Best of Enemies

by Eric Dezenhall

  Dr. No reasoned that this was the job of a lawyer.

  Ilya shifted on his feet as the two hoods sat comfortably at the table. He expressed doubt that a judge would listen. He had been under the impression that Slava knew someone in a position of authority who might understand that his father had been framed.

  The gangster feigned shock. Was Ilya suggesting Dr. No would bribe a public servant? Why, heaven forbid! He would never do such a thing here in Russia! After all, bribes were illegal. Who did Ilya think they were?

  Ilya soldiered on, stressing that he had been led to believe that Slava could speak—or have someone speak—to the appropriate authorities to help his father get out of prison, or at least be treated better while he was in prison, to be protected.

  Dr. No asked if Ilya had the money. Ilya said that he did, removing the equivalent of $10,000 from his coat pocket, and set it down on the table. The junior gangster took the envelope and looked inside. He nodded as if he was pleased with its contents.

  “Will you help?” Ilya asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Dr. No responded.

  “What will you do?”

  “Let’s see, what will I do…?” Dr. No then outlined his horrifying proposal: He would leave Ilya alive, period. And he would do nothing for Gennady. Nothing. If, in fact, the FSB wanted him to rot, why shouldn’t Dr. No enforce their will? Who was he to tangle with the FSB? Ilya was instructed to tell whatever clown had told him to use Slava’s name that he met with a fine gentleman who vowed to do all he could to help his traitor father—even though he would get nothing from Dr. No. Ilya would say nothing else because if he did, Dr. No would find him, kill him, and mail pieces of him to his father. And then he would kill Gennady, too.

  “Do you understand?” Dr. No asked, unconcerned with the answer.

  Ilya felt his body go numb and break into a sweat. Did he just hear what he thought he heard? These animals would take his money and not raise a finger to help Genya. He looked at the two men as they sat passively at the table. He waited for a smile or a hearty Russian laugh along with an exclamation such as “We were kidding! Of course we’ll help you, silly boy!”

  But there was no reassurance, only the black eyes of a shark that would devour its prey as a matter of remorseless biology. Why did moviemakers feel the impulse to make these animals into Shakespearean kings, full of complexity and operatic pretentions, when they were nothing more than cockroaches?

  Ilya knew there was no arguing at this point. The affair had been adjudicated. He left the back room, a journey of only a few steps that felt like a long climb to the summit of Mount Everest. As he passed into the store, he thought that the tattooed punk from earlier might jump out and knife him. He had no knife, but his mocking words cut deeply as Ilya opened the front door to leave.

  A voice mocked him from the shadows: “Say hello to Slava for us.”

  Ilya proceeded down the dark Moscow street, his head aflame with betrayal and despair. Cowboy and his fabled connections had come up woefully short. Even Cowboy, with all his shadowy associates, was capable of getting scammed in the new Russia. What would he do now? What would become of his father given the kinds of beasts that inhabited this world? Was his father getting his just deserts for something he had done in the world of espionage, or even in the karmic sense because of how he had treated his family? Ilya wasn’t sure where he would even go now. He didn’t know how he could tell his family about what had just happened, but he would have to tell them something. Things couldn’t get much worse, could they? Yes, they could, he decided. They could kill his father. They could kill his family. Still, Ilya was filled with such rage now, he decided he would tell his family, and Cowboy and his father’s friends, exactly what had taken place.

  As he made what he thought was a life-or-death decision, Ilya was overcome by terrifying possibilities: What if his ordeal had nothing to do with freeing Gennady at all? What if it had been nothing more than an opportunistic mafiya scam to shake down a vulnerable family for cash? What if his father’s fabled spy friends were no better connected than the old woman standing on the corner in a babushka with a sack of spoiled groceries. Hell, Ilya thought, there probably had never been a Slava at all.

  Back in Virginia, Ron Fino was likewise stunned when Cowboy told him what had happened to Ilya in Moscow during the Slava caper. He assured Cowboy that he had been in touch with serious players and vowed to find out what had gone down. Fino, however, wondered why the CIA wasn’t doing more, asking, “Why do you want to do this on your own?”

