Last to Fold
For Marcelline,
who makes everything possible
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
The news broke first on Ibansk.com, as it often does these days, the hyperbolic blog having filled the void left by the Kremlin-controlled media for informative, if overheated, news of the New Russia. They say even Putin reads it—secretly, of course. Citizen Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, the anonymous impresario behind Ibansk, was digging in the Cheka’s graveyard again, a favorite spot of his and a dangerous place to be found with a shovel. No one’s caught on to Ivanov yet, but plenty of people would happily see him buried. I know because I know a lot of them. As I read his latest post, I had the feeling the list just got longer.
OLIGARCH FOUND?
Has a final chapter been written in one of Ibansk’s more sordid tales—that’s saying something, no?—the greed-driven life and none-too-early death of one of New Russia’s most notorious oligarchs? Or is this the first entry in a new book of mystery and deceit?
Anatoly Kosokov. Even longtime denizens of Ibansk will be scratching their heads, pulling at the cords of memory. Kosokov? Who the hell, pray tell, is Kosokov? Abramovich, Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Khodorkovsky—sure, all well-known names, although two live in London, one in Tel Aviv, and one in solitary confinement in Siberia. But Kosokov?
Ivanov asks, how soon we forget? Patience. He will explain all.
Kosokov wasn’t as flamboyant as his fellow thieves. He didn’t buy yachts, estates in England or France, or football clubs. Still, he was just as ruthless and made himself almost as rich—until the end.
An accountant by training, Kosokov worked in the vast
aparat
of the Soviet Finance Ministry. His sister married one of Yeltsin’s chief aides. Sounding more familiar? In the early years of transition, he acquired a series of banks and built them into Rosnobank, Russia’s third largest. He was worth billions. Then came the financial crisis of 1998, the collapse of the GKOs (an Ibanskian version of a financial guarantee if there ever was one), and the devaluation of the ruble. Fortunes evaporated overnight, including Kosokov’s. Or did it?
I remembered Kosokov. A short, coarse, ambitious man, too sure of himself by half. He made a point of telling you how well he knew everyone from Yeltsin on down. Exactly the kind of guy to make a killing in Russia’s train-wreck transition to capitalism. He wasn’t one of us—us being the Cheka, Lenin’s original and still my preferred name for the ChK/GPU/OGPU/KVD/NKVD/MVD/MGB/KGB/SVR/FKB/FSB. Most know it as the KGB, or today’s acronym, FSB. The secret police by any label you choose.
Kosokov was always around, acting as if he belonged. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it seemed odd, looking back. The Cheka has always taken care of itself first, and we were under attack from all sides back then, following the failed Gorbachev coup and the collapse of the Party. Kosokov was one who argued loud and long for putting us out of business. Our paths might have become intertwined later on, but I was long gone by then, and he, of course, had disappeared. Or had he?
I went back to Ibansk.com.
Rosnobank didn’t fail until a year later, October 1999. Rumors abounded—embezzlement, money laundering, financing ties to Chechen terrorists. The answers went up in smoke—literally, along with the depositors’ funds—in a spectacular fire that gutted the headquarters tower in central Moscow. Arson, certainly, but as with so many such investigations in Ibansk, the perpetrators were never found, even though this was without doubt a sophisticated crime involving much preparation and many hands. Nine dead, the life savings of millions—gone. Depositors queued for weeks to find they had nothing left. But this is Ibansk—who gives a damn about them?
The authorities went looking for Kosokov, although just what they planned to do if they found him is still a question. The case foundered, and in due course fell onto the slag heap of forgotten offenses.
Until now. A charred corpse has been unearthed—a decade old!—in an old Soviet shelter beneath the burned-out barn at Kosokov’s dacha in the Valdai Hills. And Ivanov is told—sssshhhhh!—in strictest confidence, by sources too well placed not to know, that DNA tests will prove it to be the body of Anatoly Kosokov.
Ivanov will neither waste bandwidth nor insult intelligence by listing the myriad questions this discovery raises. He
will
, however, go looking for answers. Keep your browsers open to Ibansk. Ivanov is on the case!
Even as an ex-Chekist, I don’t try to defend the Soviet system. I lived it on all sides, experienced everything it could inflict, for forty years. I still have the scars. I moved to New York to get away from my past and to keep some distance from the cauldron of Wild West capitalism, pseudo-democracy, and Cheka control we now refer to as the New Russia. Ivanov’s more direct. He calls it Ibansk, which translates roughly as Fucktown. Making a clean break is never easy, though, especially in this global age, even forty-seven hundred miles and an ocean away.
