Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  The clincher for me was that Melanie approved right away, as did Romy. When I called Romy in Israel and Melanie in Australia to tell them, they both said they never heard me sound as happy.

  ‘If your heart tells you to be impulsive,’ Romy said, ‘then you should be. You’ve earned the right to be happy.’

  Sam wasn’t a rich man, but he had done something he enjoyed—being close to animals—and made a very nice living from it. For sixteen years, he had owned a pet store in Thousand Oaks, California, lived in a comfortable home, and visited with his daughters regularly. That, he said, would be my home as well after we were married. He wouldn’t take no for an answer on that one, either.

  And so we planned to wed in the springtime, another American couple’s love story. That’s right, an American couple. I was going to live in America. I could hardly believe it.

  They say if you wait long enough in life, good things will make up for the bad. Sam made me believe that to be true. I couldn’t help but think back to my divorce from Avi. Back then, I was stalked and terrorised by a man who had said he loved me. Now, I was safely in the arms of a man who not only loved me but was going to give me a whole new life. Talk about your romance novels. Sometimes, even for a confirmed cynic like me, life does imitate art, after all.

  When Sam and I had made the decision to marry, Danny had not been happy about Melanie leaving Australia. He didn’t want her to leave until she’d finished sixth grade with her class in December. I’m sure he wanted to go further, to keep her from going at all, but Danny knew she would be better off with her mother. Rather than pick a fight about the school issue, I went along with it as a compromise, though living apart from Melanie for those few months made my insides hurt. All that, of course, meant I finally had reason to divorce Danny.

  I must say I felt right at home in California. Sam owned a small condominium that in time we would sell and then buy a lovely house in a cul-de-sac of six houses set against a background of beautiful mountains in the distance. The sky seemed always to be azure blue and the weather warm and comforting. Sam’s two girls, who would be my new stepdaughters, were adorable and took to me right away, as did I to them.

  Sam’s pet store, called ‘For Pet’s Sake,’ was well managed. While that allowed us to spend most of our time together, we became somewhat restless. Or maybe I should say I became restless, a trait that always seems to recur in me wherever I go. In 2001, we opened a small bookshop.

  My life now was about as far removed as possible from my erstwhile obsession to make the Joneses keep up with me and my business life of high-pressure, leveraged-to-the-hilt, multi-million-dollar deals with seedy characters. For that I was grateful. Those yearnings were out of my blood forever.

  On May 20, 2001, Sam and I were married at the home of a wonderful couple, Arie and Rivka, whom Sam had known for many years. It was a lovely affair, with sixty guests in attendance, and the ceremony was in a big, pastoral garden out back, under a shining midday sun and a chupa we had made ourselves. Of course, it wouldn’t be a wedding of mine without some typical looniness—the rabbi was a young man who doubled as a professional stand-up comic, and the occasion gave him an audience to try out his material during the service. I only wish that Billie, Wally, Romy, and my sisters could have been there for the happiest day of my life.

  As lovely as the path to my future was, the past still intruded, rudely. I could never tell when it would happen; it just did. Mainly, it sprung from inside my psyche. For instance, the first time I drove in the dizzying, chaotic swirl of traffic on the Hollywood Freeway into Los Angeles, my hands began to shake, and I broke out in a sweat. It wasn’t merely the frantic pace of the cars but rather a frightful feeling of being cooped up in a small space with no way to get out.

  These were feelings that had been ingrained in my mind from the hours of forced captivity in that dark, freezing cellar under the dacha. Being in the car, trapped in traffic, was the stimulus that let it all out again. I actually would have flashbacks as I drove, of the wooden stairs, of Oleg standing over me menacingly with his nail-embedded stick. I didn’t know if I could make it home or if I’d run off the road. Now I only drive on the freeway if it is absolutely necessary.

  Sleep was no easier either. Closing my eyes took me back to Noginsk. Insomnia is my defense, and sleeping pills are still the only way to break it down, though I have been able to at least wean my way down to half the dosage I used to require.

