Hella Nation - Evan Wright [66]
Ksenya initially consented. Turning her money over to Southland wasn’t all bad. He reassured her that he had invested $35,000 of her money by purchasing a share of Sea Castle.
But after meeting Simberg, Ksenya began to question the arrangement. Sensing the threat Simberg posed to his “family,” Southland urged Ksenya to dump him. When Simberg drove over to pick her up, Southland wouldn’t allow him in their apartment.
Eventually, Ksenya left the “family” and moved into an apartment with Simberg, which she paid for. Though Simberg was unable to hold down a job, he had a whimsical side that Ksenya found irresistible. She says, “Sometimes in the morning he would wake me up and put a blindfold on my eyes and drive me out of the city to look at a mountain.” He wrote her poems and notes incessantly.
In the summer of 2001, about the time Southland and Langdon placed their deposit on the two yachts for Sea Castle, Ksenya noticed a change in Southland. He began to warm up to Simberg. Ksenya discovered in late August that Simberg and Southland were spending time together alone. After returning from one of his meetings with Southland, Simberg told Ksenya he was on the verge of making between $25,000 and $50,000.
5. THE FIRST HEIST
TROY LANGDON OPERATED PEAK PHYSIQUE out of a no-frills office suite in an anonymous-looking North Phoenix business park, adjacent to the almost equally nondescript Cactus Pharmacy, the company owned by his wife’s parents.
On the morning of September 24, 2001, a FedEx truck pulled into the Peak Physique parking lot carrying eighteen boxes—each about the size of a milk crate—packed with Saizen-brand HGH shipped by Serono. The cost of the order was $1 million, but the resale value was more than three times that. As the FedEx driver stopped his truck in front of Peak Physique, a group of young men emerged from the parking lot and surrounded it. One, later identified as Simberg, approached the driver’s window.
“I’ve got business for you,” Simberg said in an accent so thick the driver had difficulty understanding him. Simberg continued, repeating himself a couple of times to make himself clear. “We’ll give you twenty thousand cash. You open your truck, and we empty it.” The FedEx driver refused.
“Tell the police a black man robbed you,” Simberg told him.
When the driver continued to reject his advances, Simberg’s resolve folded. He walked off, and the other young men who had been standing several feet away from the truck followed him. The FedEx driver watched them disappear behind some parked cars and drive off. He made his delivery to Peak Physique, then quietly phoned the police.
Because of the 9/11 attacks less than two weeks earlier, the nation was at the highest state of vigilance and fear since at least the Cuban Missile Crisis, if not Pearl Harbor. Even in normal times, the FedEx driver would have reported the menacing approach of the young man and the suspicious offer he made, and police would have begun an investigation. But in the post-9/11 hysteria that focused on foreigners and the possibility of biological weapons attacks, the driver’s report of a heavily accented young man who tried to illegally obtain a million-dollar shipment of pharmaceuticals sent alarms to the highest level.
6. THE COP
THE DAY AFTER THE 9/11 ATTACKS, Detective Tom Britt, forty-one, who had been working on an organized crime unit, was told to focus on counterterrorism. Nobody in the police department knew exactly what “counterterrorism” work might mean, but Britt was a good candidate for the job. Raised in Southern California, he attended California State University, Northridge, on a baseball scholarship. In 1984 he enlisted in the Navy. Displaying