Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  The big problem wasn’t getting Danny to break—the cops were confident that once he came to trust them and feel safe from harm, he would loosen up and spill the truth. It was that they had only seventy-two hours to get him to do it. Under the absurdities of Russian law, charges had to be filed within that time, or the suspects would be freed and never prosecuted. The prosecutor would need both Yvonne and Danny to jointly make the case; thus, a rift between them would be disastrous.

  The snafu was so serious that Colonel Rushailo himself came to see Danny and explain how vital it was that his story match up with Yvonne’s. But Danny didn’t budge, and for hours, nothing changed. Day became night. Yvonne and Danny had yet to see each other. Time was still ticking, but on a different drama now.

  For Yvonne, those hours of interminable stagnation were like living in suspended animation. Everything around her just stopped. Her world again became the cramped confines of a small room with a single window.

  Bruce Scott of the Australian Embassy, who had told her he would be by to see her at 8:30am, had finally arrived at around noon. However, after Danny had been brought in, Bruce was permitted to only briefly see her, during which time Yvonne appealed to him to convince Zharov to let her see Danny. Not only did that not happen, Scott was then prohibited from seeing either of the Weinstocks. Danny’s intransigence was a serious roadblock, and until the two told the same story, Scott was told, they would be strictly segregated, with Danny undergoing the familiar ritual of a third-degree by people he didn’t know or trust.

  Rushailo, who thought the prosecution would move along with the same smooth clockwork as had the rescue mission, was disgusted by a complication which threatened to dim the spotlight in which he was prepared to bask. Pulling no punches, he bore in on Danny in his office.

  ‘Mr Weinstock,’ he said, through Andrei’s translation, ‘if these animals are walking free in seventy-two hours, who will they come after first, you or Yvonne?’

  Ironically, while this restive drama played out at the Ministry of Interior, the story of the kidnap and rescue spread with major impact. Almost right after Danny had been found, word filtered from the MVD to Dimitry Afanasiev then onto Ian and Wendy Rayman and the FBI agents encamped at the house, then back to Jim Pelphrey.

  All had been waiting hours for the phone call that never happened. When the clock struck midnight in Wayne, even though no one at the house wanted to say it, the giddiness about Yvonne’s liberation drained along with his or her energy. An hour later, they were wearing their depression and fatigue like cloaks. Everyone wondered who would be the first to say out loud what he or she were thinking—that Danny must have been killed in retaliation for Yvonne’s rescue. When word finally came at around 1:30am that Danny was also safe, the kitchen erupted in whoops and hollers and high-fives—though years later, Gerry Ingrisano recalls the moment a bit more coolly, in typical FBI-speak. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘a good event.’

  After the celebration, he, Joe McShane, and Tom Cottone packed up and drove to the Newark FBI office to file reports. Hours earlier, the Newark office had sent faxes to the bureau’s Washington DC headquarters requesting confirmation of Yvonne’s rescue. Even in those early cables, the Newark boys had already begun to gild the lily, touting the American government’s lead role in the resolution of the crisis. One paragraph from that batch of faxes read:

  The location of Yvonne Weinstock and the arrest of subject[s] was accomplished through the cooperation and exchange of information between the US State Department and [Russian] militia officials.

  Nothing, of course, was said about the initial reluctance of the bureau to get involved. Rather, given the happy ending, the same bureaucrats who had stalled were more than willing to take bows—despite the fact that in the end the FBI’s ‘official’ involvement was of less value than the information passed along to Rushailo during the ‘non-official’ phase.

  Once Danny’s rescue was confirmed, the PR department at the Newark office was put to work drafting press releases about the successful mission. A release was sent to the media before the sun had even come up, lauding by name just about everyone—except, pending notification of their family, the Weinstocks, who seemed almost an afterthought in the overall story line. It began:

  An Australian citizen and his wife, being held against their will in Russia, were freed yesterday, in a unique case involving American, Russian, and Australian law enforcement agencies. The unidentified Australian couple was reportedly not seriously harmed after eleven days in captivity, during which time their Russian captors were demanding a payment of more than $1.5 million dollars [sic] from the victim’s relatives in New Jersey.