We have a saying in Russia. If a pig comes to your table, he will put his feet on it. Trouble is, no one tells you how to spot the pig.
CHAPTER 2
I found a parking place, legit, on East Eighty-third, just off Fifth. Good till eleven thirty, when the street cleaners come, but I expected to be on my way by then.
I’d driven uptown, Ivanov’s florid prose filling my head. He takes great pleasure in it, but it’s a far cry from the hard, flat, biting satire of the original Soviet-era creator of Ivanov and Ibansk, Alexander Zinoviev. He was a master wordsmith. Fucktown was his moniker then, when it was even more apt.
My destination was two blocks south, and that’s all it took to work up a sweat. We were entering the second week of a mid-June heat wave. The thermometer hadn’t seen the seventies in six days. Not the dry heat of Chandler’s Santa Anas, the kind that made meek wives thumb carving knives while eying their husbands’ necks. This was heavy, soaking New York heat. The air clung to your body like a wet black garbage bag, and everybody on the street looked like he carried a meat-ax. Yesterday topped out at ninety-nine, and Con Ed blew a transformer. Most of Midtown lost power. Office buildings emptied, and bars swelled—the former had lost air-conditioning, but the latter still had ice. The city seemed evenly divided between those fuming at the disruption and those determined to turn calamity into a good time. I had one foot in each camp.
The aftereffects were still being felt this morning, including on the subway, which was one reason I drove uptown. I enjoy heat, most of the time. Where I grew up, there was precious little of it. Even so, like everyone else, I was hoping this would end soon.
The weather wasn’t the only thing aggravating New York. A credit crunch, not too different from the one that wiped out Kosokov, was jerking the financial markets around like a sadist with a dog on a leash. The previous week, on Wednesday, the stock market dived three hundred points. On Thursday it lost another two twenty. It tried to rally Friday morning, before the bottom fell out and the Dow lost five percent. Yesterday was a shaky day, but flat, a relief to everyone. Nobody was predicting what would happen next. I keep a little money in the market, but I’m enough of a Marxist not to bet too much on the cornerstone of capitalism. Like Chekhov said, when you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around you. That’s a minority point of view in this town.
I was early, so I crossed the street to get a better look at 998 Fifth Avenue from the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum. Twelve stories of Italian Renaissance–style limestone evoked wealth and solidity—a lot of wealth and solidity. The building’s exterior was newly cleaned, and the stone shone bright white. Panels of green and gold marble, set into the walls at the eighth and twelfth floors, sparkled. One of the first apartment buildings that was designed to coax New York’s wealthy out of their town houses into a uniquely American residential experiment—communal living for millionaires. The facade reminded me, as the stolid prewar co-ops on Fifth and Park often do, of the massive Stalinist apartment blocks that line several of Moscow’s main boulevards. They have the same solidity, the same anonymity, the same imposing mass, the same we’ll-be-here-long-after-you’re-gone attitude. Not that astonishing, given that many were built around the same time. The Moscow buildings, however, were constructed for a completely different kind of communal living, every room jammed with multiple families. No workingmen (other than servants) ever lived at 998 Fifth, and the men who did were unlikely to appreciate the comparison.
I knew from the real estate columns that apartments in buildings like this rarely came on the market, and when they did, the prices ran into tens of millions. A broker I’d dated once told me, with more than a little breathless reverence, you needed three times the purchase price in liquid assets—stocks, bonds, cash—before the co-op boards that ruled these residential fiefs would even think of letting you in the door. The ratio was even higher in “the best” buildings. That relationship didn’t last, probably because she figured out I wasn’t Avenue material. The man I was going to see, Rory P. Mulholland, had no problem making the cut—or hadn’t when he bought the apartment. Today, if the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Post
were to be believed, he was feeling the pinch.
I pictured Mulholland as an American Kosokov—plump, arrogant, imperious. The little research I’d done supported that impression. A second-generation Irish immigrant, he’d also made his fortune as a banker, turning a sleepy New England credit union into America’s sixth-largest lender, mainly by catering to people with credit ratings others wouldn’t touch. FirstTrustBank was the country’s most aggressive marketer of credit cards and a major player in the subprime mortgage market. Mulholland preyed on the poor, charging a healthy premium for providing them access to credit the rest of us take for granted. He was the kind of man Marx blamed for the world’s problems. Lenin would have had him arrested, Stalin—shot. Now maybe the markets were going to mete out their own brand of punishment. It was becoming more and more clear that Mulholland had borrowed long and lent short, which even an ex-socialist knows is a form of Russian roulette. Wall Street sharks, sensing one of their own wounded in the water, were circling. FTB’s stock had almost halved since Wednesday.