From Russia with Blood

v

Mayfair, London—2002

The Down Street butler was apoplectic. A small army of deliverymen was marching across the plush cream carpet, carrying trays heaped with delicacies that filled the Mayfair office with the powerful scent of stewed garlic and spice. There was lobio—beans simmered in wine and herbs; piles of khachapuri—bread oozing with cheese and runny eggs; and enough chicken in garlic and walnut sauce to sink a battleship. The butler ran the kitchen at Down Street with military precision, and this avalanche of unsolicited food would have been enough of an imposition without the affront to culinary sanitation that followed. The intruders disappeared downstairs only to reemerge with not one, not two, but ten whole roasted hogs, bearing them into the kitchen aloft and laying them down legs akimbo on every available surface.

This was a bridge too far. The butler quick-stepped across the office, past the sauna and the side room where the most secretive meetings were held, to rap on the door of his master’s corner office. When it swung open, he was fixed for a moment with an interrogative stare before the glittering black eyes flicked over his shoulder to the bizarre procession beyond. Suddenly animated, the tiny figure barreled excitedly by to inspect the movable feast, leaving the butler protesting hopelessly behind.

“Mr. Berezovsky! There is no room for all this food in the fridge! What shall I do with ten dead pigs?”

The oligarch neither heard nor cared. The delivery slip confirmed what he already knew.

“From Badri!” he declared happily. His absent partner had sent him another taste of home.

Patarkatsishvili had initially stayed in Moscow to try to save the business empire after Berezovsky fled to England. The Georgian oligarch was the sort of man Putin had time for—politic, practical, and phlegmatic—so Patarkatsishvili was soon called into the Kremlin to be offered a sweetheart deal. Putin would let him keep everything and give him a clean slate, as long as he cut Berezovsky loose. Patarkatsishvili couldn’t countenance that kind of treachery, so he declined the offer and was duly run out of Russia. Unlike his Anglophile business partner, the Georgian oligarch spoke barely a word of English, so when the inevitable arrest warrant was issued and he had to bolt, he took up exile in his hometown of Tbilisi. Boris and Badri remained in close cahoots as they plotted to rescue their assets from demolition back in Russia, but it was clear to all who knew them that the separation was painful.

Coming out of his own cramped office in the far corner, a slight spectacled man with a short salt-and-pepper beard stopped and took in the chaotic scene with a smile. Yuli Dubov had seen this fandango play out many times before. These food deliveries had become a frequent occurrence in the two years since Berezovsky’s flight from Russia. Patarkatsishvili packed his private jet full of every home comfort his cooks could rustle up and had it all flown to London at regular intervals, having it picked up from the airstrip and chauffeured to Berezovsky’s opulent new Mayfair headquarters in a fleet of limousines. There was no way Berezovsky could possibly eat all this food, so his staff would once again be saddled with the surreal task of hawking a family of roasted Georgian hogs around the kitchens of Mayfair. But Dubov knew that wasn’t the point. The point was that Badri sent Boris his love.

The office on Down Street, in this refined London district, was Berezovsky’s new command center, and the air seemed to crackle as the oligarch and his many visitors hatched their schemes. Dubov, the former Logovaz director, had fled Russia after prosecutors opened a new probe into corruption at the car giant, adding to the cases mounting up against Berezovsky. He had been given a small office in his boss’s new headquarters, from which he assisted with the mission to extricate the billions Boris and Badri had left back home and wryly observed the colorful comings and goings.

Berezovsky had appointed himself the chieftain of a growing group of exiled businessmen and dissidents who had turned up in Britain after falling afoul of Putin, and the Down Street guest book read like a who’s who of Russia’s most wanted men. Among the most frequent callers was Alexander Litvinenko. The former FSB officer had been repeatedly arrested and imprisoned on increasingly imaginative charges after lifting the lid on the URPO assassination plot—until finally Berezovsky bankrolled an elaborate escape operation to relocate him and his family to Britain, where the defector was granted political asylum. Now Berezovsky was preparing to wage war on Vladimir Putin, and in his mind Litvinenko was a deadly weapon loaded with at least two silver bullets. The first kill shot was the proof of Putin’s alliance with the murderous drug-smuggling Tambov gang, from St. Petersburg, and the second was the evidence connecting the president to the apartment bombings that had killed almost three hundred of his own people.

