From Russia with Blood. Heidi Blake
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.
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.
“Our people can’t do anything,” Dubov said, sounding desperate. “And this could really damage our relationship with Stuttgart.”
Berezovsky knew exactly what needed to be done. “You’ll have to go and see Putin,” he said.
Dubov was mystified. “Who the hell is Putin?”
As the limousine swept through the snow-cloaked St. Petersburg streets, past the golden domes of the Kazan Cathedral and the gleaming columns of the Winter Palace, Dubov reflected on what little he knew about the man he was getting ready to meet for lunch. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Berezovsky had explained, was the city’s deputy mayor—an unfailingly loyal but ever more powerful lieutenant to the aging Anatoly Sobchak—and these days he was the one who ran the show.
“He’s a really good person,” Berezovsky had told him. “And he’s really in charge of what’s going on in the city.” Dubov had entertained many politicians in Moscow as Logovaz built its business, and he was in little doubt about how the meeting with Putin would go. He would have to spend hours plying the deputy mayor with delicious food, fabulous wine, and plenty of vodka before they turned to the problem at hand and what it would cost to solve it.
As