Comrade J by Pete Earley

Author:Pete Earley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-07T04:30:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

SERGEI AND HELEN DEPOSITED $25,000 in a Moscow bank that was paying 200 percent interest—a rate that didn’t seem out of line given that inflation was unchecked. They were impressed. Armed guards stood watch in the ornate lobby and smartly dressed tellers eagerly answered their questions. A month later, they decided to drop by the bank to see how much interest they’d earned. When they reached the building, the offices had been stripped clean. No guards, no furniture, no employees—and no deposits. Their bank was one of 315 financial institutions in Moscow that disappeared overnight during 1994. Most were pyramid schemes. Sergei used his connections at the Center to look for the thieves. “The bank had been run by a Russian mafia clan and I was told it was better to lose the money than to be killed trying to get it back. It was a shock to me. Not losing the money—the change. The KGB had been the most frightening organization in the Soviet Union, but now these Russian criminals were more feared.” A study by Transparency International, a German think tank, found that only seven countries in the world were as corrupt as Russia. Contract killings in Moscow hit three hundred per year. A U.S. study warned that the Russian mafia had taken control of half a million businesses, fifty thousand banks, and one thousand corporations.

Sergei and Helen had returned to a Moscow that they quickly came to despise. “You’d see people on the street who couldn’t afford bread and then a new, shiny American SUV would race by and you knew it was a criminal.”

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