Berezovsky hadn’t listened to Litvinenko about either topic when he was still pulling for Putin before the election, but now he intended to unmask his former protégé as nothing more than a criminal in a well-cut suit, a well-mannered monster who had aligned himself with the mob and butchered hundreds of Russians in his pursuit of power. It would be the perfect way to kick off his international campaign against Putin’s presidency—but that was going to require a formidable fighting fund, so it was doubly imperative for Berezovsky to get his money out of Russia. The other entries in the Down Street guest book belonged to the elite cast of British lawyers and financiers with whom he was plotting to save his fortune. The Mayfair office was a dizzying confluence of different worlds.

Dubov crossed the lobby and passed the granite-faced security guards stationed by the exit on his way to the elevators. When he reached the ground floor and the doors slid open on the marbled reception area, he was met by a face that, secretly, he wished was less familiar.

“Hi, Yuli!” exclaimed the tall man, with a flash of his gratingly reflexive grin.

“Scot,” the Russian replied warily. Dubov couldn’t understand what his boss saw in this permatanned huckster, who was always trying to flog you a flashy watch or a penthouse or a fast car you didn’t want. But since Berezovsky had moved to Britain and bought a mansion in Wentworth Estate, it was as if Young had become his shadow. The fixer cropped up everywhere he went—at Down Street, on board his private jet, in the back of his armored car—and Young had a particularly disconcerting habit of appearing late at night wherever Berezovsky was finishing dinner to whisper in his ear about the latest shady deal.

Dubov wasn’t alone in his distaste. “He’s a small-time crook,” another of the oligarch’s closest aides whispered after meeting Young. “You talk to him, and you see a crook in front of you.” But Berezovsky always seemed pleased to see his fixer. Young’s can-do spirit made an invigorating contrast to the skepticism of his longtime aides, who were forever pouring cold water on his ideas. Dubov wasn’t about to try to tell his boss whom to spend time with, but for his money Young was a charlatan, and he’d resolved to give him a wide berth. He skirted past with a gruff nod and slipped out into the London throng without a backward glance.

Young wasn’t fazed by the hauteur of the Russian hangers-on. He knew Berezovsky needed him. Funds coming from Moscow raised all sorts of alarms with Western banks—especially when the recipient was wanted for industrial-scale embezzlement back home—so his job was to help the oligarch spend freely in the UK without getting snarled up in red tape. Thankfully, the British financial system was full of handy loopholes, and Young knew them well. So as Berezovsky siphoned his wealth out of Russia, Young was busy plowing it into a dazzling portfolio of British properties and cars, hiding the oligarch’s ownership behind an array of hastily established shell companies, and procuring exorbitant gifts for his ever-changing coterie of girlfriends. The sums of money at his disposal were mind-bending, and the role had thrust him into a new reality so exotic that nothing and no one could take the edge off the thrill.

Berezovsky moved through the world as if he owned it—emanating wealth and entitlement so powerfully that gravity seemed to shift around him—and that was what made being his fixer such a wild ride. Wherever the oligarch went, the former French Legionnaires who served as his bodyguards swarmed around him, scanning the area and muttering urgently into their earpieces. Young had learned that few things in life made a man feel more like he’d hit the big time than striding into a room surrounded by trained killers. The same went for traveling through London in a full-blown motorcade. Berezovsky was chauffeured around town in a bulletproof Maybach, followed by a backup car full of guards and countersurveillance vehicles bringing up the rear to check that he wasn’t being tailed. Up front was an outrider zooming ahead on a fluorescent motorbike to scout for potential threats and try to hold busy intersections. The rider was a good-natured South African who joked privately about the number of times he’d been knocked off his bike trying to stop the chaotic traffic at Hyde Park Corner without the authority of a police badge or beacons. Berezovsky had grown far too used to being the most powerful man in town to be prepared to sit in traffic and wait.

This need for speed was equally evident in the oligarch’s choice of air transport. He had bought a Bombardier Global Express—a top-of-the-line private jet that flew farther and faster than others because it climbed at a stomach-churning clip to a higher altitude, where the air was thinner. When it wasn’t employed for business, Berezovsky used the plane to meet another of his needs. He sent his pilot on regular trips to the former Soviet states to pick up bevies of escorts and fly them back to Farnborough Airport, where he would climb aboard for a few live auditions in the cabin’s deluxe double bedroom. The women who made the cut were ushered into the Maybach and driven to one of London’s most lavish hotels, where they were kept in the regency splendor of the royal suite for as long as they captivated Berezovsky’s interest. Those who didn’t pass vetting were flown back from Farnborough without setting foot on the tarmac.

Young loved reclining on the Bombardier’s cream leather seats, talking business and sipping chilled Champagne with Berezovsky as they climbed through the clouds. But hovering over the daily thrill was a dark threat that refused to be ignored.