  There is no defense, however, against the reality that the Russian Mafia has spread to America, with a particularly virulent strain of cutthroat criminals taking up residence in Southern California. It was one such expatriate Ukrainian sleazeball who in 1997 ruthlessly murdered Bill Cosby’s son Ennis in cold blood on the side of a road in Los Angeles. As well, I know of al-Qaeda ‘sleeper’ cells infiltrating into communities, biding their time waiting for orders to wreak havoc with some bloody deed. The same sort of sleepers exist in the Russian Mobs. Could they have again teamed up with al-Qaeda the way they did in Noginsk to come after me—not for money but to kill me, to complete the job they botched? Will the order come down tomorrow?

  These are not idle thoughts. They are daily thoughts.

  I don’t make the al-Qaeda connection lightly or take dramatic license by mentioning it. It was only recently that such a connection was presented to me, to my astonishment, by a very, very credible source: Dimitry Afanasiev.

  Sometime in 2002, I suddenly developed a nagging urge to find out as much about the operation that freed me and decided to track down the mysterious Russian who had played such a dramatic role in it. He had returned to Russia by then, and I had no idea where to find him. I still had the original FBI press release in which all the players in the mission were acknowledged. One of them was Jerry Shestak, and thankfully his law office number was listed in the release, so I called him. Jerry was thrilled to hear from me and readily furnished me with Dimitry’s number in Moscow.

  I developed a regular phone-calling routine with Dimitry, exchanging details of our experiences and our current lives. They were long and enjoyable conversations, and during one of the calls, he was very excited. He told me he was coming to Los Angeles in December for a friend’s wedding and asked if we could get together and have dinner. Of course, I couldn’t wait for the meeting, which took place at the Mondrian Hotel in Hollywood. Dimitry had on his arm a beautiful and very tall young blonde woman named Natasha, whom he would marry. We must have chatted away for at least four hours; Sam and I were so transfixed that we forgot we’d parked our car at a meter. When we left, it had been towed away.

  By now, Dimitry had become arguably the most influential lawyer in Russia. His firm of Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev and Partners had, since 1993, represented both the Russian government and private corporations in international business affairs, as well as Western companies doing business in Russia. He is also an expert in global terrorism, especially the breeding grounds in the old Soviet states where allegedly discarded nuclear materials are thought to be hidden.

  His expertise had been crucial to the rescues, and apparently my tale of terror had stuck in his mind. He said he’d been curious about a few things in the ensuing years. He never had quite bought the storyline in some news accounts of the episode that the kidnappers were gypsies—just as I didn’t. I always believed they were ex-KGB agents, though that was impossible to prove.

  ‘They may have called themselves gypsies,’ he said, ‘but they weren’t. From what I’ve been able to deduce, they were actually Chechens.’

  He then wove for me the genesis of the al-Qaeda movement, how it was spawned in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden and spread like a virus into Chechnya, how well-heeled Westerners were their prime targets of opportunity, and how extorted money became a sea of money and was funneled through to the al-Qaeda network.

  These revelations floored me. It was now a year after 9/11, and never had I imagined, even in my feverish mind, that the bastards who flew planes into the World Tra
de Center and the Pentagon could actually have been made of the same terrorist cloth as those who had brutalised me.

  That was mind-bending enough. More outrageously, however, was that, according to Dimitry, Boris Yeltsin, knowing of the scum in his midst and their capacity for catastrophic damage, had tried to warn the first President Bush about the budding al-Qaeda nexus as far back as the early 1990s—only to be ignored, with disastrous consequences after his son became president.

  Trying as I have not to let paranoia run amok within me, every once in a while something will happen that absolutely freaks me out. In the spring of 2004, I began receiving strange phone calls. Someone on the other end with a heavy Russian accent would mutter a few words in Russian, then say the word death or dead in English and hang up. The first couple of times, I passed it off to be a wrong number, but the calls continued.

