by Noel Hynd
She hadn’t held the Glock for several weeks. It felt different in her hand, as if it were ready to fight her. She adopted the ungainly squat ting position that had been standard for shooters for the past several decades, raised the pistol in both hands, held it forward, and focused on the sights with her right eye; she didn’t close the left, but paid no attention to what it saw, not that anyone ever can aim a pistol in a quick draw combat situation.
Front sight. Front sight.
That was the key, one FBI instructor had told her once, the rock upon which the Church of Almighty Handguns was built. A shooter had to see the front sight and let the target remain hazy in the background.
Otherwise, might as well call in an air strike.
So, front sight, front sight.
In the notch of the rear sight, a frame, she saw the bull’s eye of the target.
Her hand was steady. She squeezed the trigger, fighting the temptation to flinch. Even under the headset, the blast of the weapon was frightful. The recoil was less than expected, however, and her aim had been near perfect on the first shot. Not bad after a long layoff.
She fired six more rounds quickly and succinctly.
She brought the target forward.
Wow! She was pleased. Pretty good for a chick who hadn’t fired a shot in many weeks. Three hits right in the center. The others were off by less than an inch. She should do this for a living.
She sent the target back and reloaded, firing another seven rounds. Even better. One shot on the perimeter of the smallest circle, the others within it.
A real life shootout didn’t usually allow the luxury of a studied methodical aim, so she quickly graduated to a more challenging shooting pattern. She would raise the weapon quickly, no time to aim, and try to hit the center of the target.
This she did with great skill as well.
She had, in fact, forgotten how good she was at this. She continued on the range for another twenty minutes. Her skills were in excellent shape, she decided. She was more than pleased.
She went through two boxes of ammunition. Seventy-two shots, then stopped. She didn’t want her wrist to be sore the next day. She had done enough. She turned.
An even larger group of guys was watching her, their jaws open in admiration. Must have been a dozen of them. When she caught them looking, she was at first slightly resentful, then almost embarrassed.
Then they gave her an impromptu round of applause and a couple of “good ol’ boy” whoops of approval. She was their type of female, at least for the moment. She shook her head, laughed, and accepted the compliments.
“Beginner’s luck,” she said, carefully locking her weapon in its case.
“Yeah. Some beginner,” one of the younger guys said knowingly.
“Do they all shoot like that at UCLA?” another one asked.
“Only on the basketball court. Have a good evening, boys,” she said.
And she disappeared.
FOURTEEN
S he phoned Robert from her car. He was home, following a difficult shift at the White House. Some wacko had breached the security at one of the side fences by climbing over and making a run for the Rose Garden.
The nut case hadn’t gotten more than twenty feet when he was tackled. But such occurrences always ramped up the anxiety level of the entire Presidential Protection Detail. And of course, investigations had to follow and the breach needed to be studied. One never knew whether one small incident was a prelude to something larger. In the post-9/11 world, acute paranoia was the new normal.
“So I’ll bring dinner over. How’s that?” she asked Robert. “We’ll have dinner; then I have to scoot. I have this Ukrainian stuff to study and a final FBI report to read.”
“Dinner would be great,” he said.
She picked up some Thai takeout for dinner after leaving Colosimo’s.
Robert lived at a big apartment complex on Dupont Circle, a building known as the Bang Bang Hotel because there were so many well-armed government security people living there and so many single women. It was two blocks away from the Iraqi consulate.
They split dinner. They lingered together for a while afterward, but Alex was back at her place by midnight.
She showered and spent half an hour looking at her Ukrainian books and working with one of Olga’s CDs. What an unforgiving language. Not like French with its charm, English with its complexities, Italian with its musicality, or Spanish with its history. But the tough parts-the existence of “perfective” and “imperfective” and the whole tangle relating to verbs of motion-were the same as in Russian, so at least Alex wasn’t starting cold.