  “Because,” Cowboy answered, “my own fucking company is a coward.”

  Meanwhile, Cowboy, Fino, and the Shoffler Brunch boys dug in, and Ron Fino took Ilya’s rip-off so personally that he made a partial reimbursement out of his own savings.

  16

  THE GULAG REDUX

  C’mon, Jack. Don’t forget me. I once saved your life. Now you can save mine.

  Gennady’s first trial finally took place in May and June of 2006 in the Golovinskiy district court of Moscow. The initial charges were for terrorism, given the explosives and firearms “found” at his dacha. Gennady was certain that the terrorism charges were psychological warfare and that they wouldn’t actually bring such a thing into open court—but they did. Moreover, the prosecutor was asking for nineteen years, essentially a death sentence, with a little torture thrown in. Gennady couldn’t believe it and was sure a jury wouldn’t either when they saw the evidence. His attorneys requested a jury trial, but the judge denied the motion. No, a judge—one judge—would decide his case. Gennady knew what that meant: an operative in the pocket of the FSB.

  Gennady was hospitalized at least once before his trial began, other than for the injuries sustained during his arrest, but Ilya arranged through his father’s friends for the medical leave as a reprieve from prison. The FSB, of course, made sure that Gennady was held in a hospital within the walls of the notorious Matrosskaya Tishina (Sailor’s Silence), where some of the plotters in the 1991 Soviet coup had been held. The message was clear: this was a prison for traitors. “I was chained to a bed like a dog for two weeks,” Gennady recalls.

  As the case against him unfolded, Gennady’s diary notes betray abject desperation. “Reading the case! Something unbelievable!!! Liers!!! [sic] Savage!” The witnesses brought against Gennady were straight out of a Kafka story. Some of them were actually his fellow prisoners, who were given the same baggy suit to wear as they testified against him in exchange for shorter sentences. Gennady recognized them from around the jailhouse. These were the witnesses against him? Yes, Gennady had admitted his terrorist plots to them, they said. He wanted to blow up the Kremlin. Lenin’s tomb, too. Did he want to blow up the Black Sea? Oh, yes, he certainly wanted to blow that up. There were no monuments or natural resources inherent to the Russian identity that Gennady wasn’t plotting to immolate.

  At one point a witness was asked to identify Gennady in a photo lineup with two other men: Motorin and Martynov. This lineup was submitted into evidence. Of all the photographs the witness could have been shown, the other two chosen for the lineup were the two notorious Soviet turncoat friends of Gennady’s. Really? The prosecutor asked the witness “which spy” did he speak to, just to send a message to Gennady that the FSB was screwing with him because he was a traitor.

  Prison authorities testified against him, too. They alleged that Gennady had smuggled weapons into the prison and had been violent. “Same shit!” is a repeated entry in his diary. Gennady’s lawyers investigated the witnesses in order to prepare their cross-examinations, but the witnesses were either inmates who had been coached in their testimonies beforehand or, worse, ciphers who didn’t appear to exist at all.

  Team Gennady knew things weren’t going well—and how committed the FSB was to nailing him—when they found out they had also stocked his garage, located a few miles from his dacha, with explosives. Gennady had a relative who used that garage for a car repair business, and he had visited the guy i
n the weeks before his bust. Apparently, the FSB had been following him and tapping his phones to make sure all their bases were covered. They wanted to be able to show that Gennady was so devious that he used an off-site garage for his terrorism business. To mimic telltale forensics, they laced his car’s steering wheel and door handles with the same kind of residue that was in the garage where the explosives were found, to create a link between the two locations. Gennady theorized that the FSB noticed he had bought paint for his dacha and had been cleaning his hands with kerosene. Fearing he might wash off any explosives residue, they had probably waited to apply a fresh smattering of residue in strategic locations immediately before his arrest just to be on the safe side.