  At around the same time, two swarthy men came into the bookshop and stood there staring at me. They never removed a book off a shelf or bought anything. I also found in my email an incomprehensible message written in gibberish—or some sort of code—sent from an email address in Russia.

  Were all these things just some weird coincidence? Or was I being stalked?

  Unnerved, I called the FBI’s office in Los Angeles. I expected to be figuratively patted on the head and told I was watching too many bad spy movies. Surprisingly, they took it seriously. I had given them the telephone number that had appeared on my phone whenever I received such calls. The following day, two FBI agents—as well as a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy—came to speak with me. They explained that my 1992 experience was still a high-interest matter, given the epidemic of Russian Mob-related crime in the area—not to mention the terrorist implications. They soaked up every detail I could provide, and though there was little they could do, they did open a case file and promised immediate priority would be given to any future incidents.

  I didn’t know whether I should be relieved or even more terrified by that visit.

  Fortunately, though, the calls stopped, and there were no further inscrutable emails, no more suspicious stragglers who came into the shop. Who knows, maybe if someone was out there to get me, he may also know that the FBI would be on his case. Whatever the reason, I breathed a little easier. But who knows what will happen tomorrow?

  Thank God Sam understands me and can talk me through little crises like these. It can’t be an easy job to put up with me. But I don’t think I could get by without him.

  The same goes for my whole family, which is why I also thank God for those discount long-distance calling cards. If Billie, Wally, and Romy can’t be in my eyes, at least they can be in my ears.

  Romy did come to Los Angeles to be with me after the happiest day of her life, when in August 2004 she married her perfect man. Thus began some new, happy adventures, that of a mother-in-law.

  Considering the alternative and what might have been had those men wearing green army jackets waving machine guns arrived a few minutes later than they did, I’m up for just about anything.

  EPILOGUE

  Danny Weinstock lives in Australia. We are on good terms and have regular contact. Matthew Hurd and Richard Markson reside in Melbourne, Australia.

  Mikhail Rud continued to flourish in Vladivostok’s high-level mercantile trade circles. In the mid-’90s, he became director of the Runo Company and founded the Ussurisk Central Market—the largest Chinese trade market in the Russian Far East. During this time, Ussurisk’s customs officers became rife with corruption. Rud, apparently knee-deep in the sludge, may have made one bribe demand too many. On April 12, 1998, at age forty-five, he was ambushed on Ussurisk’s Kalugina Street by a pack of gunmen who shot him through the head. The murder, which police called a contract hit, was one of three killings of suspected underworld figures within a week in the area, including the rubout of a Mafia boss known as Shurup, or ‘The Screw.’

  For Yvonne, his gruesome demise produced an ambivalent reaction: ‘To be sure, if Rud did organise the kidnap plot, he received his just desserts, and it meant I had one less threat to worry about. However, it was also proof that Rud may have run in circles that will stop at nothing to carry out a hit. Could he have handed off my ‘hit’ to another mobster before being whacked? And could he conceivably have gotten it because he failed in the plot against Danny and me? Truthfully, I think I would rather not have heard about his death. It just makes me think about scenarios like this, and that’s the last thing I want to do.’

  Dimitry Afanasiev built a large, well established law firm in Russia and has since added an office in the USA. The name of the firm is Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners. In 2004, he was recruited by the Russian Foreign Ministry to lead a team of lawyers to defend two Russian agents accused of assassinating Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, an exiled Chechen who the Russian government alleged was behind the well-publicised Moscow theatre siege by terrorists in 2002 and who was blown up in his car in Qatar in February, 2004. Dimitry engaged the assistance of his former mentor, Jerome Shestack of Wolf Block, the law firm where Dimitry had worked on the Weinstocks’ case, along with former US Attorney General, Richard Thornburgh.

  The arrest of the two agents was a huge black eye for the Russian government. The agents were convicted in June and sentenced to life in prison. Afanasiev claimed that the two men had been seized at a diplomatic villa in violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, that they had been tortured and coerced to give confessions in breach of the 1984 New York Convention Against Torture. He vowed to bring his clients back to Russia through an appeal or negotiation.