To ingratiate herself with her teacher, she made a point of memorizing several phrases in the fifth chapter. She found that she could concoct a primitive conversation with reasonable ease.
Ja vpershe u vashij krajini. I’m in your country for the first time.
Ne serdytesja na mene. Please, don’t be angry with me.
Toward 1:00 a.m., she thought she heard a sound at her front door, almost like someone trying the knob. Cautiously, she went to the door and looked through the peephole. She relaxed. It was her neighbor, Don Tomas, the retired diplomat, wandering in, a little tipsy, humming a Lucero tune, his keys clicking against his own door.
She rechecked her own locks. She brewed a decaf cup of tea. She settled down at her kitchen table, positioning herself where she could see the door.
There was one final task at hand for the evening. She needed to read the final file she had been given, the FBI dossier on The Caspian Group.
She settled in and took the first step toward knowing Yuri Federov too well.
FIFTEEN
FBI Document UK-2008-5AR-2a
Subject: Ukraine› Organized Crime› Overview›
Caspian Group› Federov, Yuri
Initial report date: June 19, 2005
Amended: (7 times, most recently:) March 12, 2008
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington DC
Status: Highly Classified; AA-2
Author: S.A. Diane Liu, FBI, New York, Southern District
The Caspian Group (TCG) is a Ukrainian energy conglomerate doing business with Western Europe and the United States and presumably Asia. The latter market will warrant careful scrutiny in the future.
The unofficial head of operations of TCG is a Ukrainian of Russian extraction named Yuri Federov. Almost uniquely, TCG functions without actual incorporation within Ukraine.
Their assets exceed one billion dollars {See Chart 56-2008a-1}. They invest in all financial sectors common to entities that do business with governments and the military. Additionally, they have positions in all criminal enterprises in Ukraine, including heroin and trafficking in women.
TCG’s young enforcers were trained by veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. They are infamous for their extreme brutality. Their victims are usually business people who have balked at extortion demands. Victims have been known to have been repeatedly stabbed and tortured, then mutilated before they are butchered. Others have been fitted with concrete cinderblocks and thrown live into the Desna River. The wave of terror has been so hideous that it has scared many of the competing crime groups away from doing business in Ukraine…
Since the collapse of Communism, , “ukrainka mafia,” the Ukrainian Mafia, has become bigger, more brutal, and better armed. It is now as wealthy as any Russian crime cartel. It wields the same worldwide influence as its major counterparts in Colombia. The Ukrainian Mafia traffics narcotics, currency, human sex slaves, handguns, carbines, submachine guns, antiaircraft missiles, helicopters, plutonium, and enriched uranium.
{Editor’s note: In 2006, Deputy Assistant Director Kevin Fosterman, then the FBI’s supervisor in charge of organized crime, warned Congress that the Ukrainian mob, which had 37 crime syndicates operating in 24 North American cities, had “an outstanding chance” of becoming “the most dangerous crime group in the United States.”…}
In the United
States, the activities of the Ukrainian mob alarm all law-enforcement agencies. By 1996, the Ukrainian Mafia had supplanted the Cubans as one of the top crime groups in South Florida and has supplanted many established African American and Sicilian interests in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York…
Until recently, the most powerful Ukrainian crime figure in the United States was Yuri Federov. In November of 2004, undercover surveillance {Note: Court wiretap approved 10/29/04 by Hon. Ira J. Cohen, 2^nd Circuit Court, Brooklyn, NY…} Federov boasted of his brutish past, but he also mentioned his charitable activities and described numerous fund-raisers that he had held for Catholic charities at a restaurant and Brooklyn night club he owned called Old Odessa.
Federov is a nonpracticing Eastern Orthodox Christian but holds Israeli citizenship. He insists that he never stole from religious organizations. But according to statements he made to undercover agents for the New York City Police Department, the “overhead” for these events tended to reach eighty cents of every dollar.
