by Earl Merkel
Not surprisingly, each claims leadership in the market they share. Impartial observers credit the Chicago Sun-Times—considered the grittier of the two papers—with providing its largely urban readership a slightly stronger coverage of both crime and the omnipresent City Hall political machinations, two staples the city delivers in ample supply. In the area of state and national issues—two areas of substantial concern to its somewhat more affluent and much more suburban readership—The Chicago Tribune is given a slight edge.
But there is one area where The Trib is acknowledged the hands-down winner—not just locally but arguably among every other newspaper in North America. In a day when bean counters manage most aspects of news coverage in every medium—thereby holding a vast leverage on what is seen, thought and believed about issues critical in a global context—The Chicago Tribune still fields its own expert, expensive corps of foreign correspondents. Other newspapers may fall back on the penny-wise solution of relying on wire services, local stringers or CNN to uncover and interpret the world at large—but in the words of The Colonel, founder Robert McCormick, The Chicago Tribune is the World’s Greatest Newspaper, with the accent on ‘world.’
As a result, the newspaper remains home to an unexcelled syndicate of experienced reporters and columnists who know as much about the world stage as anyone alive today. Many of them are legends like Kathy O’Banion, who had spent her career filing exclusive reports from trouble spots around the world and who now sat at the Formica table across from me.
It was midafternoon, though no evidence of the sunlight bathing Michigan Avenue filtered down to the plate window near our table. Florescent tubes and beer company promotional fixtures provide the light in The Billy Goat, a subterranean hangout for generations of Chicago newspaper reporters. Until the place was turned into a campy sort of legend by a cadre of expatriate Second City alumni, they had rubbed elbows here in relative obscurity with pressmen and typesetters and delivery truck drivers.
The phrase “Cheeseboiger, cheeseboiger” altered that dimly lighted universe forever—and although it had made owner Sam Siannis a far more prosperous man, long-time regulars of the tavern still pine for Sam’s heirs to return to their senses, and for Billy Goat’s to return to its true roots.
There was a Cubs game on the television, a tribute to Sam’s legacy. Decades ago, he had smuggled his trademark pet goat into the ballpark, had been summarily banned by the club ownership, and in response had called down an Olympian curse on what henceforth had become known as the “hapless” Cubs. Subsequent removal of the curse had not had a noticeable effect on the team’s ill fortunes, which continued unabated to the present.
At least, that was one explanation; on the screen, a bobbled grounder to third made the score Houston 5, Cubs 1. But it was still early in the season.
I sat beside Leonard G. Washburn—“Lenny” to the police, court officials, crime-beat reporters and assorted crooks and criminals about whom he wrote, and “Mr. Washburn” to just about everybody else. This category included the various representatives of his publisher. These functionaries did whatever was necessary to keep rights to the latest of his true-crime books, knowing it was destined for a slot on the best-seller lists.
When I had called Washburn, I had been greeted like a long lost friend. Neither of us made any reference to how I had blown him off almost two weeks before, on the night when Washburn had waited outside my apartment.
Lenny looked around approvingly, a strong-featured black man clearly in his element.
“Love this place,” he crooned. “It’s about the only place I know where I can walk in with an accused multiple-murderer, wave hello to the cops who busted him, and have the prosecutor on the case send us over a free beer. In fact, that’s just what happened last week. Swear to God.”
He bit into the sandwich the Greek at the grill had paper-plated and passed to him with a disdain bestowed only on favored regulars. “And the cheeseburgers are still the best in town. So, Kath—how long did you spend in Moscow this time?”
“Two months, this trip,” Kathy O’Banion said, “and I’ve never been so happy to get out of a place in my life. Every day is a new crisis over there.”
She looked at me. I saw her eyes flicker over my face and take in the still-raw scrapes on my hand. I got the distinctly uncomfortable feeling she didn’t miss much. Almost in self-defense, I studied her in turn.
