Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  WAYNE, NEW JERSEY

  Ingrisano, McShane, and Cottone set up the recording/tracing equipment, then instructed Ian what to say. Be calm, they said, be yourself. Be normal. Establish a ‘comfort zone’ of trust and interdependence. Be accommodating, but don’t make any promises. And, most of all, keep talking, find out more details. ‘Give us something to check out, places, people,’ Ingrisano said. ‘Find out how much danger they’re in. Listen for telltale background noises. And talk, talk, talk.’

  There was already some solid information that was ferreted out by Ian during the first call—the telex number that linked to the SovAustralTechnicka office and the account number at the Vnesh Bank. It wasn’t conclusive, but these were pieces. Now, the objective was to wheedle a number for Ian to be able to call back, to be better able to trace the origin of the call.

  Call-tracing technology had evolved a long way. In the digital age, it was even possible to instantly trace a call; caller-ID systems, soon to be available to home phones, could pull up an address from a worldwide database within seconds. However, this was Russia, a wasteland so technologically starved that tracing a number and an address required archaic manual switchboard-routing. Given these realities, the best option was to be able to initiate a call to Russia since an outbound call could cut the trace time by as much as half.

  Ingrisano sat at the kitchen table across from Ian, an earpiece connected to a recording/tracing device. When the phone rang at 5:40, the loud jingle in the hushed room made Wendy jump. Ingrisano flipped on the switch of his machine. It was ‘go’ time.

  ‘Hello? Danny?’ Ian said.

  He was met with the same subdued, mechanical voice, and each question he posed that did not directly deal with the money transfer had Danny ducking, dodging, and re-diverting him back to the money.

  Robert had plugged in another headset so I could audit the conversation. After a few minutes, I could tell that Robert wasn’t catching the nuances of Ian’s questions, the precise nature of which led me to believe Ian had been coached, no doubt by someone right there next to him. I knew Danny could tell this, too, and was just waiting for the right moment to let vital information drop into the conversation.

  Right away, Ian inquired about the deal that had created the $1.6 million ‘debt.’

  ‘Tell me again what this transaction was all about,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you send computers for fertiliser?’

  My heart leaped. How did Ian know that? We never told him about the deal. He could only have learned of it by making inquiries of our associates in Melbourne. Whoever he was working with, perhaps they’d begun to fit the pieces together. Could it be he knew that Grigory Miasnikov was behind the whole thing?

  Danny stayed cool and on point, his stiff and formal manner enough of a clue for the moment.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but that was a different deal. Listen carefully, Doctor Rayman. The money must be paid. We cannot leave until it is received.’

  ‘Are you in any danger?’

  ‘Doctor Rayman, we are not in any danger,’ Danny said. ‘We are not in the slightest amount of danger. Not even the minutest amount of danger.’

  I could read Danny’s mind—Ian could not have failed to grasp the message of that all-too-obvious bit of overstatement. But did Robert, as well? I tipped a glance at the suave, urbane fop. No reaction. Whew. Had we really fooled what may have been a polished, ex-KGB man? Or was he as smart as he seemed, and would he make us pay for our insolence later?

  Given his inscrutability, it was impossible to know. However, it did seem as if Robert was perturbed by Ian’s next question: ‘Grigory Miasnikov is there also? Can I speak to him?’

  Again, my heart jumped. Was Ian getting too close? Robert reflected for a few seconds. He could have been thinking: This fellow Ian is sharp. No use trying to feed him lies. Then, too, if Grigory was outed, he might turn out to be an asset. Miasnikov too was smooth and plausible as a businessman; he could put a human, if villainous, face on the rather nebulous ‘business’ deal in question.

  Robert nodded to Grigory, then to Danny to respond in the affirmative.

  ‘Sure,’ Danny went on, ‘Grigory is right here.’

  Now it was Ian’s turn to be manipulated and conned by the man who lured us into his web.

  Grigory took the phone and with his snake-charming smarminess played the role of the innocent bystander.

  ‘Doctor Rayman? This is Grigory Miasnikov. I remember we met in Melbourne. It was great pleasure to meet you and your wife.’

  ‘Yes, I remember too. Can you tell me what’s going on over there?’

  ‘I will explain. This is business deal. It is time the debt should be paid to the Far East Trading Company in Vladivostok. Otherwise, there will be criminal proceedings. It has been too long.’