Federov has always manifested the qualities of a mobster. He is greedy. He stole tip money from the strippers at his clubs. He is ruthless. He once forced a woman to drink bleach as punishment for an unknown transgression. He is ambitious. He brokered the complicated negotiation involving the transfer of a Russian military submarine to Cali-based Colombian narco-traffickers.
(Note: See www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/history/1999-2003.html-2006-03-07)
The unwavering point here is that there is no transaction too large or too small {Italics mine-Diane Liu 092507} to escape his interests if a profit can be obtained. Special attention should be paid to his emerging business connections with a shell corporation named Park Enterprises, based in Taipei, believed to be a conduit for business with North Korea… {Italics again mine-Diane Liu 092507}
Federov was born in 1965 in Odessa, a Black Sea port that was once the Marseilles of the Soviet Union. When he was three, he moved with his mother and his father to Rivno, a small city in the western Ukraine. He sang in a boy’s choir and participated in a boxing program set up by the Soviet military. His father was a professional thief and prosperous dealer in the Ukrainian black market. He’d trade stolen merchandise for choice cuts of meat, theatre tickets, and fresh vegetables. His father’s brother was a successful actor in Moscow.
In 1980, when Federov was fifteen, his father had the word “Jew” stamped in the family’s passports even though they weren’t Jewish. Then he managed to move the family to Israel and gain Israeli citizenship. Before leaving Ukraine, the Federovs converted their money into diamonds. They stashed some in shoes with hollow heels and hid the rest in secret compartments in a specially built piano, which they shipped to Israel.
In the late 1970s, the Soviet government was under diplomatic pressure to let Jews freely emigrate. In response, the Brehznev government searched their Gulag for Jewish criminals and allowed them to leave for America. Many were “recent converts.” More than forty thousand Russian Jews settled in Brighton Beach, a section of Brooklyn, New York. Most were sound citizens. But the criminals among them resumed their careers. By the time Federov arrived in 1992, Brighton Beach had already become the seat of the Organizatsiya, the Russian Jewish mob. Using his Russian ties, Yuri Federov fit in immediately and flourished…
In addition to his “normal” criminal activities, Federov has a habit of brutalizing women.
“This is cultural,” he once explained to an undercover FBI agent, following an arrest in 1996. “In Russia, it is manly to beat women. In the stories of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Gorky, to beat a woman is normal. Then you do something like that in America, something that you grew up with, and you’re arrested for domestic violence! It makes no sense.”
In an incident taped by the FBI and the DEA from a surveillance apartment across the street from Old Odessa, Federov once chased a girlfriend out of the club and hit her repeatedly with a hammer. On another occasion, he allegedly pounded a female dancer’s head against the door of his black Cadillac Escalade until the window broke and the vehicle was covered with blood. No charges were filed in either case.
Federov regularly abused his two daughters and his common-law wife, Tanya, an Estonian Jew whom he met in Israel. When the police arrived at their home in response to 911 calls, the wife was sometimes found huddled inside a locked car with her daughters or hiding in a closet. Tanya later vanished and is presumed dead. His daughters have changed their last name and live with a second cousin in Toronto…
Following one instance of domestic violence in Brooklyn, Federov was arrested. The arresting officer, who knew who he was, referred to him as “a filthy (expletives deleted) Russian Jew gangster.” Federov, though handcuffed, bit off the upper half of the officer’s ear. He beat the domestic abuse charge when his wife disappeared. But for assaulting a police officer, he drew four years in a New York State prison. {See NY Criminal Docket #98-CD-456-2} It was the first time Federov had been convicted of a felony…
Criminals with Israeli passports have a sanctuary that other criminals don’t. It is extremely difficult to extradite Israeli nationals, Israel being the self-proclaimed “land of opportunity,” at least in theory. It is not difficult, however, to deport Israeli citizens (e.g., USA vs. Meyer Lansky, usdj 020472).