  The release went on to relate the role of ‘Dr Israel Rayman of Wayne, a brother-in-law of the Australian male victim’ in the phone calls, which the FBI ‘consensually monitored,’ gleaning telephone numbers, street addresses and other information [that] was it passed on to Russian police authorities through the US Embassy in Moscow, leading to the suspects being identified and pinpointed. Then, more preening: ‘This is another dividend derived as a result of the transformation which has occurred in what was the Soviet Union. Such close cooperation in a criminal investigation between these two agencies would have been heretofore unthinkable.’

  It concluded:

  [The FBI] complimented the Russian law enforcement officials and expressed gratitude to the US State Department in Moscow and to the Australian Federal Police for their critical assistance [and] also expressed his appreciation to the law firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen, located in the Packard Building, 15th and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An associate of that firm, Dimitry O. Afanasiev, assisted in establishing lines of communication with Russian authorities.

  Given the riveting, James Patterson-like plot line, the US government clearly sought to use the broad theme of unprecedented cooperation as a powerful political metaphor. By the next day, the media jumped on the theme. The New York Times was already preparing a front-page story for Saturday the 18th.

  In Moscow, meanwhile, Jim Pelphrey appreciated the feel-good vibe of the story as it was being spun by his government. After he terminated the connection with the FBI at 9am, he could finally leave the cramped guardhouse at the embassy and go to bed, pleased that the operation had been an epic success, although something about it stuck in his craw.

  When Jim Pelphrey broke contact with the FBI, he’d been in that guardhouse for close to twelve hours, and in all that time, no one at the embassy heard from the Russians. He asked himself a few times, ‘Aren’t we doing all this just so the Russians can get the information they want?’ If the FBI traced the call, didn’t the Russians want to know? The Americans did all this for them, and then the next thing the Americans hear, is that some Russian lawyer in Philadelphia is passing the information they needed.

  Jim was thrilled at how the whole thing came out. He thought it was great how all these barriers were broken to establish a method of communication with the Russian security services. But to be honest, he naturally thought he would be in the thick of the rescue, because the Russians had led him to believe that, but in the end, Jim did very little. He just had one long, all-night conversation with an FBI agent in New Jersey.

  He was a young diplomat at the time, very idealistic. When it didn’t happen the way he thought it would, his nose was put a little out of joint.

  I don’t know if Andrei wanted to tell me why Danny and I were being kept apart, but I kept pestering him so much about it that he eventually confirmed my suspicion that Danny was telling a different story from mine. But he still had to put up with me bugging him to let me see Danny, to persuade him not to protect the kidnappers.

  ‘How can you keep me from my husband? How cold-hearted can you be?’ I railed.

  I was just so cranky and so tired. I was angry with everybody for treating me like a prisoner. Andrei, for example, told me I shouldn’t even open the door to the office, because I might see the kidnappers being
led back and forth, and they might intimidate me. That, of course, only made me want to do it. Maybe I would see Danny out there. During one of the periods when Andrei was out of the office and I was being watched by blank-faced cops, I got up to stretch my legs and slyly pried the door open a crack.

  Amazingly, just as I peeked out, standing there, not five feet away, was Grigory Miasnikov! Before I could close the door, our eyes met, and he glared at me with the filthiest look imaginable. The hatred simply cut through my entire body. When I closed the door, my hands were trembling.

  I was more afraid of Grigory at that moment than I was at any other time, even when he stood by when Oleg and his henchmen were beating and stomping me. At that point, I knew I would never be able to testify against him at a trial. I was absolutely convinced that if I were ever in the same city or country, he would find a way to have me killed. That may not have been courageous, but such was the man’s power. He was that evil. Brilliantly evil. I just hoped the Russian authorities would be able to put him away.

