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By Root 656 0

diplomatic and circumspect negotiation. After a late-night meeting with a rough-looking but willing intermediary, and a lot of talking around the issue with middlemen, finally ‘Gregor’ showed up at a midnight rendezvous with a photo album. After a few shots of vodka and some zakuski, he proudly walked me through a collection of photographs depicting him with various thick-necked gentlemen holding automatic weapons; in some shots, they were stripped to the waist, their bare chests and backs decorated with tattoos of cathedrals, minarets, and Cyrillic lettering. Hearing that my associates would like to shoot video of whatever ensued, he became excited, assuring me that should we want to shoot a major Hollywood production in Saint Petersburg or Moscow, he could ‘provide security,’ make sure there were no ‘difficulties or red tape.’ He’d done it before, he boasted, naming two recent film productions. I looked closely at the photographs, determined never to make any of these guys mad at me.

Club Malibu was set back from Nevsky Prospekt in Saint Petersburg, easy to find by the rows of gleaming Jaguars, BMWs, Porsches, and Mercedes parked illegally out front. After passing through a metal detector and undergoing a thorough, somewhat intrusive pat-down and frisk – as well as a few gruff questions in Russian – followed by a hushed phone conversation, I was led up thickly carpeted steps, vibrating from loud techno music. At the foyer to the main ballroom, where tonight’s event, No-Holds-Barred Caged Extreme Fighting and Senseless Brutality, would soon be under way, Gregor approached me like an old friend, giving me a big warm for-show hug and kisses on both cheeks before deferentially showing me to my reserved table. This demonstration of closeness and friendship, I’d been told, was very important to how welcome I’d be there. I’d worn my best Crazy Joe Gallo outfit for the occasion: black fingertip-length leather jacket, black silk shirt, black silk tie, black pants, pointy black shoes, my hair gelled into what can best be described as late Frankie Avalon, doing the best I could to look like a person who could realistically be introduced as ‘a friend of ours from New York.’

For two hours, I sat and drank and nibbled caviar with blini, watching the most outrageously ugly and pointless violence I’d ever witnessed. The well-dressed audience, some of whom seemed in mute collusion with some of the contestants (I saw at least two blatant dives taken), consisted of a mix of flatheads and older, more distinguished fellows, most accompanied by tall, high-cheekboned, long-legged, and invariably blond women with spectacular breasts and cold, cold eyes. When one of the contenders in the ring caught an elbow to the face, foamy red sputum bubbling from his lips, I was reminded of the farm kids in Portugal at the pig slaughter as I glanced around the room. The women stared blankly at the sickening carnage.

One poor brute after another stepped into the ring and was quickly pounded into submission. Choking, kicking, kneeing, flying elbows, head butts – almost every bout ended with one man on the mat, the other’s arm around his throat, choking off his air supply and simultaneously stomping his abdomen with both knees. I counted, at the end of the evening, two KOs, two fixed fights, and ten TKOs – all concluded by near asphyxia. It was nauseating. It was ugly. It was kinda cool.

My local contact, translator and fixer in Russia was the amazing Zamir, a genial, funny, well-informed guy with a dark mustache, a three-day-old growth of beard much of the time, and a fur-lined hat with earflaps. Worldly, experienced, fatalistic about the way things were going in his country, Zamir, on this subzero afternoon, was taking me out to experience a much-beloved Russian institution, a traditional banya, or sauna, the place Russians of all ages have relaxed with family or friends on weekends for ages. In this case, it was a small sweatbox in the middle of the snow-covered countryside, next to a frozen lake in the woodsy community of Shuvalovo, about thirty miles