RUSSIA'S YARD SALE Psst! Wanna buy a MiG jet fighter? How about 200 lbs. of uncut emeralds or a little nuclear-reactor fuel? In once secret military-industrial cities, all this and more is for sale. But beware: the mafia, the KGB, old party officials and new Moscow bureaucrats may want a piece of the action.
It was late November, the temperature outside hovered near zero, and six of us were sitting fully clothed in an unused basement bathhouse beneath a rundown hotel in central Russia. The water in the green-tiled pool had long ago turned an oily, opaque black, and from the cavernous banquet room directly above our heads rock music reverberated. Hardly an ideal venue for a business meeting, but there are few safe places to discuss the sale of 200 lbs. of stolen emeralds.
The four Russians were interested in a joint venture with their guest of honor, a foreign businessman, but had little desire to meet anywhere they could be seen by KGB types. (Russians still call the secret police the KGB, even though the domestic side of the agency has been renamed the Federal Counterintelligence Service.) Nor could they afford to be spotted by anyone from the vast, amorphous gang of criminals and hustlers that make up the Russian mafia. Only a few months ago, one of the Russians explained apologetically, the hotel manager had been killed because he failed to show the local mafia proper deference. "They didn't shoot him; they cut him and broke his bones to teach him a lesson." The visitor, an international broker with diverse interests -- major weapons systems, oil, gold -- was intrigued by the emeralds and wanted advice from his well-connected hosts. A month earlier, he had traveled deep into the Ural Mountains, driving over forest roads not shown on any map, following a trail of whispered rumors that a cache of gem- quality stones was up for grabs. A group of miners, fed up with laggard paychecks, had supposedly been holding back emeralds in hopes of finding a private buyer.
The businessman found the mine, 200 lbs. of uncut emeralds in sacks and a tangled dispute over who was going to sell them. Unearthed for use in laser- weapons programs, the emeralds technically belonged to MINATOM, the Russian ministry in charge of the former U.S.S.R.'s vast nuclear program. But as each man in the bathhouse well knew, there was nothing unusual about a squabble over the right to sell state assets. Since the demise of the Soviet empire, no one knows for sure who has the right to sell such assets. Meanwhile, billions of dollars' worth of weapons and raw materials has been exported, much of it illegally and for private gain.
So, the broker wanted to know, should he return to the tiny mining enclave on the Siberian border to negotiate in earnest for the emeralds? "Nyet," declared two of the Russians. The disagreement between the mine operators and bureaucrats might have been resolved by paying off both sides, but the foreigner's previous visit had aroused dangerous interest among the locals. A mafia group headed by a fearsome gangster nicknamed the Gorilla had got wind of the deal and was demanding a piece of any sale. The curiosity of the local KGB had also been piqued, and it too had no intention of permitting the emeralds to change hands without taking a cut.