  There was no chance of that as long as Danny kept clamming up about Grigory and the others. Fortunately, he had a change of heart. At around 9pm, some eleven hours after Danny had been brought in, Andrei returned. Looking almost guilty that he’d had to keep us apart, he waved excitedly.

  ‘Come,’ he said, ‘you can see your husband now.’

  My heels practically flew down those slick corridor floors, through the breezeway, back into the other Ministry building. Andrei, struggling to keep up with me, got to the original office I’d been in and flung open the door.

  I was expecting that when Danny saw me he’d sweep me up in a bear hug. The man I saw sitting slumped and weary in a wooden chair was barely recognisable as my Danny. He was a defeated man, scared, shaking. It was as if, having implicated the gang, he believed he had signed death warrants for our families and us.

  Wearing the gray cardigan sweater I’d knitted for him months ago, he looked up to see me. His face was gaunt and unshaven, his eyes distant. At first he seemed cold, not wanting or able to show any emotion.

  Seeing him this way, I realised he must have been through the wringer the last twenty-four hours. Even during the worst days at the dacha, he never looked as physically dissipated and defensive. I could tell he was petrified, just as I’d been when I was brought into this brooding black mausoleum. I reached out for him, touching his arms. He seemed to back away, like he didn’t want to be touched, and so I merely put my hands on his and gently squeezed them.

  For both of us, I realised right then, getting back to normal feelings and emotions wouldn’t be as simple as being rescued. We’d been in hell. Our minds and our souls had been damaged. The scars on our bodies would heal sooner than the inner psychological scars and the wall of numbness we’d erected. Neither of us would ever be the same.

  I drew a chair and sat next to Danny, holding his hand, and we began to talk. It was small talk, about getting something to eat, about where we would go and such, but it was a start.

  Fortunately, Bruce Scott was allowed to see us. He was the first to put us at ease, as opposed to all the rat-faced Russian cops who seemed to resent us for some reason. Bruce and his secretary brought us food, and he told us he had arranged for us to stay for the next few days at an Australian Embassy safe apartment until we would go home, as scheduled, the following Tuesday.

  Even now, though, we were not free to leave. The police work wasn’t over. First, our bruises would have to be photographed. An austere policewoman who told me to strip off all my clothes took me into another room. She then snapped Polaroid pictures of every conceivable area of my body, which made me very uncomfortable. We then had to go over our written statements, together now, with Andrei under the watchful gaze of another man who stood a few feet away, his arms folded haughtily.

  Every few minutes, as if to get approval, Andrei would say something to him in Russian. I wondered: Who is this big shot? He looked like he himself was a gangster who had stepped out of a B-movie. Around forty years old, dark-featured, his hairline receding, he wore a vivid red shirt and black tie under a black leather jacket—a pearl-handled revolver on his hip. After a while, he smiled and introduced himself as Colonel Vladimir Rushailo and congratulated us in broken English—although he seemed as if he really wanted us to congratulate him.

  We didn’t have any idea who he was, but we could tell this was a big moment for him.

  He seemed extremely pleased with himself; he felt he deserved adulation. That’s exactly what he was getting, as people in the Ministry came into the office to shake his hand.

  Watching him preen, I grinned wanly. Yet another crazy Russian character, I thought.

  It was now 10pm. The Ministry building had become empty again. All the paperwork was done. Grigory and the four other gangsters had apparently been taken to jail cells in the basement. Rushailo, having gotten his handshakes, had vanished. Andrei uttered the nicest-sounding words I believed I’d ever heard:

  ‘You are free to leave.’

  With Bruce Scott and Andrei leading us, we put on our coats and rode that ancient elevator down to the first floor and exited by the side gate where I had come in. There waited two cars, Scott’s limousine and Andrei’s police car. Danny and I got into the limo, and we drove off, while Andrei followed. Not five minutes away, we stopped at a modern residential building. We all went upstairs to the second floor, to a two-bedroom apartment much different than the cave-like flats we’d seen around Moscow. It was large and well furnished.

