The Big Bad Wolf - James Patterson [42]
I sat down next to Monnie and peered at her computer screen. “So now somebody’s opened a lucrative market for suburban white women. Who? And where are they working out of? Europe? Asia? The U.S.?”
“The murdered couple could be a break for us. Russians. What do you think?” she asked.
“Could be a ring operating out of New York. Brighton Beach. Or maybe they’re headquartered in Europe? The Russian mob is set up just about everywhere these days. It’s not ‘The Russians Are Coming’ anymore. They’re here.”
Monnie started to spit out information. “The Solntsevo gang is the largest crime syndicate in the world right now. Did you know that? They’re big here too. Both coasts. The Red Mafiya has basically collapsed in their country. They smuggled close to a hundred billion out of Russia, and a lot of it came here. You know, we’ve got major task forces working in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, New York, D.C., Miami. The Reds bought banks in the Caribbean and Cyprus. Believe it or not, they’ve taken over prostitution, gambling, and money laundering in Israel. In Israel!”
I finally got a few words in. “I spent a couple of hours last night reading the files from Anti-Slavery International. The Red Mafiya comes up there too.”
“I’ll tell you one other thing.” She looked at me. “That kid who was grabbed in Newport. I know it’s a different pattern, I get it, but I do believe he’s part of this. What do you think?”
I nodded. So did I. And I also thought that Monnie had great street smarts for somebody who rarely left the office. So far, she was the best person I’d met at the Bureau, and here we were in her tiny cube trying to solve White Girl.
Chapter 47
I HAD NEVER really stopped being a student since my days at Johns Hopkins, and it had served me well in the Washington PD, even given me a certain mystique. I hoped it would be the same in the Bureau, though it hadn’t been so far. I set myself up with a supply of black coffee and started in on the Russian mob research. I needed to know everything about them, and Monnie Donnelley was a willing accomplice.
I made notes along the way, though I usually remember most of what is important enough and don’t need to write it down. According to the FBI files, the Russian mob was now more diverse and powerful in America than La Cosa Nostra. Unlike the Italian Mafia, the Russians were organized into loose networks that cooperated with but weren’t dependent on one another. At least not so far. A major benefit was that the loose style of organization avoided RICO prosecutions by the government. No conspiracies could be proved. There were two distinctly different types of Russian mobsters. The “knuckle draggers” were into extortion, prostitution, and racketeering, and their particular crime group was called the Solntsevo. The second type of Russian mobster operated at a more sophisticated level, often securities fraud and money laundering. These were the neocapitalist criminals, called the Izmailovo.
For the moment, I decided to concentrate on the first group, the lowlifes, especially the brigades involved with prostitution. According to the Bureau’s OC Section report, the prostitute business operated “a lot like major league baseball.” A group of prostitutes could actually be “traded” from an owner in one city to one in another. As a footnote, a survey conducted among seventh-grade girls in Russia listed prostitution among the top-five career choices of the girls when they grew up. Several historical anecdotes had been inserted in the file to represent the Russian criminal mentality: smart and ruthless. According to one story, Ivan the Terrible had commissioned St. Basil’s Cathedral to rival, even surpass, the great churches of Europe. He was pleased with the result and invited the architect to the Kremlin. When the artist arrived, his blueprints were burned and his