to infer we had made up the tale! People in the media don’t know how hurtful something like that can be. They are especially cruel and heartless.

  More concerning was the dire state of our business. The only positive note about it was that it would have been a lot worse had Mikhail Rud had his way. Incredibly, the man who had thought nothing of having us kidnapped didn’t let old dogs lie after all. Only days after we’d left Russia, Rud, on March 19, sent a threatening fax to the Video Technology office. Without a word of commiseration about our travails in Moscow, he reiterated his claim to $1.6 million.

  ‘This agreement was not fulfilled,’ he wrote stuffily. ‘I am asking you [by] April 20th [to] notify [me of] the time and place to meet your commitments, otherwise we will have to involve your government and international courts.’

  In response to this crude and shameless bluster, we cabled Russia’s ambassador to Australia, saying that we ‘suggest strongly that Mr Rud and his organisation were the perpetrators of our kidnapping’ and that the Australian Federal Police would step in, if necessary, to see justice done.

  Rud, though, brazenly persisted. Making the long journey from Vladivostok to Moscow, this sleazy character talked his way into a meeting with Ian Wing at the Australian embassy to appeal for the Australian government to recover the money for him.

  This was the height of chutzpah. Ian Wing was sickened hearing demands by the man he knew was neck-deep in the abduction plot. Rud was shown the door and informed he was no longer welcome at the embassy. They may have also not minced words in warning him to keep away from us, because we did not hear from him again.

  Even with Rud off our backs, however, no one could get rid of our massive debts. We had lost Vostok as a trade partner, and other joint ventures had become scared off from doing business with us. Still others owed us money from past deals. One joint venture, for example, owed us $200,000. We might have been able to make them settle, but it would have cost us far more in legal fees.

  Worse, our assets in the Vnesh Bank were frozen by the Russian government pending the resolution of the criminal case. At Ian Wing’s urging, we considered filing suit against the Russian government under a new law being proposed in that country that would allow crime victims to seek compensation. We asked Dimitry Afanasiev to make some calls on our behalf, but after making inquiries, he told us the law would only apply to political prisoners of the old Soviet regime, so we dropped it.

  Swimming in all that red ink, we could no longer afford the 8000-square-foot office on Claremont Street, South Yarra. Within six months of our return, we had let the staff go, closed the office, and folded Video Technology. For a time, we went back to our software-development company that had been dormant for two years, running it now out of our home, but the debts we had incurred were overwhelming, crippling, and Danny soon after declared bankruptcy. I didn’t, only because under Australian commercial law a company cannot operate with bankrupt directors. Nevertheless, the bill collectors now began coming after me.

  Knowing that the bank would have taken our house, we decided we had no choice but to sell that glittering showplace we had always said we would kill to keep. In the end, we made almost nothing from the sale since we had very little equity because of the sky-high mortgage repayments. We then rented a far less opulent home.

  We’d fallen a long way from the heady days of la dolce vita. And the hole would just keep getting deeper.

  I was falling through a different hole, a personal one, in my own soul. The memories of what I had been through, which would erupt at any time, day or night, left me with not a moment’s peace. While Danny, who could repress his inner emotions with little difficulty, seemed to be rebounding from the trauma, I was growing more mercurial, and I’m quite sure manic-depressive, though my downs were always more intense than my ups, which were at times nonexistent. A psychologist, named Dr Tim Watson-Monroe, called a few days after our return and offered his services free of charge. I consented to see him.

  Tim was very good, very patient with me, but nothing could stop me from constantly crying for no apparent reason. Sometimes I would take little Melanie with me when I went for a session with Tim. Before I could summon up the strength to go into his office and talk again about the events that made me physically sick, I would plop down and sit on the stairs outside the office building, sobbing, with Melanie in my arms. Passersby would stop and ask me if I was all right. I was anything but.