Thus in 1999, the United States government confiscated Federov’s traceable assets in the United States (estimated at two million dollars) and deported him to Israel.
But as he departed, his enthusiasm for the land he was leaving was undiminished. “I love America!” Federov said to a federal marshal who escorted him to his departing flight. “The people are stupid, the government protects rich people and the police are corrupt. It is so easy to steal here! Even your big elections are stolen!”
Federov stayed in Tel Aviv for one month, then moved back to Ukraine. {Note: Surveillance conducted by French and Israeli intelligence partnerships. See CIA File No. 2006-SF-345-c.} He quickly became the guiding force behind The Caspian Group. He has survived several attempts on his life since 2003 from various competitors and other parties who might have a positive interest in his death. He has also always been known to strike back forcibly at those who have struck at him…
Through his normal tactics of terror, extortion, and intimidation, he has become wealthy again. The company (TCG) keeps no official records. Reputedly, Federov has a highly disciplined mind and a photographic memory. He keeps all financial records in his head…
The extent and degree of Yuri Federov’s influence in Ukraine, particularly in government circles, is unknown at this time but is also considered to be almost without limit…
Federov should be considered dangerous at all times. Under no circumstances should he be underestimated…
Attention should be paid to the fact that Federov, while on top of the Ukrainian underworld, has many competitors who would benefit with his demise and who might have an interest in his premature death…
SIXTEEN
W hen Constanza d’Amico awoke in Rome the morning of January 9, her head was pounding. She was trying hard not to think about the direction her life was taking. But she couldn’t help it.
She lay in bed with her eyes open. The sun penetrated the drawn blinds in her bedroom, spilling little slashes of sunlight across the room. The clock at her bedside said 9:12 a.m.
Her stomach churned. Her nerves wouldn’t settle. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes. Then, next to her in her bed, she was aware of light snoring.
Oh, yeah. She was married.
Beside her, Rocco, her husband, slept fitfully. She had arrived home before he did in the early morning hours, and he had crawled into bed next to her.
Not unusual. Rocco was a musician, a guitarist for a techno-pop band that had a modest following around the city. He often came poling in shortly before dawn, usually smelling of sweat, booze, and cigarettes, sometimes smelling of cheap perfume, but never smelling of nothing. He would set the clock radio in their bedroom for 2:00 p.m. the fol
lowing afternoon. He would set it LOUD with a heavy metal American CD. The intense volume of music was the only thing that could rouse him.
Whatever. Constanza had given up caring and always made plans to be out of the apartment when the music blasted on. She and Rocco had been married for four years and had started to go their separate ways. He was particularly repulsive, she had come to learn, when he crawled out of bed in the early afternoon after his usual night of debauchery. So she arranged each day to miss those golden moments.
She edged up in bed and looked at him. How could she ever have made such a mistake? She could only see half his head since he was facing away from her. But that was enough. Dark, dirty hair. No shirt. Unshaven for a week.
She sighed. Her head pounded. What a life. There was a time when she had been philosophical about it. No matter where you are, there you are. Recently, however, she had become more proactive about her fate.
Her future: she decided she wanted to have one.
Extra work. Specialty jobs. Some significant income on the side. Like the previous night. Stash some money, put together enough to take off. Make sure she had a passport that was good to go on a moment’s notice-or more than one passport if she could work it right. Make sure no one could ever find her. She could start again under a new name. After all, some bad people might come looking for her.
Maybe she could even get to America. She had heard that in the cities of the United States a woman could pay off certain priests and get a marriage annulled. Well, she decided, she would do that and find a way to stay in America.
It would be a new life, and it would be all hers.
But first, that horrible headache, the one that threatened to define the new day.
The buzz in her head graduated to a full firestorm. Time to go proactive on that too.
She had some Vicodin stashed in her purse, thanks to an amateur pharmacist she knew from some of the clubs. The Vike and a Red Bull would get the day off to a good start.