Young knew his Russian connections represented a risk, if only because his wife wouldn’t let him forget it. The trouble at home had begun when Berezovsky took the Youngs out for dinner to celebrate getting the keys to the Wentworth Estate house, and Michelle blew a gasket at the sight of the fleet of armored cars and bodyguards that turned up with their host.

“This shows that he’s very dangerous,” she hissed in Young’s ear as soon as the oligarch was out of earshot. “I don’t want anything to do with that, and I don’t want my daughters to have anything to do with that.”

Young had tried to reassure his wife that the family was in no danger—but it didn’t help when Berezovsky dropped by to talk business and his bodyguards advised Michelle to remove Sasha and Scarlet from the house for their own safety. Things got worse when she read about Berezovsky’s background and found out he had narrowly survived a car bomb back in Moscow. Then she came home one day saying she had been approached by a man who claimed to work for MI6 and warned her that her husband was getting himself in too deep with the Russians.

“You’re risking your life and your family’s life!” she had fumed at him. “You think you’re indestructible! You think you have so much power, so much money—but no one’s invincible.”

Still, for all her protestations, Michelle had gotten used to traveling by private jet, holidaying on yachts, and going on seemingly never-ending shopping sprees. Young’s wealth had ballooned exponentially with Berezovsky’s arrival in the UK—his Coutts asset schedule now showed he was worth £279 million—and he showered her with fabulous gifts on an almost daily basis, surprising her with a £1 million diamond necklace, a Range Rover packed to the roof with couture dresses, and the keys to an ever-growing array of palatial homes across Britain and abroad. Young had suddenly become such a huge player in the British property market that the elite real estate broker Knight Frank wrote letters of recommendation describing him as “the most important single private client the firm has within the UK.” And he was rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s most rich and famous people.

Young and Berezovsky were invited by the Finnish billionaire and Tory donor Poju Zabludowicz to a “boys’ dinner” in London with Bill Clinton, and Young had also become close friends with the retail billionaire Sir Philip Green, the Ivy group owner Richard Caring, and the reality TV mogul Simon Cowell. He boasted about flying Paris Hilton to London for dinner, and he and Michelle hung out in Miami with the pop superstar Pharrell Williams. The faint hint of danger hanging low in the air could hardly dim the brilliance of a life so bright and beautiful.

Young rode the Down Street elevator up to the second floor, cheerily greeting the unsmiling guards who parted to pull open the office doors, and strode in to find himself momentarily overwhelmed by the heavy pong of roasted hog. Badri. With a grin at the immaculately Chanel-clad receptionist, he crossed the lobby to knock on the door opposite Berezovsky’s.

The elegant bullet-headed man who opened it was as groomed and gleaming as ever, but he greeted Young with a smile just wide enough to crease the corners of his ice-blue eyes. Ruslan Fomichev was Boris and Badri’s single most trusted money man. He had been the chairman and chief executive of the bank they established back in Moscow to manage their multifarious investments, and now he was acting as their private treasurer in London. Berezovsky always said Fomichev was the one person who knew everything about his business, and as luck would have it, the financier was the only one in the oligarch’s Russian circle who had taken a shine to Young.

Fomichev was younger than the others in Berezovsky’s entourage—in his midthirties—and he and his wife, Katya, had only recently relocated from Moscow. Young provided them with a perfect entrée to the London party circuit. He regularly rubbed shoulders with celebrities and young royals at the capital’s glitziest nightspots, blowing tens of thousands of pounds a night at Boujis on tables lined with buckets of Belvedere vodka and Dom Pérignon, and he could work his magic to get a last-minute reservation at any restaurant, backstage access at any concert, or an invitation to any high-society party he chose. The Fomichevs were witty, glamorous, and personable, and within a few years they had ascended to number 13 on Tatler’s annual “100 Most Invited” list—a rung below David and Samantha Cameron.

Young and Fomichev had become fast friends, and they were soon cooking up a number of joint ventures alongside their work for Berezovsky. The tastiest of them all was a prime property deal in central Moscow. Fomichev’s father was a retired KGB general, so the banker could still operate back in Russia, and he wanted to cut Young in on the action. That was a risky proposition for Berezovsky’s number one British fixer, but Young was more than game. He’d developed a taste for the cloak-and-dagger thrill of Russian business during his various trips to the capital on Berezovsky’s behalf—and Fomichev’s city-center development could be a huge win when it came to fruition in a few years’ time. For now, though, the two men had their hands full with more pressing business.