  I’m sure I was suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, which in turn led to a terrible sleep disorder. I simply could not release my fears enough to relax and close my eyes. Subconsciously, I may have been afraid I’d be transported back into the nightmare, and that I’d wake up in the dacha again. Tim prescribed sleeping pills and anti-depressants (Valium, of all things). Twelve years later, I still take the sleeping pills. Just as, twelve years later, my fears that someone is lurking around every corner are still with me.

  Something did happen, however, that eased my mind just a bit. It was something very, very strange. We’d been back home about a week when the phone rang. On the other end was a man we had known from the community who was, like me, active in Jewish affairs, a very stable guy with no cause to want to do us harm or play with our heads. In a serious tone of voice, he said he had something important to tell us and asked if Danny and I could meet him in a nearby park.

  He didn’t go any further, and normally such a mysterious request would have made me slam down the phone and go hide under the bed sheets. We had known of this man, and the park was a public place, adjacent to the synagogue where Avi, my first husband and I had married. When I told Danny about it, we both agreed that we would do it. We went over to the park, where the man was waiting. We all sat on a bench whereupon he got right to the point. He said he had just received a call from the head of the Russian Jewish Mafia in New York and that ‘he wants you to know that you and your families’ lives are safe here in Australia. He has passed the order.’

  Danny and I looked at each other, not knowing what to make of this melodramatic, Godfather-like moment. If it was true, we were truly flattered.

  ‘They’re talking about us in the Russian New York Mafia!’ I said in wonderment.

  We thanked him and went home, more than a little stupefied. Was there even a Russian Jewish Mafia? If so, how could mobsters halfway around the globe protect us?

  We didn’t need to answer the questions. We just hoped they did, and could. Maybe, we thought, that was why Rud had gone away. Maybe we were being protected. Guardian angels or the Jewish Mafia, it didn’t matter at all.

  21

  MELBOURNE AND THOUSAND OAKS

  CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 1992–JULY 2004

  The prosecution of the five gang members charged with our kidnapping became the sole province of the Russian criminal justice system when the American State and Justice Departments declined to ask for their extradition to the United States, ‘In deference to the Russian prosecutors, ‘the FBI put it in one of its press releases. However, this was just a diplomatic formality; in truth, even if the Americans wanted to adjudicate the crime—on the borderline grounds that the extortion attempt was made in the United States—there was no way the Russians were going to give up a choice opportunity to grandstand. And yet, for all
the career mileage some—primarily Colonel Rushailo—would get out of the case, the nature of Russian ‘justice’ made the prosecution very problematic.

  In February 1993, Boris Yeltsin, in a startling admission, said, ‘The world has come to consider Russia as a powerful bastion of the mobs. We are surpassing countries like Italy that have traditionally been in the front lines [or organised crime]. There are criminal structures literally corroding our country from top to bottom.’ Logically, the justice system was the core of this rotten apple. It was infested and infiltrated by ex-KGB loose wheels and underworld mobs, tainting scores of judges and prosecutors who had free reign to coddle the crooks and smother their prosecution.

  Aiding them was the fact that, in the books of statutory law, crimes such as kidnapping and extortion were not even official crimes in 1992, for a simple reason: These were two of the normal tools in the KGB arsenal of intimidation, and its agents would be immune to prosecution if their methods were ever brought to light. It would take years to codify such crimes with appropriate sentences. Moreover, while Chechen rebels had exported the war to Moscow, with car bombs and assassinations, there also were no laws that specifically covered terrorist activities or war crimes—yet more tools of the KGB trade, to aid in the ill-fated crackdown of the rebellion. Other than Yeltsin, few in positions of authority seemed overly surprised much less outraged by the worst acts of barbarism.

  This boded ominously for the prosecution of our abductors. The first bad sign was that for eight months we heard nothing about the progress of the case. After grilling us so thoroughly on every detail, nobody in Moscow seemed to care much about informing us. The sympathetic Colonel Andrei Zharov had left the MVD to go into the spice-selling business, yet only he kept in touch with us. In fact, it was Andrei, at our request, who snooped around and found the facts, some of which were rather distressing.