From Russia with Blood

i

London—1992

The flamboyant young lawyer always made it his business to get a seat up front on the Concorde flight from New York to London. The first three rows of the supersonic jet were reserved for the most significant people on the plane, and he liked to number among them. He’d sat next to Jackie Onassis on one occasion, and another time his neighbor was Eric Clapton, so he always watched the other passengers boarding with a frisson of anticipation, eager to spot which notable might be joining him next.

The young couple who settled across the aisle in seats 1B and 1C captivated him instantly. It was a crisp autumn day, and the man, who didn’t look much older than thirty, was sporting an Armani couture coat with a magisterial brown fur collar. He was tall, tanned, and athletic, with designer stubble and a cloud of dark curls framing an appealingly open face. His slight female companion had pointed features, with waves of blonde hair tumbling over the shoulders of a soft leather jacket, and a newborn baby asleep in her arms. The lawyer thought them fabulous—and clearly very much in love. They must come from very important families, he hypothesized, since British Airways had seen fit to discriminate in their favor by placing them in row 1.

Not until the jet was soaring over the Atlantic did the tall man lean across the aisle and proffer his hand to the lawyer. “Scot Young,” he said with an unexpected Scottish lilt. “Should I know you?”

The lawyer was pleased at the opportunity this question afforded. He’d been enjoying a lot of publicity lately for his work on behalf of superrich and famous clients.

“You might,” he said cheerily, shaking Young’s hand. “I’ve been on the television recently. I’m a lawyer.”

Young’s smile broadened. His fiancée, Michelle, was busy breast-feeding their baby daughter, Scarlet, and he was bored. The family had been holidaying at the ultraluxe Sandy Lane resort, in Barbados, and had flown back via New York to do a bit of shopping en route. Young let it be known, with a confidential air, that he had paid for the entire trip—flights, five-star hotels, designer acquisitions, and all—in cash. That was a revelation that piqued the lawyer’s interest. Perhaps it explained their presence at the front of the plane, he thought. But Concorde tickets cost about eight thousand pounds each for a round trip. What sort of people paid for them in cash?

The two men passed the rest of the flight chatting pleasantly, and when they had landed at Heathrow and the bridge was being attached, Young asked for the lawyer’s card.

“I’ve got a little tax issue I’d like to talk to you about,” he explained as they stood and stretched their legs.

A fortnight later, Young strode into the lawyer’s central London office and closed the door.

“I’ve been robbing banks all over Europe,” he said matter-of-factly. “And every time I try to spend my money in the UK, the tax man wants to know where it came from.”

This struck the lawyer as an unusual predicament. Most of the criminal clients he had so far acquired—a group he referred to affectionately as “my crims”—tended to confine their activities to the UK. Young, it appeared, was a man of more international ambitions; an altogether more interesting class of crook. He assured his new client that he could help straighten things out. But first he would need to know more.

Young was a man who seemed to have been born in a hurry. Ever since he could remember, he’d wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the tumbledown tenement block where he grew up in the gritty Scottish port city of Dundee. He had dropped out of school early and started dealing drugs in the pubs and clubs of his home city before making his way to Edinburgh to ply his trade on a grander scale in the smoky cellar bars of the Scottish capital. What Young lacked in formal education he made up for in charm, eloquence, and cunning. He could talk almost anyone into anything, and his great gift was the art of making a deal. It was this talent that would eventually set him on the path to becoming a self-styled “superfixer” for some of the world’s richest and most politically exposed men. But first he needed to make it big on his own.

From his earliest days in Dundee, Young had an irrepressible habit of making dangerous associations. His first mentor was a gun-toting casino king named Alex Brown, who wasn’t afraid to settle a pub brawl with a shotgun and whose venues had a strange tendency to burn down in unexplained fires. Brown would eventually be found dead, floating facedown next to his luxury yacht in a Spanish marina, but that was long after Young had made enough money to leave Scotland for the brighter lights and bigger deals that London had to offer. And when he got to the capital, the young hustler set about forming an altogether more treacherous alliance.

Patsy Adams was one of three brothers who ran Britain’s most feared organized crime gang, and he was famed as one of the most violent figures in London’s underworld. The Adams family, or the A-Team, as they liked to be known, had amassed a fortune worth hundreds of millions of pounds through their profuse crimes. Patsy was the family’s enforcer: high-speed motorcycle shootings were his hallmark, and Scotland Yard had linked him to as many as twenty-five gangland hits. Young wangled an introduction to the gang boss when he got to London and worked hard to win his trust. He soon started working for the family—and that was when the cash really started flowing.