Fomichev was coordinating the helter-skelter operation to route Boris and Badri’s billions out of Russia into a byzantine network of offshore accounts—which, with Young’s help, Berezovsky could draw down to fund his lifestyle in Britain. The pair had siphoned vast wealth out of Logovaz and Aeroflot during Yeltsin’s government—much of which was already stashed safely in their Swiss bank accounts—but now the Russian prosecutor general was pursuing corruption cases against them with escalating vigor, issuing foreign arrest warrants, seeking freeze orders on their overseas assets, and sending squads of masked officers to raid their Moscow offices.

The oligarchs were facing two major hurdles as they rushed to rescue their remaining Russian fortune: Russian currency controls limiting how many rubles could leave the country at once and Western money-laundering safeguards requiring proof that funds being brought onshore were from legitimate sources. The latter was an especially tall order for anyone who had gotten rich in the smash-and-grab days of post-Soviet Russia and was even more challenging with arrest warrants looming overhead. Circumventing those obstacles had meant enlisting the help of some of Britain’s most secretive lawyers—and doing a Faustian deal with one of Moscow’s most powerful men.

Paris, Moscow, and London—2000–2002

On a crisp December night in 2000, two private jets landed at Le Bourget airport, in Paris. Boris and Badri descended the steps of their respective planes and enjoyed a brief reunion in the airport’s VIP lounge before the blinking lights of a third jet hovered into view through the wide window over the runway. The two oligarchs readied themselves for a critical encounter. The man they were about to meet was one of the most influential businessmen in Putin’s Russia, and he held the keys to a vast slice of their fortune. They were there to persuade him to risk everything to help them get their money out of Moscow.

Roman Abramovich strode across the tarmac and entered the lounge. The soft-spoken, sandy-haired tycoon knew how much he owed the two older oligarchs. Without their political backing, he would never have won the laughably lowball bid for the former state oil giant Sibneft that had made him a billionaire overnight in the ’90s. Indeed, he had been repaying that debt of gratitude handsomely ever since. Boris and Badri claimed a share of all of Sibneft’s profits, and on top of that Abramovich had been subsidizing Berezovsky’s lifestyle—paying for his private jet travel, buying him his villa on Cap d’Antibes, and generally slinging him such substantial sums on the side that “Project Boris” became an ever-present item in the oil giant’s expense accounts.

But Abramovich had a new master. He was one of the few Yeltsin-era oligarchs who had stayed in favor under Putin, having made the judicious decision to buy the future president a yacht when his star was still rising, in 1999. Maintaining business links with Boris and Badri was unacceptably risky now and he was anxious to part ways, but he needed to do so in a manner that showed unequivocally where his new loyalties lay. So he assured Boris and Badri that he would find a discreet way to cash them out of their joint interests and get their money out of Russia, but there was something he needed from them. Before flying to Paris, he had visited the Kremlin and obtained Putin’s authority to buy another of their most prized assets: their controlling stake in Russia’s biggest national broadcaster.

Channel One represented Boris and Badri’s only remaining political capital in Russia. The former state broadcaster, which provided the platform for many of Berezovsky’s most stinging attacks on Putin, reached almost every Russian household and had a global audience in the hundreds of millions. It had come under increasing pressure to surrender to Kremlin control as Mikhail Lesin’s crackdown on the independent media intensified, and its journalists had grown all too used to preparing to go live with masked FSB agents ransacking the building around them.

For Patarkatsishvili, selling to Abramovich was a no-brainer. It might just take the political heat off them while they spirited the rest of their cash out of the country. But Berezovsky was not ready to cede control of his most prized political bargaining chip easily. The value of their stake was relatively small potatoes in business terms, but the independence of Channel One infuriated Putin—and there was nothing Berezovsky enjoyed more. He had been fomenting plans to turn the broadcaster over to a trust of journalists and intellectuals, preserving a lone uncontrolled star in the increasingly Kremlin-dominated Moscow media firmament. So the trio parted without signing a deal, and Berezovsky returned to his villa on Cap d’Antibes to think things over.

The following day brought terrible news. Boris and Badri’s most loyal lieutenant back in Moscow—the Aeroflot CFO, Nikolai Glushkov—had been arrested for embezzlement and thrown into the FSB’s notoriously brutal Lefortovo Prison. Berezovsky was beside himself. He was consumed with guilt about leaving the faithful Glushkov at the mercy of the Kremlin after skipping out of Moscow, and he knew his friend suffered from a blood disease that could become life threatening without proper treatment. Hoping that giving up Channel One would help get Glushkov out of trouble, he took to the Moscow airwaves to announce he was abandoning the plan to turn the broadcaster over to an independent trust, and then he got on the phone to Patarkatsishvili and agreed to sell the stake to Abramovich.