  Rather than accept the explanation meekly, Ian became confrontational. ‘Why did you allow Yvonne and Danny to come to Moscow? Why did you let them get into this trouble?’

  ‘It could not be helped. I warned them when they were in Australia. I am in trouble, as well.’

  With that, Grigory handed the phone back to Danny, who asked Ian about the progress of the payment.

  ‘We still have not been able to contact the rest of the family,’ Ian said.

  Seeing that Robert was getting antsy, Danny and I knew now was the time to drop our best clue.

  ‘Doctor Rayman, I know you are looking forward to visiting Uncle Chaim and Auntie Tova this weekend in the Catskills.’

  I could hear Ian’s throat catch ever so slightly. Maintaining the same tone, he repeated the refrain. ‘Yes, we are looking forward to seeing Uncle Chaim and Auntie Tova this weekend. We’ll pass on your regards.’

  Bingo! There was no doubt now. Message received.

  It had been passed along so unobtrusively that Robert didn’t even bother to translate the seemingly innocuous banter to Oleg and the others. Instead, he motioned for Danny to wrap up.

  When Ian next asked, ‘Can I speak with Yvonne?’ Robert shook his head no.

  ‘She is not here,’ Danny replied. ‘She is back at the house we are staying in.’

  ‘Can I call her at the house?’

  ‘Doctor Rayman, that is not possible. But I’m sure she can be here for the next call.’ That was another smart move by Danny, as it would involve me in the phone-calling process, giving us more of a chance to get our clues through—provided I could steel myself enough to keep from breaking down in tears once I would get on the line.

  ‘When can we speak next?’ Danny asked.

  Ian paused. ‘We’ll be talking to the bank again in the morning—no, wait, make it Monday. The banks are closed for the weekend. I will call you. Where can you be contacted?’

  This, I sensed, was Ian’s big opening—and Danny, surprised that Robert didn’t shut him down, hurriedly complied.

  ‘Here is the number,’ he said, giving out the Chekhova Street office number.

  I was about to tell myself ‘Bingo!’ again, before speculating there was a reason why Robert hadn’t objected to this key piece of information: We would not be brought back here for future calls. We would be taken to God knows where. It was not a comforting thought.

  And so when the call ended, and we were bundled back into the car for the ride back to the dacha, I was not nearly as hopeful as I wanted to be. If Ian could do something with the information he now had, how could we believe we were getting anywhere when looking ahead was like staring into a big, gray cloud?

  WAYNE, NEW JERSEY

  Gerry Ingrisano heard enough to be clear in his own mind that the Weinstocks were in a dire situation. Although the call didn’t last long enough to get a trace of the number, he was heartened that Danny had proffered the SovAustralTechnicka number, that Ian had spoken to Grigory Miasnikov on the phone, and that Grigory had given the name of the Far East Trading Company—now, some of the dots had been connected. Most significantly, Ian had bought more time.

  Ian immediately composed another tel
ex and sent it off to 25 Chekhova Street. It read: ‘BECAUSE OF THE LARGE SUM OF MONEY INVOLVED—MANY BANKS ARE INVOLVED. WAITING.’ When confirmation came in that the telex had been accepted, Ingrisano gnashed his teeth. Damn, he thought, what if those bastards are there right now? If only we had feet on the ground in Russia.

  He had an idea. Ian and Wendy were Australian; they were still officially citizens. If they notified the Australian Embassy in Moscow, it would establish a ‘point of contact’ in Moscow. He told Ian to call the Embassy and tell them about the phone calls. In the meantime, he would have the bureau provide information of the case to the Australian Embassy in Washington DC and to government officials in Canberra, Australia. Perhaps this would open a channel for crucial information sharing.

  It had better, he thought. From what he had heard, the taciturn FBI man was certain that the Russian authorities had nothing to do with the Weinstocks’ plight; this was in every sense a criminal enterprise. He rushed back to the Newark office and filled out his report, stamping it ‘Urgent.’

  12

  DAY FIVE:

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 10th

  THE DACHA AND WAYNE, NEW JERSEY

  ‘A SERIOUS SITUATION’

  On Friday morning, the head agent of the Newark office wired a memorandum to the bureau’s headquarters in Washington DC. It read, in part:

  FM: FBI NEWARK (9A-NK-72769) (P)

  TO: Director FBI/IMMEDIATE

  SUBJECT: IAN RAYMAN VICTIM; EXTORTION

  REQUEST OF FBIHQ:

  FBIHQ IS REQUIRED TO DISSEMINATE THE CONTENTS OF THIS COMMUNICATION TO APPROPRIATE OFFICIALS OF THE GOVERNMENT OF AUSTRALIA IN THE U.S. AND AUSTRALIA.