The A-Team distinguished themselves from Britain’s lesser crime gangs not only by their propensity for extreme violence but also by their international outlook. Scotland Yard had tracked the family’s connections with both the Colombian drug cartels and the powerful Russian mafia groups shipping their heroin and cocaine into St. Petersburg. The brothers were suspected of doing a brisk business trafficking those narcotics into Europe, on top of their healthy trade in racketeering, extortion, bribery, sex trafficking, money laundering, smuggling, fraud, gun running, theft—and armed robbery.

Young didn’t mention his association with Patsy Adams to the lawyer. But he did explain that he had teamed up with a crew of armed robbers who had made millions hitting banks across Europe. Most of the loot was stashed in bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein or in suitcases filled with more cash than they knew what to do with. But every time Young tried to splash out in the UK, he got questions from Inland Revenue that he didn’t know how to answer.

The problem had become more pressing since he had fallen in love. He had met Michelle when she was a successful fashion buyer in her early twenties and told her on their first date that he knew she would be the mother of his children. Now that had come true, and she’d agreed to become his wife, too. His fiancée certainly had a taste for the finer things in life, but she had no inkling that he was anything other than a legitimate businessman. He needed to find a way to spend his money in the UK freely so he could lavish her with the kind of luxury they both felt she deserved without arousing suspicion.

It struck the lawyer that there was a touching kind of naive candor about his new client. He wanted to be accepted into the wider community. It was nice, he thought, to see a young couple so much in love and moving up in the world.

He told Young he knew just the man to help get him on the straight and narrow. They needed to talk to a tax barrister.

When the lawyer ushered Young into the senior barrister’s chambers, they were met at the door by an eager clerk.

“This is going to cost you £3,500 an hour” was his greeting. That seemed like an eye-watering sum, but Young was desperate. He nodded, and they were shown through.

The barrister perched behind his desk and listened attentively as Young explained the whole story. When he finished, the barrister nodded, twiddled his thumbs, and asked some supplementary questions while the clock ticked. Then he leaned back in his chair and dispensed his prized advice.

“You should tell the tax man where you got the money,” he said. Young goggled at him. Confessing his crimes to the authorities was not a piece of advice he felt like paying for. But the barrister elaborated. It just so happened, he said, that the schedules of taxable earnings in the Income and Corporation Taxes Act of 1988 did not make any mention of money stolen in bank heists. Technically speaking, that meant Young was not liable to pay a penny on the proceeds of the robberies. Better still, the law protected people from incriminating themselves when making tax declarations—meaning Inland Revenue couldn’t turn him in to the police.

“They don’t want to stop money coming to London,” the younger lawyer chimed in sagely. If Young simply declared that all the cash was stolen, and if he agreed to pay tax on the interest he had earned and any future profits he made by investing it, the authorities would be happy.

To Young’s astonishment, that advice proved correct. He became a regular visitor at the lawyer’s grand Georgian house on the edge of Epping Forest, spinning up the drive in his Porsche each morning for another painstaking day sorting through his tangled finances and getting ready to come clean. After three months, the process was complete. As predicted, Inland Revenue accepted the declaration, and Young suddenly had millions of pounds sitting in his UK bank accounts.

On his final visit, Young pulled up in his Porsche and rang the bell carrying a large polished wooden box. Once inside, he sat on the sofa sipping a cup of tea and passing the time of day while the lawyer eyed the mystery object keenly. Only when he was getting ready to leave did Young hand the gift over.

“I wanted to thank you for what you’ve done for me,” he said with what the lawyer felt was a look of touching sincerity. “Why don’t you open it?”

The lawyer lifted the lid, and his mouth fell open. Inside was a solid-gold Rolex Daytona, brand new and sparkling, with a brown leather strap. Young took the watch from the box and fastened it to the lawyer’s wrist—where it remains to this day. Then he said goodbye and set off into the world a new man.

Oxfordshire, England—1996

From the window of the study overlooking the expansive grounds of Woodperry House, a Porsche could be seen gliding up the long gravel drive. The sleek vehicle purred to a stop outside the golden stone frontage of the eighteenth-century Palladian mansion—named after the Old English “wudu-pyrige,” meaning “the pear-tree near the wood”—and a tall, expensively dressed stranger climbed out. Hearing a knock, the Iranian academic arose from the paper he was finishing inside and made his way to the door, where he was greeted with a wide grin and an outstretched hand.

“Scot Young,” said the man outside. “I was on the way to Heathrow, and my wife said we’ve got to buy that house,” he continued, gesturing at a slender blonde woman waiting in the passenger seat. “If you want to sell it, I’d like to bid.”