O’Banion had a disarming smile—an attractive woman in her mid-fifties who at first impression could have been mistaken for a high school principal. When you looked closer, particularly at her eyes, you might imagine it was a particularly tough high school, a place where the staff learned far more than the students as they obtained an education in subjects not on any civilized curriculum. Then you looked again, saw the strength, and knew that among the lessons she had learned was how to achieve the difficult, delicate balance between hope and disillusionment.
“Lenny says you got the smelly end of a faked-up bribery stick in Lake Tower. My guess is that makes you the subject of his next book, am I right?”
Washburn answered for him. “That may depend on what you can tell us, Kathy. Davey’s got a lot of problems”—he winked at me, taking part of the sting from the comment—“and he needs to consult a few people who are in the know. That’s why I called you, love.”
O’Banion opened her shoulder bag, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one with what looked like a very old and battered outsized Zippo.
“I don’t know why you want to know about the Russian Mafiya, but I guess I’ll be reading about it on a plane soon,” she said. “Lenny’s books are always so good at making a long flight feel shorter. That’s a compliment, kiddo.”
She took a deep drag on her cigarette. “Okay. I’ve filed stories on this for the past four years, so I’m not exactly telling you any secrets. You tune into Meet The Press or McLaughlin, and you hear about how the Russian Mafiya poses one of the biggest threats to the Russian government, right? That’s crap, children; they have it all wrong. In just about every important way, the Mafiya is the Russian government today.”
“Putin’s a former KGB thug,” I frowned, “but I have a hard time picturing him as a Russian gangster.”
“Look, you’ve heard the term ‘narco-state?’” O’Banion asked. “Columbia, some of the Caribbean island countries, and probably pretty soon even Mexico—countries that are so tight with the drug cartels that their national policies genuinely reflect the interests of the bad guys. The government and the dopers are in bed together, the two of ‘em.
“Well, here’s the difference: Russia is in bed with itself. It’s the first modern instance of a major nation that has become completely criminalized. They’ve turned capitalism into a blood sport over there. You have an oligarchy of new-money billionaires—crooks, all of ‘em—pulling the strings of the government at the same time people are starving on the streets.”
She peered at me intently, willing me to understand. “Look,” she said, “I’m South Side Irish, and a little hanky-panky was an accepted part of doing business when I was growing up here. Hell, still is—that’s Chicago, you gotta love it.
“But in Russia, everything is connected—everything! You want to start a business, make an investment, open a franchise; you’ll pay extortion money up front, or more likely you’ll agree to take on a ‘partner.’ The concept is, ‘either you deal with us or we deal with your replacement.’ Simple, but they’ve found it uncommonly effective.”
“Just like the Capone era,” Lenny interjected, “real icepick-in-the-eye stuff.”
“Right, but Capone never got this big,” she said. “Think Citicorp, BankAmerica, Chase Manhattan—hell, just make a list of the ten largest financial institutions in the U.S. Now imagine if eight of them were owned by the Cosa Nostra. That’s Russia today, kiddo.”
“I imagine they’d loot my Christmas Club account, right?” Washburn said.
She barked a harsh laugh.
“Embe
zzlement, money laundering, any of that sort of small-potatoes stuff—that’s just hit-and-run stuff. You do it if you’re in a country where you know the bank regulators are going to catch on to you sooner or later,” she said. “In this case, imagine GM, IBM, Exxon and the rest of the Fortune 500 being forced to come to you when they want to borrow money. Think about the leverage you have—in every aspect of the economy.”
“As Marx used to say,” Len observed, “capital drives the capitalist system.”
“Yeah, well—that goes double for economies that are in a transition to a capitalist system,” the reporter said. “But it’s not as simple as it once was, either. Today, ‘developing’ countries like Russia have to cope with the realities of a global investment community. The rules are all changed.”
She took a deep draw on her cigarette.
“Okay, you have the big players—the major investment funds, the international banks and brokerages in New York, London, Hong Kong and so on,” she said. “Used to be, they brought a kind of stability to the whole game, long as a country stuck to what was deemed the ‘proper’ fiscal path.”