  I felt little comfort. Nothing, not even a fortress, would shield me from the fear I had that someone outside in the night was watching, waiting to take a shot. After all, only five of the gang had been apprehended. The police seemed to be content with that, but what about all the others who had aided in holding us? What about Boris? What about Sascha, the sewer rat who had raped me? They were all out there somewhere.

  For about an hour, both of us nervously paced the floor, taking looks out the window, as Bruce and Andrei sat in the living room talking and leisurely sipping tea. Since I was wide-awake, I used this time to make a blizzard of phone calls. I called Australia and spoke to Susan, to my sisters, to my parents, and said a few words to the kids. All of them, of course, knew nothing of the kidnapping, and Bruce told me the FBI had forbid Ian Rayman from telling the family a word about it, believing that if the news leaked out, we would have surely been killed. I told them all about the ordeal only briefly and matter-of-factly, saying the most important thing was that we were now safe and that we would be home on Wednesday.

  Then, at about midnight, a call came for Bruce Scott, who took it and told us the embassy had set up a conference call from America. Ian and Wendy were on the line, as was a lawyer in Philadelphia named Dimitry Afanasiev, whom we were told had been involved with the Raymans, the FBI, and the Russian police in a first-of-its-kind rescue mission approved at the highest levels of the American, Australian, and Russian governments.

  PART THREE

  THE AFTERMATH

  20

  MOSCOW AND MELBOURNE

  JANUARY–DECEMBER 1992

  At 11am, after a few fitful hours of sleep, Bruce Scott and Ian Wing, the senior trade commissioner at the Australian Embassy in Moscow, came by the apartment to pick us up. First, they took us to the embassy, which was located in a grid of streets known as Embassy Row. So many countries had their diplomatic missions there. At nearly each embassy, a fascinating ritual was going on.

  Russians waited in long lines to apply for passports to get out of the country now that they were officially permitted to do so. It seemed not to matter to which embassy they’d go; when a line became shorter, people from other lines would switch to that one.

  One of the most desirable, and longest, happened to be at the Australian Embassy on Kropotkinskaya Street, no doubt because Russians saw so little sunshine, they had designs on Australia’s January summer. Danny and I felt the same. We were literally aching to get out of this God
-forsaken tundra and recover from the horrors that Russia would forever embody for us. Merely getting inside the embassy was a large jump up the cultural scale. Seeing Bruce put some food into a microwave oven, we sat there wide-eyed. That’s how long it felt since we’d been away from civilisation. When we could drink Australian coffee instead of that tar-like Russian tea, it may as well have been champagne.

  We made some more calls home, and then it was back to the Ministry of Interior for more corroborative interviews by the Russian cops. The Organised Crime Department wanted to build an airtight case against the five gangsters before the weekend began and needed to get every detail straight. Somehow, the cavernous black Ministry buildings weren’t quite as forbidding on this morning, and the faces of the policemen not quite as morose—though, of course, this was probably my imagination. The faces of Grigory, Oleg, Robert, Kuzin, and Orloff—in the pictures from which I had to identify them—were no less frightening. God, how I hoped those monsters would be put away.

  Slowly, it began to occur to me that, despite the scars that still burned on our bodies and the near-death experience we had faced, there was no time for self-pity or even recuperation. We would have to turn our attention back to the business. We had all those deals on the table in Russia, notwithstanding the loss of Grigory Miasnikov as our conduit to the joint ventures.

  The first thing that became obvious to us was that we should stay away—far away—from Mikhail Rud, who we believed had been in cahoots with Grigory and may well have hatched the entire plot, though it could just as easily have been the doing of Grigory or even Matthew Hurd. We never would know the definitive answer to that riddle. This posed a delicate situation, since we had agreed to make good on Rud’s alleged—and bogus—’loss’ from the ill-fated fertiliser deal; that was the main reason we had come to Moscow. While we considered that agreement null and void given the extortion and torture perpetrated upon us, and had told the police all we knew about Rud, there was no hard evidence that he was involved. Still, how could we possibly do business with the man now?