Andrei Kurov was shot dead entering the Atlantis Casino on Ulitsa Tverskaya in Moscow. His body was sprawled in the dirty snow brightened by his blood only two days after his return from the USA. Two neat bullet holes, shot at close range, in the head, the mark of a real professional.
He had been in one of his characteristic brash moods as he had flown back to Moscow after more than a decade in the Miami sunshine. He had slugged Veuve Cliquot from the bottle, speaking movingly about caring for his ailing mother and his retirement; he planned a set up a small business in Moscow. Those who knew him well that meant racketeering and drug trafficking.
However, it was clear that Kurov’s motives for returning home involved self-preservation more that a visit to his ailing mother. He had fallen out with Ortega and the new mobsters who had taken over Miami Beach.
Behind his bravado lay fear, hidden beneath his suntan and the thick gold bracelet he sported with a diamond studded Rolex. He dreaded the idea of financial hardship and old age in the misery and harsh conditions of the poor in modern Russia. He was no longer in the same class of the new generation of gangsters. He had gone soft; he had got involved in the kind of business he no longer had the necessary guts or intelligence to handle, mixing in affairs that did not concern him, such as with Kennedy and the Estonians.
His problems started with the decision of Ortega to eliminate Erikkson, he had confided the task to Kurov as a test. The Swede had become a risk and had grown too greedy, attracting attention in Russia by moving large quantities of forged bank notes and bonds with that two faced Caucasian gypsy, Demirshian.
Ortega did not need that vodka sotted Swede with his cheap mulatta shooting his mouth off about that kind of business around Havana or anywhere else. Not only that, but the problems in Chechnya told him of the need to distance himself from Demirshian and his friends for a while.
Kurov had been full of cocaine the evening when he had left the Ortega residence on Indian Creek, instead of getting one of the men to drive him to Erikkson’s hotel, he had taken the cigarette boat in the direction of the Port of Miami.
The police estimated he had been travelling at over 80mph in a 25mph zone when he had hit a cruiser, slicing it in two on the inter-coastal waterway, the cigarette boat had ended up ramming a dock near a condo almost five hundred yards away from the crash leaving bodies and wreckage behind it.
With over fifty thousand miles of waterways and three quarters of a million boats in the state, water travel was a common form of transport for many Florida residents and especially those who lived on the banks of the inland waterways such as Ortega.
Kurov, miraculously unhurt but shaken had fled the scene his mind befuddled by cocaine, hailed a passing taxi to take him to the Down Town area to Erikkson’s hotel where he bungled the job, shooting an innocent tourist. Not that the tourist was a problem, that happened all the time in Miami, but the risk was that Kurov be linked to Ortega, which would have much graver consequences.
The Miami Beach gangsters had labelled Kurov as ‘The Tsar’. It was a term of contempt rather than a compliment; they had observed him develop a preference for a princely life-style rather than attending to his business, that was to say in organised crime.
His friends and acquaintances, described the fifty-five year old Kurov as a worried man. He did not want to meet his end as his partner and close friend, who was gunned downed at his Miami Beach home two years earlier.
Kurov panicked, with good reason, he fled Miami to London carrying with him a large quantity of the mobs counterfeit dollar bills and bonds which he hoped to be able to negotiate with Raymond Reagan, one of Kennedy’s men who had been innocently used to carry out his dirty work as his boss jetted around the world in style.
The Miami Beach area, a ten kilometre strip of Florida coastline, was altogether different from the place it had been when Kurov and four other Russians arrived after fleeing Cuba and the PNR, the Policía Nacional Revolucionaria, who had been investigating drug trafficking, over ten years previously.
In 1990 Miami Beach had become a bolt hole for certain Soviet expatriates and fugitives who had quit Cuba as the relations between the two countries had become bitter and filled with mutual recriminations after fall of the Soviet Empire. It had since become the front line in the drugs war as ruthless gangs, most of them Cuban but also Russians, whom the Cubans openly detested for their superior attitude and their racist attitude, battled for the control of the US multi-billion dollar cocaine trade.
The Russian gangsters, who ran the Miami Beach drugs trade with their Latino counterparts, had earned a reputation for their brutal methods.
There was no visible evidence to link Kurov directly to crime on the Miami Beach, but there was little doubt that he was close those operating on the wrong side of the law. It was not without reason that the city had been renamed ‘Crime Beach’ and the gangsters had become more vicious as the stakes had grown.
Kurov’s gangland execution was carried out as an urgent $5,000 contract when his arrival in Moscow was announced to Ortega. Ortega had learned of the disappearance of the counterfeit bills and bonds by their owners who wanted them back and had expedited two strong-arm villains to London to ensure the goods were returned.
Federal Drug Agency officers had been observing the activities of the Russians, and informed Scotland Yard of the departure to London by the two mobsters, unfortunately a little too late to intercept them. They were Dublin before the police picked up their trail again.
Miami Beach was infested with Russian criminals and drug runners. “There are places where they have completely taken over. They have their own infrastructure and form tightly knit groups, which make it very hard for us to penetrate,” the Agency had told the British police.
When Kurov had settled in Florida ten years previously he had been a redoubtable figure. Those who came across him treated him with respect. His past made people think twice before criticising him. However, in recent years, he had been confronted by new Miami gangsters hardened by their experience in Eastern Europe, who distrusted him and disliked the attention he attracted by his ostentatious life style.
Kurov ran a club, which had been the scene of shootings, stabbings and punch-ups linked to drugs and traffic in counterfeit currency, since it had been opened three years previously. It had been bombed and the man who was once considered untouchable had become vulnerable. It was time to get out.
Even Kurov’s former Cuban cronies began to feel he was a liability. “I had a lot of respect for him back in Havana, but a few years after he moved here Kurov started acting like a jerk.” said another Russian gangster living in Miami Beach. “Down here you do a bit of business and keep a low profile.”
While some of Kurov’s drinking partners grew rich on drug money, Kurov found it increasingly hard to support the expensive life style to which he and his wife Tatiana had become accustomed to. “Andrei owes a lot of money to the wrong sort of people,” said an underworld source told the press.
Kurov’s business interests including an Cuban restaurant, a bar and a night-club, had taken a turn for the worse and a couple of years back he had put his villa on sale which was worth a million dollars to raise fresh cash, but did not find a buyer.
Kurov was shot down by a tattooed drug runner from Moscow nicknamed the ‘Chaika’, seagull in Russian, who told those who cared to listen, “Miami Beach had got too nasty for faggots like Kurov.” Chaika earned his name from sea bird calls he used as signals to his accomplices waiting on the beaches for the smuggled cocaine that arrived on the gofasts.
The Chaika openly boasted he would never stand trial for a murder he committed. His victim, a Colombian who had crossed him, was tossed overboard from a gofast tied up in a sleeping bag weighed down with stones, The Chaika recorded the screams and played them over the telephone to his friends. “We had very little trouble since then,” he boasted.
Each year some two hundred million dollars of Colombian drugs were intercepted and confiscated off
the Florida coast, a mere fraction of the total quantity imported into the USA.
“It was where the drug runners taught the mobsters the business and where the mobsters provided the drug runners with cash to work.” The US Customs described it as a symbiosis that had developed between the production end of the drug industry in Colombia and its marketing counterpart in the USA.
Chapter 78
The Plot
Offshore Islands Page 77