O’Banion’s face screwed up in a disdainful scowl.
“Today, global investment is schizophrenic as hell. A couple of rumors, a bad headline or two—all it takes is one major investor to get cold feet and pull out its money. Everybody else follows suit, and bingo! The abrupt withdrawal of credit causes an economy to collapse.”
“I remember the crisis a couple years back,” Washburn nodded, his expression dour. “Sent stock market into the crapper around the world. Even worse, my little mutual fund got burned bad.”
“I saw you listed in that Fortune Magazine profile of successful authors last month,” Kathy grinned. “So don’t expect sympathy from me. But, yeah—that set the pattern for the Russians since then. They lurch from crisis to crisis, and the IMF or World Bank jumps on their butts.” O’Banion shrugged. “A few cosmetic changes, and we send ‘em just enough money to keep the Russian economy from imploding.”
“And that works?” I asked. It sounded like a confidence game writ large, and the thought outraged my policeman’s sensitivities. “Enough to send them billions of dollars?”
“Now you’ve asked the really big question,” she said. “‘Can the Russian government be trusted?’ The first time they had a chance to cheat, back in ‘99, they did. They tinkered with the books they used to sweet-talk the IMF and got caught misrepresenting their cash reserves. A couple of months later, they got caught laundering money through a New York bank. All it cost them was a good tongue-lashing.”
O’Bannion frowned in thought. “Trust? On the surface, the IMF is saying ‘yes.’ Or at least, ‘maybe.’ Given the mess Russia’s in, socially as well as economically, that’s the only thing that’s kept the rest of the Western investment community from bolting. And that would completely sink the Russian economy.”
“But the Russians don’t seem all that worried about bucking the United States,” I said. “They’ve even rubbed our noses in the fact that they’re selling arms and nuclear reactor technology to—what? Places like Iran and Iraq.”
“You don’t understand how international power diplomacy works,” she retorted. “Putin could be photographed pushing a hand dolly to deliver a nuclear bomb to Saddam, and unless the American public finds out—and gets outraged about it—the international community can cover it up, in the name of maintaining ‘stability.’ It’s an old story, my friend.”
“Ah, for the good old days,” Washburn said, mock-nostalgia in his voice.
O’Banion smiled. “Ya gotta miss ‘em. The Berlin Wall came down in ‘89. The whole system collapsed in 1993 and the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist. But that was at the end of a long decline, including a ten-year war that they lost to what they had thought was a ragtag band of turban-wearing peasants.”
“Afghanistan,” I said, and Kathy O’Banion nodded.
“The Seven Tribes of the Afghan whipped their butts, and how. Remember what Vietnam did to us? Afghanistan was their Vietnam. In a way, the mujahedeen actually won the Cold War for us.”
“Ronald Reagan won the Cold War,” Lenny broke in, more confident than combative. “He upped the ante on the arms race so high that the other guy had to fold.”
“The Soviet Union was doomed long before Reagan used Star Wars to spend them into bankruptcy,” O’Banion retorted. “Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they weren’t faking it—Soviet Communists really believed they had the philosophy that would save the world. They were like Jesuits with nuclear missiles. The whole damn country was based on that belief, and it died because its people lost the faith.
“I interviewed some of the old timers—veterans of their ‘Great Patriotic War’ against the Nazis, even a few people who remember back to the ‘20s and ‘30s. They said that as far back as the late ‘70s, the writing was on the wall…and I don’t mean the Berlin Wall. The younger people didn’t believe in the Marxist philosophy. They preferred listening to Western rock music and wearing secondhand Levi’s and pretending to understand Doonesbury—all smuggled into the country by what the Soviets liked to call the ‘antisocial criminal element.’ You can’t maintain a system based on an ideology if nobody believes in the ideology anymore.”
O’Banion wiped her fingers with a paper napkin and carefully picked a potato chip from Washburn’s paper plate.