Woodperry’s owner, the eminent Oxford University law lecturer Kaveh Moussavi, had not been planning on selling. But there was something strangely compelling about the man on the doorstep, and he found himself agreeing to a meeting in London a few days later to talk terms.

When Moussavi arrived in the plush bar of the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair, Young presented him with a flute of Champagne already poured from a bottle on ice by the table and raised his own for a toast.

“What are we celebrating?” Moussavi asked.

“I’m going to make you a deal you’ll be very happy with,” said Young with a flash of his engaging grin. “I’m going to buy your house in cash.” He pulled out a briefcase from under the table, and Moussavi’s eyes widened as he opened the lid. Inside, stacked to the brim, were rolls of fifty-pound notes.

Four years had passed since Young had reached his entente with the tax authorities, but he had not lost his taste for the thrill of a dangerous deal. He had continued his involvement with the Adams brothers, but he had recently set his sights on even loftier treasures. He and Michelle were now married with two small daughters, Scarlet and Sasha, so he had a whole family to think of. He’d been busy making new associations, and he wasn’t just dealing with the odd million stashed in this Swiss account or that suitcase anymore. The stakes were much higher.

Young said he’d pay £10 million—double what Woodperry would be worth on the open market—if Moussavi was prepared to accept cash. Then they’d declare a sale price of £2 million on paper, keeping the remainder off the books and tax free. Moussavi didn’t like that idea, but he’d come around to the notion of off-loading Woodperry, and he told Young he’d happily accept market value if the money came by bank transfer.

It didn’t take the Oxford academic long to spot that something was amiss once the deal got under way. The first clue came at the Dorchester, when Young pulled £45,000 out of his briefcase to jump-start the sale but asked Moussavi to make out a receipt for £50,000. So he’s obviously accountable to someone, Moussavi thought, and he’s taking a little bit off the top. That alone raised enough questions in his mind for him to task an elite real estate agency with checking out Young’s background. The agent called him back sounding perplexed.

“I’ve looked and looked, and there seems to be nothing there,” he said. “I’ve no idea where his money comes from.”

When Moussavi asked Young directly about his wealth, the Scotsman said he had made his first money in property and invested millions in a chip-and-PIN internet technology company with help from a brilliant Soviet mathematician. Not long after, Young turned up at Woodperry with a beetle-browed stranger who wanted to look around the grounds. The small, suited newcomer spoke in a heavy Russian accent with a hurried air. Was he the Moscow-based benefactor who had helped Young make his big technology investment? Was this the person whose money was really going into the purchase of Woodperry House?

Young was splashing cash in all directions as he prepared to take ownership of the Oxfordshire mansion. Just as claimed, he pumped £2.6 million into an internet chip-and-PIN firm, taking a 50 percent stake alongside the Finnish billionaire and Conservative Party benefactor Poju Zabludowicz, and soon after that began lining up a £2 million investment in another internet venture with the retail tycoon Sir Philip Green. He had, he liked to boast, joined the billionaire’s club. But still, when the property agent chased Young for details of which bank he would be using to pay the asking price for Woodperry, it seemed he was stalling—as if he was having trouble finding a way to marshal the cash. Spooked, Moussavi phoned him and got tough.

“You’ve got twenty-four hours to pay, and then you’re going to forfeit the asset and I’m going to sue you.”

Young was unfazed. “I’m going to deposit cash into the account tomorrow,” he said.

“Do you really mean cash?” Moussavi asked, still somewhat disbelieving.

“Kaveh, I mean cash. Are you sure you don’t want to accept it?” Moussavi said he was sure. He wanted the money aboveboard, by bank transfer, not under the table. Lo and behold, the next day the millions arrived in Moussavi’s account by transfer from Coutts—the queen’s bank.

The Youngs were blissfully happy in their new two-hundred-acre mansion. They enrolled their two daughters at the ultraexclusive Dragon School, in Oxford, alongside the children of a glittering array of celebrities, and Michelle loved being the lady of the manor, overseeing a grand redecoration and marshaling armies of domestic staff to keep the house shipshape. She woke up every morning, looked out the bedroom window at the rolling grounds, and felt amazed that she was mistress of all she saw. When the snow fell in January, she bundled the girls into down-filled jumpsuits, and the family ran outside to tumble around on the marshmallow lawn.

But in the quiet rural community surrounding their stately home, the Youngs were causing a stir. When they hired an upscale local architecture outfit to redevelop Woodperry, the firm’s owner rang Moussavi, an old acquaintance, in a state of consternation.