  RE: TELCALL FROM NEWARK, GMRA … CONTINUE ATTEMPTS TO … RAISE $1.6 MILLION. WIRE THE $1.6 MILLION TO VNESH ECONOM BANK (BANK OF FOREIGN TRADE OF THE SOVIET UNION), MOSCOW. DANIEL WEINSTOCK TOLD IAN RAYMAN HE AND HIS WIFE YVONNE HAVE BEEN UNHURT BUT WOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO LEAVE MOSCOW. DANIEL WEINSTOCK WOULD NOT GIVE DETAILS ON HOW HE WAS BEING PROHIBITED FROM LEAVING MOSCOW.

  DANIEL WEINSTOCK SAID HE COULD BE REACHED AT TELEPHONE NUMBER (REDACTED). IT WAS AGREED THAT IAN RAYMAN WOULD CONTACT DANIEL WEINSTOCK AT 6:00 P.M., EST, 1/13/92, AT THAT TELEPHONE NUMBER. DANIEL WEINSTOCK SAID THAT TELEPHONE NUMBER IS AT NUMBER 25 CHEKHOVA STREET, MOSCOW. THAT ADDRESS IS THE OFFICE OF (REDACTED) JOINTLY OWNED COMPANY, JV (JOINT VENTURE) SOVAUSTRALTECHNICKA.

  DURING THE TELEPHONE CONVERSATION, DANIEL WEINSTOCK TOLD IAN RAYMAN THAT HIS BUSINESS PARTNER GRIGORY MIASNIKOV WAS THERE WITH HIM. GRIGORY MIASNIKOV THEN TALKED TO IAN RAYMAN AND SAID THAT DANIEL WEINSTOCK WAS IN A SERIOUS SITUATION; IT COULD BECOME A CRIMINAL MATTER, AND HE COULD BE ARRESTED. DANIEL WEINSTOCK COULD BE ARRESTED BECAUSE OF THE LEGAL DEBTS OF HIS COMPANY TO A STATE-OWNED COMPANY—FAR EAST TRADING COMPANY.

  Now the FBI had a kidnap-extortion plot with international implications on its hands. What it didn’t have was a definitive way to go about dealing with it. Sitting at his desk late that Thursday night, Gerry Ingrisano felt like a chained wildcat. As much as he wanted to do something to help two people halfway around the world, he could do nothing more. He would analyse the tape of the last call, and he would be back at the Raymans’ home on Monday, again trying to glean critical information to pass along—though to whom he had no idea.

  All he knew was that someone had better be able to make such a person appear out of thin air, and damn fast.

  It would be a maddening three days of uncertainty and uneasy anticipation waiting for Monday to arrive, hopefully with some good news from Ian. At least on the day of a call, I knew we could occupy ourselves with what to tell Ian and derive some idea of where we stood. Now, it was a matter of killing time, coping with mind-numbing boredom, trying not to step on anybody’s toes in the dacha.

  By now, we were grateful that the beatings of the first few days had abated as we fused into the ‘family,’ yet the psychological scarring of the early torture influenced the way we saw everything, even the most mundane of events.

  That Friday, for example, a pipe under the house froze in the brutal, subzero cold, so there was no water from any of the faucets or in the toilets. The only drinking water was kept in a twenty-gallon steel milk container next to the sink in the downstairs bathroom, which happened to be right next to the cellar where we had been dumped like potato sacks in the dark for hours at a time. When I was instructed to do dishes that day, I had to stand over that bathroom sink, a step from the sight and putrid stench from inside the open trapdoor.

  Because the bathrooms were unusable, we all had to use the backyard. Apparently, the pipes froze regularly, and for the family, this was a common restroom alternative. For us, it was anything but common to pull down our pants and defecate in a freezing yard, just like the dogs. In fact, the dogs had first call on the grounds; if any of them were doing their business, we would have to wait our turn. But then, in the pecking order of the house, we were lower than the dogs, which were treated far better.