Berezovsky refused to have any further dealings with Abramovich from that day forward, deputizing Dubov to finalize the terms of the sale on his behalf. Meanwhile, Fomichev was dispatched to negotiate the Sibneft payment alongside Patarkatsishvili. After a series of meetings, Abramovich agreed to pay Boris and Badri $1.3 billion to sever all ties, on top of the $154 million he had already put up for Channel One. Now all that remained was to find a way to move the money from Moscow to London without raising red flags with the authorities at both ends. That was where two of Britain’s most cunning lawyers came into the picture.

Stephen Curtis was a gigantic, gregarious man from the north of England who had become a lively member of Berezovsky’s Mayfair circle since he was brought on board to help Fomichev. His law firm, Curtis & Co., operated out of smart offices at the top of a tall town house on Park Lane and had built up a client base comprising some of the richest and most politically exposed people in Russia and the Middle East. Curtis was outwardly unaffected and amiable, but his genius for dreaming up elaborately deceptive financial schemes for his secretive paymasters—while somehow keeping all the details in his head to avoid an inconvenient paper trail—had made him fabulously rich in his own right. He owned a huge Gothic castle on an island off Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, and a six-seater helicopter to fly him to and fro.

Whenever he could, Curtis worked in partnership with his old friend Stephen Moss, a diffident man with a confidential manner, whose role as managing partner at the reputable law firm Reid Minty made him an ideal cleanskin. Moss tended to be kept out of the loop until all the dirty work had been done, at which point Curtis could bring him in to draw up all the official paperwork needed to make things look legitimate without the burden of too much knowledge.

When the deal with Abramovich was finalized and it was time to bring the money onshore, Curtis was ready with an elegant solution. Years spent shilling for superrich clients in the Middle East had yielded all sorts of valuable connections, and he had forged an alliance with a young royal in the United Arab Emirates that was about to prove spectacularly useful. Sheikh Sultan bin Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan was the son of the then emir of Abu Dhabi, and he was happy to use his position to make some extra fun money.

Over a lavish dinner at Mosimann’s—a London restaurant resplendent with red upholstery, crisp white tablecloths, and giant chandeliers—the young sheikh agreed that a company he controlled in the Persian Gulf could be used as a cutout to funnel the money from Abramovich’s accounts in Latvia to Berezovsky in London. That way it would simply look like Abramovich had paid the sheikh and the sheikh had paid Berezovsky. British banks would be more than happy to accept the funds of an Emirati royal, and the money would be meted out in multiple tranches to avoid attracting too much attention. Abramovich didn’t need to be bothered with the ins and outs of the plan—he would just be given the sheikh’s bank details and told that that was where the money was to be paid. The lawyers and accountants would handle the rest.

A trust called the New World Value Fund was established to take delivery of the payments. By February of 2001, around $140 million had arrived in Boris’s and Badri’s UK accounts via the sheikh from the Channel One sale, with the Sibneft money to follow. But surrendering the broadcaster did nothing to help secure Glushkov’s freedom. The former Aeroflot director was still languishing in Lefortovo, and while the finishing touches were still being put to the Sibneft deal that spring, a bizarre turn of events plunged him into even deeper difficulty.

Glushkov was on a hospital visit for his blood condition when, as he crossed the courtyard in his slippers, he was accosted by a man he remembered as an employee of Aeroflot. The man said he was there to get Glushkov out of jail, but as they hurried toward a car parked outside the hospital gates, a squad of plainclothes FSB officers swooped in and handcuffed them. Glushkov was charged with attempting to escape. Boris and Badri’s former head of security at Channel One, a former KGB officer named Andrey Lugovoy, was later arrested for organizing the operation. Then a warrant was issued for Patarkatsishvili’s arrest on suspicion of ordering the plot.

Glushkov said he had been framed, insisting that the escape attempt had been staged by the FSB to incriminate him and Patarkatsishvili, but this was the incident that sealed his fate. Though he would eventually be cleared of the original embezzlement charges, he was found guilty of the attempted escape, spending four years behind bars in Moscow before he was eventually released and fled to England to join Berezovsky in exile. Another of the accused would also show up in London after serving time for his role in the attempted escape. Andrey Lugovoy, too, would take up a trusted place in Berezovsky’s circle.

As for Channel One, almost as soon as the sale was complete, the Kremlin assumed control of the airwaves. Berezovsky could not have felt more betrayed—or more determined to exact his revenge. By then, the Sibneft money was flowing onshore via the sheikh, and Berezovsky’s UK accounts were flush. Russia’s public enemy number one was angrier than ever—and he had the fighting fund he needed to declare war.