Hella Nation - Evan Wright [65]
By the middle of 2001, Southland had burned through nearly a million dollars of Sea Castle investment funds and payments made to him by Langdon through Peak Physique (as well as cash he took from his girlfriend, who continued to strip at the club). Not all the money was frittered away on his lifestyle upgrades. In July 2001, Southland gave $150,000 to a yacht broker as deposit on two boats, a forty-eight-foot yacht under construction in Taiwan and a slightly used seventy-three-foot Empress Cruiser being sold by a businessman in Bahrain.
According to the contracts he signed, Sea Castle Ventures was required to pay the broker nearly a million dollars in early October 2001, or risk forfeiture of the deposits. Police believe that the deadline for this payment drove Southland and Langdon to attempt a million-dollar theft and insurance scam targeting Langdon’s own firm, Peak Physique. To that end, police allege, Southland recruited Konstantin Simberg, as well as a gang of high school kids, to serve as their muscle in the crime.
4. THE RECRUIT
FEW IMMIGRANTS ARRIVE in the United States as primed for American life as Konstantin Simberg. Born in the Russian industrial city of Rostovon-Don, he grew up as the Soviet empire was collapsing and American movies and television were flooding his hometown. By his early teens, Simberg dressed in baggy hip-hop pants and T-shirts with obscure skateboard logos. He kept a baseball cap planted sideways on his head and squinted at the world through yellow-tinted glasses like those worn by hipsters on MTV. People in the conservative town used to come up to his mother, Anna, on the street and tell her, “Your boy belongs in America.”
After graduating from high school, Simberg attended a local university. He studied law but told friends he hoped to become a journalist or a poet. His parents, desperate to provide a future for their only child, decided to move to Phoenix, where they had relatives. They emigrated in the spring of 2000, believing that, as Anna Simberg says, “everything was going to be good.”
From the start, Simberg had trouble. He found it nearly impossible to learn English. “Konstantin didn’t really know how to fit in here because of the language,” says a neighbor of the Simbergs. “But he seemed to me like a basic twenty-year-old kid. He thought about three things: fast cars, getting laid and making a lot of money.”
A few weeks after arriving, Simberg realized his first ambition when his dad helped him purchase an old Camaro. In early June 2000, barely a month later, Simberg fulfilled his second ambition when some Russians he met at a nightclub invited him to a friend’s birthday party. There he met another recent Russian immigrant, Ksenya Vybornova, who was celebrating her twentieth birthday. Simberg was immediately smitten by the petite young woman with frosty green eyes and dyed-platinum bangs.
Ksenya soon fell for Simberg. “He brought me into his world,” she says. “And turned me around and around until all I could see was him.”
Ksenya’s brief trajectory through American life had already been fraught with drama. She arrived in Phoenix in the fall of 1999 at the urging of her sister, Olga, who had immigrated a few years earlier and was now convinced the world was about to end because of Y2K. Ksenya says Olga, four years older, pleaded with her to leave Moscow immediately, saying, “This is your last chance to see me.”
When Ksenya arrived she found her sister’s life had fallen apart. The American husband she had married a couple years earlier had recently left her, and Olga had been fired from the bank she had been working in as a teller. Not all was lost; recently Olga had started dating a new guy, Sean Southland. When Ksenya met him she approved. Southland had a muscular, athletic build, drove a customized BMW and seemed to her like a “successful American businessman.”
As the sisters, both unemployed, ran low on funds, Southland advised them that big money could be made dancing at local strip clubs. Olga and Ksenya took the plunge, stripping side-by-side in