  Not by coincidence, the pack of them consisted of the meanest breeds on earth—a Rottweiler, a Doberman, and a German shepherd. There was also a Rottweiler puppy in training to do what the others did: bark and growl at any sound outside the house. And despite the fact that they were kept exclusively outside in the cold, they were all revered and catered to. The family’s highest priority was that the dogs were fed. There were prodigious amounts of food—not canned but real beef—reserved for the four of them, and the babushka would chop and dice it for their meals.

  Whereas Danny and I were offered provisions once or twice a day—usually on the order of cold, leftover spaghetti and stale bread—the dogs always seemed to be chomping down sirloin by comparison. Still, they were always hungry, which made us wonder if perhaps they might bite off an arm if we got too close to them when we were in the yard sharing their bathroom. Fortunately, they seemed to be more interested in watching than attacking. Like an audience, they would sit raptly looking at us do our business. We were their entertainment. I’m not sure the same couldn’t be said for some of the men in the gang, who seemed to overly enjoy watching me through windows and doors, and likely thought seeing me degraded like a dog was the ultimate peepshow.

  My fear of the hounds, if not the men, didn’t last long. I grew up around dogs and loved them, and I had more fondness for these four animals than I did for any of the human monsters in the house. While Danny—and all the ‘tough’ men—were petrified of the dogs and kept their distance, I would let them sniff the back of my hand, knowing that was a non-threatening gesture. They would sniff, sense that I liked them, and become playful and docile. Those are the kind of moments one takes for granted in life. I vowed to myself I would never take those moments for granted if I ever got out of this mess alive.

  That afternoon, the escapist idyll ended when the puppy, which they called ‘Roka,’ escaped out of the yard through a hole in the fence and ran off. I never saw such a commotion. Nearly everyone in the house went looking for it, and the entire neighbourhood joined in the search. The dog was never found, putting them all in a sour mood. I could only hope they didn’t take it out on us.

  Just being out of that brooding, suffocating house was refreshing. Several times that day, we were permitted to put on scarves and coats and hats and step through the deep snow. I felt my nose tingling in the bitter cold as I would find a spot to squat. Even the rush of cold on my bare bottom felt good. Danny and I even found a brief moment to laugh, the first time we had in five days, when he began covering up the snow he had soiled with fresh white snow.

  ‘You look like a dog,’ I told him. We both broke up.

  The laughter was fleeting. Late that afternoon, we were in the kitchen when the front door opened and in came about half a dozen men dressed in dark green, military-style uniforms, guns holstered around their waists. Danny and I reflexively tensed up. The day before, we had seen a truck drop off some heavy digging equipment of some kind in the backyard. Now, our imaginations ran wild.

  Were these rogue militiamen hi
red by Oleg to come and use that equipment to dig holes back there—holes that would be our graves? Not, as it turned out, on this day, anyway. The men did go into the yard, but only to work on the water pipe. They were, we guessed, local cops or security people paid off by Oleg to do the job rather than allowing anyone in the house who might see us and would not be trusted to keep quiet. At 5pm, the water was working again, and the uniforms marched back out the front door.

  Thus, on a day when nothing particularly eventful happened, good or bad, at various times during the day we thought we might be eaten alive by dogs or buried alive by people fixing a water pipe. That was what passed for reality in our current state of mind.

  Clearly, boredom now was our enemy, breeding all sorts of imagined nightmares. All we could think about was Monday. It could not come soon enough.

  13

  DAY SIX:

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 11th

  THE DACHA, KALUGA, AND PHILADELPHIA

  Beginning at around 9am, the dacha began filling up with people. Loud voices, trudging footsteps, and children’s squeals intermingled. Apparently, on weekends the house was a kind of gathering place for the family’s women, their friends and children, and, as such, a time for the men to vacate and go hang out in a place for the ‘men only.’ This evidently was such a male-bonding ritual that Oleg wanted to impress Danny with just how manly Russian men could be. Prisoner or not, Danny was a ‘wealthy Westerner,’ assumedly used to the finer comforts and ‘gentlemen’s’ pleasures life had to offer—though, in truth, only the first applied to Danny, who was never much for Animal House-style carousing.

  This, then, was to be Oleg’s day to show off the perks earned by a Russian Mob boss, with Danny as his witness and guest. At around 3pm, Danny was piled into a waiting Fiat Tipor, and another convoy of cars set out for points unknown. In the meantime, I would have to make do assimilating with the congregation of fat Russian hens and their whiny children.