“Mr. Moussavi, there’s something that smells very bad about these people,” he said. “I’ve seen their furniture! This is clearly new money. Where did they get it from?”

Meanwhile, Michelle was ruffling feathers at the school gates by boasting of her extravagant lifestyle—the exotic holidays and diamonds and twice-weekly dinners at Raymond Blanc’s double-Michelin-starred restaurant, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Young wasn’t making things any better by tearing around the country lanes at top speed in his Porsche, often leaving the engine running noisily outside the quiet local pubs. Those who did welcome the wealthy new family into the community on first appearances quickly began to smell a rat on closer inspection. Young’s claim to have been educated at Stowe—one of Britain’s most exclusive boarding schools—was belied by his habit of passing the port the wrong way at dinner.

Moussavi was becoming increasingly suspicious when one day, around a year after the sale of Woodperry went through, he received a knock on the door of his new nearby home from a plainclothes detective. The man was from Special Branch, the national security wing of Scotland Yard, and he wanted to talk about Young. The Yard had suspicions, he said, that the buyer of Woodperry was involved in the laundering of Russian money. Might Moussavi know anything about that?

The academic said he didn’t—though he spilled the beans about Young’s proposal to buy Woodperry off the books in cash—but he privately resolved to find out more. He began making his own inquiries into how Young had really come into his fortune. When he put that question to a mutual acquaintance—a local wheeler-dealer who had become friendly with the new arrivals—his question met with a look of surprise.

“Don’t you know?” the man asked with amusement. “Scot is Boris Berezovsky’s bagman.”

Suddenly the picture got a lot clearer. Moussavi knew all about Berezovsky, the notorious Russian oligarch who had made a vast fortune buying up state assets at rock-bottom prices under the country’s increasingly drunken president, Boris Yeltsin, and had siphoned much of it offshore to buy himself lavish properties and yachts all over Europe. So that’s where all the money came from, Moussavi thought. Young was, in his estimation, just a greedy barrow boy who knew how to bullshit his way in the world, but getting involved with the Russian robber barons was a dangerous business. From then on, Moussavi had a strange premonition about the new man in his mansion. It’s mathematically probable, he thought, that Scot Young will end up dead.

ii

Moscow and St. Petersburg—1994

The Moscow sky was choked with snow as a small, stout tycoon climbed out of his limousine, his black eyes glittering with restless energy. Boris Berezovsky hastened toward the grand prerevolutionary mansion that served as his command center, followed by a phalanx of bodyguards. The godfather of the oligarchs was rarely unhurried, and today was no exception. Berezovsky was expanding his empire.

The building, a restored nineteenth-century merchant’s residence, was set in an exclusive enclave of central Moscow close to the Bolshoy Ustinsky Bridge, over the frozen Moskva River, from which the Kremlin’s domes could be seen blooming brightly against the iron sky. Berezovsky had shut off the road leading to his headquarters by blocking it at both ends, turning it into a private club for Moscow’s emerging business and political elite. Inside, it was smoky and sumptuous, with stuccoed ceilings, grand chandeliers, and ornate Italian furniture arrayed around a bar stocked with the finest wines rubles could buy.

The renowned Soviet mathematician, engineer, and chess obsessive had transformed his fortunes since the fall of the USSR, and now, in his midforties, he could call himself rich for the first time. As soon as the Iron Curtain came down, he seized the moment to start importing German cars and the enterprise exploded as Russia opened up for business. Berezovsky soon became the biggest distributor for the state-owned car manufacturer, Avtovaz, profiting massively by acquiring its Ladas in bulk on consignment and paying for them later, once the money had been devalued by rampant hyperinflation sparked by the sudden removal of Soviet price controls. His company, Logovaz, had made hundreds of millions that way, and it had become the official Russian dealer for Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, Chevrolet, and several other prestigious Western marques. Logovaz was among the first big success stories of the new capitalist Russia. But Berezovsky always wanted more.

As he strode through the grand entrance of the Logovaz Club on this biting January morning, the businessman’s prized possession—his hulking mobile telephone—began trilling insistently. The caller was Logovaz’s general director, Yuli Dubov. He was overseeing the company’s latest grand expansion, and he had hit upon a major problem.

The city government of St. Petersburg was refusing to issue the papers confirming that Logovaz owned the site of the new flagship service center it was building for Mercedes in Russia’s second city. Opening without the right documentation would make the center a sitting duck for extortion by the city’s notoriously corrupt officials and marauding criminal gangs, and the date when the German car giant was expecting it to be up and running was fast approaching.