  Afanasiev ruminated how Yandarbiev’s work on behalf of Chechen/al-Qaeda terrorists had its roots in the kidnappings such as that of the Weinstocks:

  ‘I understand that this man was strongly suspected of being the main conduit for al-Qaeda’s funding of the Chechen gangs in Russia, routing money from the Middle East and Afghanistan to Russia. He was on the UN’s list of international terrorists whose assets were to be frozen. ‘

  Afanasiev kept his promise to the Russian Foreign Ministry to bring back the Russian agents. Only recently, Dimitry and his partners participated in the negotiations and the handing over of the two defendants to the Russian side. Following intensive discussions with the Qatari law enforcement authorities, Dimitry Afanasiev, his partner Khristofor Ivanyan and Maxim Maximov, Consul General of Russia in Qatar, received the two Russians from the prison in Doha and escorted them aboard a Russian government plane.

  Vladimir Borisovich Rushailo gained the most from the rescue operation. Boosted by his glittering success, the ambitious cop kept moving up the Organised Crime Department ladder, from regional director to deputy director. He was then promoted into the Ministry of Internal Affairs leadership, as deputy minister in 1994. A year later, Putin appointed him minister of Internal Affairs; he has been reappointed twice.

  Rushailo applied his iron-fist approach, with less success, in the Chechen War by overseeing bloody campaigns against rebel insurgents. He accompanied Putin to the 1999 G-8 Conference on terrorism in Moscow, meeting with, among other VIPs, then-US Attorney General Janet Reno.

  Rushailo has vowed to wipe out Islamic militants in the former Soviet states, committing Russian troops to the civil war in Georgia. He may also have been a terrorist target himself. On September 9, 2002, while on an inspection tour of the Far East, a speeding sport utility vehicle crashed head on into his staff car in Kamchatka, leaving six dead including four security officers and the head of the Federal Security Bureau’s antiterrorism office. Rushailo sustained serious internal and chest injuries, but escaped death in the incident, which was officially ruled an accident.

  Rushailo recovered, and, perhaps as a reward, went on to even loftier posts: secretary of the Security Council and National Security advisor. The Weinstocks’ case helped his career a lot.

  Gerry Ingrisano remained with the FBI’s Newark office until 1996. He then transferred to the Des Moines, Iowa, office where he
is today a special agent and supervisor.

  James Pelphrey has had stints as mobile security director at the US Embassy in Belarus and regional security officer at the embassies in Sierra Leone and, currently, in Lagos, Nigeria. Before he left the embassy in Moscow, as a result of the precedent set by the Weinstocks’ case, the FBI established a permanent security office in Moscow with the leeway to act on any case involving Americans without Russian authorisation.

  Jerry Shestak is still a partner and highly influential attorney at Wolf, Block Philadelphia. (The firm changed its name in 2003.)

  Grigory Miasnikov, Vladimir Shemeken (‘Robert’), Oleg, Kuzin, Orloff, and the other gang members: Whereabouts unknown.

  About the Author

  Yvonne Bornstein has been a corporate executive, wife, mother and kidnap victim. She is now an author with this—Eleven Days of Hell—her first book. She lives in Australia with her husband, Sam. As a professional speaker and author, Yvonne has been able to share her story with many individuals and corporations around the world. Even though her life is back on track, she lives and breathes her horrifying experience every day.

  Photographs

  Summertime, 1958: I’m on the right, at three years old, tightly grouped with my protective mother, Billie, and my sister Erica. Although I’m a year younger than Erica, Mother liked to dress us like twins—and to this day, we swear that when one of us sneezes, the other’s nose tingles.

  At twelve, showing the sheer joy of spending my Sundays at City Beach in Perth.

  1972: Winning the ‘New Faces’ competition on Australian television with my heartfelt rendition of ‘Windmills of Your Mind.’ At eighteen, I was headed for fame and fortune—until reality intruded.