“So it turned into a free-for-all. In the late ‘70s and ‘80s, the Soviet press was full of stories about corruption and murders involving people pretty high in the Party apparatus. Even Leonid Brezhnev’s son-in-law. These were the top people in the nomenklatura—the Soviet ruling class.” She shook her head sadly, as if she was talking about a scandal in a close friend’s family.
“Hell of a story,” Washburn said. “But you said they also snookered the West.”
“Remember when banks were sending credit cards to every college kid in America?” O’Banion asked. “Unsolicited, through the mail?”
Washburn laughed. “Got one myself. Man, I thought I had hit the jackpot.”
“So what did you do?”
The writer looked rueful. “Maxed out the damn thing in less than a month. I was still in school—no job, no way to pay. Missed a couple months’ installments, so they called my old man.” He shook his head at the memory. “I thought he was going to kill me.”
“But he bailed you out,” she noted. “Not because he loved you, hard as that may be to believe”—she dug an elbow into Lenny’s side—“but because he didn’t want you to screw up his credit rating.
“So we let the same thing happen to the Russians,” I said. “We let them get hooked on easy credit to an extent far beyond their ability to repay.”
“Uh-huh,” O’Banion nodded. “Through most of the ‘90s, Western investors literally poured money into Russia. Real boom times, all based on credit. Good Lord, it was our government’s not-so-secret strategy: turn ‘em into capitalists and tie their economic base to the West; bingo, they’ll never be able to go Communist again. And it triggered the loan default in ‘98 that almost brought on a worldwide financial disaster.”
She drew at her cigarette, long and hard.
“So that’s where we are today, guys. Both the big investment funds and the IMF got burned, bad. Now with Putin and a new bunch in power—I kind of miss Yeltsin, the poor schmuck—they’re still bending over backward to attract outside money. Oil money or not, they need cash, desperately, just to stay afloat. Russia’s a helluva mess.”
She eyed Washburn’s remaining potato chips. Lenny grinned and pushed the plate over to her.
“I shouldn’t, but I’m going to,” she said, taking another chip. “So everybody is looking out for Number One in Russia. I’ve even seen reports that some of the elite units—airborne, even Spetsnaz units—have sold their services en masse to Mafiya factions.”
“What’s ‘Spetsnaz?’” Washburn asked.
“Russian Green Berets,” O’Banion said. “The
real hard boys. In Afghanistan, they made an art form out of torturing dissidents and rebels for information. If the stories I’ve heard are even partly true, they had guys who would have right at home with the Spanish Inquisition.”
O’Banion finished the chips and dabbed at her lips with the paper napkin.
“The point is that without Communism, none of them have any other value system,” she said. “Russia has no tradition of democracy—hell, the Humanist Enlightenment missed Czarist Russia completely—and they didn’t have the underpinning of Confucianism that gives most Asian countries their cultural values. No Koran, no Vedantic tradition to serve as the kind of socio-moral compass the Moslem and Hindu cultures have. Whatever cultural traditions they had came from a basic feudal system—take whatever you were strong enough to, and run a saber through the babies.”
She checked her watch and stood up to leave. “Speaking of running, I have to go,” she said to Len. “Every time they get me back in Chicago, they hardly leave me a single unscheduled minute.”
Kathy O’Banion turned to me.
“The best advice I can give is to follow the money. In Russia today, outside investment is the key to their whole economy. To get it, they have to maintain their credibility—with the IMF, with the global investment community, with all the groups out there that can influence public policy.”
“If you had to guess—” I began.
“Frankly, I think they’ll blow it,” she said. “I’ve written about the Russians for three decades. Deception is just too ingrained in their nature.” She laughed in a manner more experienced than cynical. “But until then, they’ll promise anything. The Russians need us to believe them. No credibility, no credit. And that means the government, the Mafiya—everybody—is in deep manure.”
She held out a hand to me, and I shook it with a single, solid grasp. I was surprised to find that I loomed above her; Kathy O’Banion was probably no more than five feet tall, though throughout the conversation I had been convinced that she was a much larger figure. I wondered how many other people, including world leaders, had had the same impression.