  Gennady’s lawyers were frustrated and embarrassed that they could do nothing to stop the morbidly cartoonish prosecution. He had hired about a half-dozen attorneys since his arrest. Ilya had had to sell his father’s car in order to pay Gennady’s counsel, the very one that had been laced with explosives residue. Each of the attorneys came into the case ambitious and fresh eyed but left despondent when they realized what they were up against. Eventually, Gennady sensed that even his own lawyers were afraid to press things too hard lest they become enemies of Russian intelligence services. He was well aware that Russia doesn’t believe in a vigorous and adversarial defense, or even codified law, the way the US does, and lawyers are considered prudent to be mindful of this convention. “It’s not like in the US, where they have to prove a crime. If FSB says it’s a crime, it’s a crime.” Gennady eventually instructed Ilya to “stop spending money on lawyers. It’s decided.”

  While Gennady’s trial received scant media attention, journalists who paid attention to the case thought something didn’t seem kosher. Indeed, author and Russia expert Gregory Feifer, who witnessed the trial, recalls there was a theory floating around that Gennady had been arrested as part of a power play related to a security job he had held at his media company, NTV Plus. The story was that a Kremlin big shot wanted to take over the network and Gennady’s boss was resisting—it was all about dueling oligarchs. Gennady’s arrest, according to this theory, was a message: if the boss didn’t accede to the takeover, he might suffer a similar fate. Regardless of the seriousness of this account—and Feifer acknowledges it was just loose gossip—the words that crop up to describe the circumstances of Gennady’s arrest in news reports include “murky” and “unclear.”

  Then there came a sliver of light. Two KGB colonels and friends of Gennady testified that he had never even learned how to deal with explosives and that such weapons had played no role in his education. Gennady sensed at this point that even the judge became worried that the frame-up was too outrageous. Watching the surprise testimony, Gennady’s mind spun with the possibility that perhaps Jack had worked his magic after all.

  Gennady’s lawyers saw an opening and they took it. They sensed the judge’s trepidation. It was one thing to preside over a conspiracy but another to preside over a farce. Conspiracies were respected in Russia; farces were problematic because they created political risk. The charade of jurisprudence was central to the illusion of a modern and progressive Russia. The lawyers positioned the judge’s newfound willingness to consider new evidence, however limited, to their client as a victory, and perhaps, on some level, it was. They aggressively pressed the court about the ends to which Gennady was involved with terrorism and argued that the prosecution hadn’t produced a single witness to link him to a particular event or political cause. If Gennady was a terrorist, what was the target of his hatred? Who exactly were his associates? What exactly had he intended to blow up besides, well, everything?

  After the pushback on the allegations, the court lowered the charges against Gennady from terrorism to possession of explosives. The judge convicted him and sentenced him to three years in a low-security prison (which actually turned out to be a series of prisons). Gennady was too miserable to see this as a victory despite it being far better than the initial nineteen-year request from the prosecution. After all, he was getting three years for doing nothing. Nothing at all.

  Gennady hadn’t been wrong to wonder whether the judge’s newfound flexibility hadn’t been due a little help from his friends. Indeed, Ron Fino had been doubling down on his contacts in Russia and likely got to the son of either a judge or someone in a position to influence the court. In other words, there was a distinct possibility that Gennady’s somewhat improved fate had been due to something other than shrewd lawyering. Moldea says, “Although there were complications with our mission, I later learned that the payoff to the Russian official was made and that, although he was not released, Vasilenko received a significantly reduced prison sentence.”

  But the hard work was just beginning. Gennady was still extremely vulnerable in the Russian prison system, and something bad could happen to him at any time. In Russia, you were only as good as your last payoff, not to mention your last blessing from someone powerful, or very, very scary. Fino was able to reach out through intermediaries, including a notorious arms smuggler, to the elusive Slava, who was furious to learn what had happened when Ilya had met the thugs to make a payoff for his father. The mobster who had pocketed Ilya’s money, a man known as “Timor,” soon found himself on the receiving end of a “valuable life lesson,” according to Cowboy, who wouldn’t go into details about the punishment, save that it was gruesome. “It makes my lost finger seem like a splinter,” he said. “Let’s just say he will never live another minute on this planet without being acutely aware of his fucking mistake.” With that, Cowboy made a gesture of zipping his lips. But he couldn’t suppress a subtle grin, leaving the rest to the imagination.

  Fino also worked other Russian contacts, including Alexander Orlov, a former Kremlin journalist who introduced him to Pyotr Aven, president of Alfa Bank. Through these contacts, Fino got word back to FSB operatives that Gennady had never given in to Cowboy’s overtures and had not, in fact, betrayed his country. While skeptical of this report, Gennady was nevertheless transferred to a somewhat less brutal prison in Smolensk.

  During his inexorable shuttling from prison to prison, Gennady was able to correspond with Cowboy a few times, including via email from a low-security koloniya (colony) in Desnogorsk, which is distinct from the harsh prison also located in that town. In Desnogorsk prison there were no toilets, just buckets. Also, in koloniyas, inmates can sleep; in prisons, they regularly cannot because they have to rotate on concrete, often urine-stained floors. Gennady never knew when he’d be in a prison or in a koloniya. Masha and the boys even visited Gennady at Desnogorsk koloniya, and the photos from that time depict a smiling, if gaunt, Gennady—and a very relieved-looking Masha.

  Dion Rankin heard from Gennady only once during his imprisonment. Gennady called him from Desnogorsk in December of 2007, saying, “I’m okay, but I’m in the hospital. I needed a rest.” Gennady said he had injured himself while working out. “We spoke for an hour. His spirits were pretty good. Then he got busted for having [an] illegal cell phone with an illegal SIM card,” Dion says.

  The backdrop to Gennady’s imprisonment was his captors’ unrelenting pursuit of a confession, and they had no intention of releasing their prize catch any time soon. How vindictive were Russian bureaucrats? On the eve of Gennady’s long-scheduled 2008 release, they planted an illicit SIM card in the duffel bag in his prison cell.

  The SIM card bust was no small deal. Initially, Gennady had been told that his stay at Desnogorsk would last three weeks, but then he got pinched and knew he was in big trouble. Gennady wrote in his diary: “The doom’s day [sic]… I was set up. The authorities dropped SIM-card in my bag and [indecipherable] punishment, means official report and no release from prison!” The following day, Gennady added: “First thing in the morning I was officially punished… At 11 o’clock I have a heart attack—ambulance gave me a few shots and disappear. I feel terrible… I’m in their hands. They want my death… Fuck them!!!!”

  It is unclear whether Gennady
actually suffered a heart attack in the clinical sense, but there is some evidence of his suffering an acute cardiac event. In one diary entry, Gennady wrote: “Hell of a day! Blood pressure = 200 x 130!” Even if he didn’t have a heart attack, one couldn’t blame him for suffering a serious stress-related episode given the frame-up and what surely awaited him, which was another trial and extended prison stay, this time in Desnogorsk. He was charged with “severe rule breaking,” and in addition to the SIM-card count, the prison accused him of illicitly using someone else’s computer.

  During a trial in November and December of 2007, Gennady’s lawyers found an ally who would claim that he had accidentally put the SIM card in his bag. The ever-patient Sasha Zhomov was tiptoeing through the shadows and colluded with the judge in Gennady’s case to make sure the ally’s claim was soundly rejected. Moreover, when he returned to his cell, the ally found himself on the receiving end of a serious beating for abetting Gennady’s defense. Gennady was convicted, which added a few more years to his sentence. This time, his ultimate destination was the dreaded prison in Bor.

  But first, a few more stops.

  The sudden-transfer scenario was becoming more familiar to Gennady: He would be adjusting to prison life when early one morning he would be kicked awake by a guard holding his duffel bag. “Time to move,” the guard would say, and Gennady would be tossed into the back of a windowless van and transported to some other gulag-like abomination.

  In one of his more flexible prison stays, Gennady was coaching volleyball and heard a voice coming from behind him. He had grown accustomed to voices so hostile that they sounded like weapons, thus he was surprised to hear one that was not only friendly but familiar: “Wouldn’t it just be easier to bring in ringers?”