I learned another interesting thing about Sater from an American journalist working in Central Europe. On the phone one day, she asked, “Do you know the lawyer, Robert S. Wolf?”

“No.”

“He’s Sater’s attorney.”

“And?”

“Check out the Jap’s Wikipedia page. That’s where you’ll find his name. Robert S. Wolf was his lawyer, too. He was on the Jap’s legal team.”

Sure enough, there he was. That’s quite a coincidence. Of course, in and of itself it didn’t mean anything. It could, in fact, be a coin­cidence—criminal defense attorneys of a certain sort specialize in high-profile, gangster-type cases. But Russia had beaten me over the head so much about coincidences—and the fact that many relation­ships in this game at this level are not coincidences—that I have to re­main open to the possibility that they’re both part of the same network. Bayrock’s former finance director—an American—had told Bloomberg media that “Felix knew how to be charming, and he knew how to be brutally nasty. He has a talent for drawing people in. He has charm and charisma. But that’s what con men do.” The finance director had characterized Bayrock as a criminal enter­prise, alleging that Bayrock was “covertly mob-owned and operated,” “backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people,” and “engaged in the businesses of financial-institution fraud, tax fraud, human trafficking, child prostitution, statutory rape, and, on occasion, real estate.” The real purpose of the company, he said, was “to launder many millions of dollars and evade taxes.”

Sounds about right.

Some additional light had been shed on Felix Sater’s family ties. Apparently, his father was deeply involved in the Russian black mar­ket in Moscow in the sixties and seventies, before moving his family to Baltimore. Toward the end of the seventies, Felix’s father found himself in Brighton Beach, working as a soldier in the Genovese crime family. Extortion was his game. When Felix was in court years later, his father was referred to as “a Mogilevich crime syndicate boss.” That is, Semyon Mogilevich—the boss of all bosses—who would, over decades, compile an impres­sive criminal resume: member of the Lyuber crime group; one of the de facto leaders of the Solntsevo group; running global prostitution, weapons, and drug rings; YBM Magnex fraud; Bank of New York money laundering; and a list of others. Speculation circulated that Felix himself supposedly had a long relationship with Mogilevich, dating back to the nineties, and served as an important contact for Mogilevich in the U.S.

Maybe, maybe not. But… The FBI and CIA had plenty of consultants on organized crime and terrorism, but someone who had contact with Mogilevich, top man of interest on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for years? Sater would have been invaluable.

The new case arrived by phone call from Kroll headquarters in New York. It was the late nineties, and I was close to wrapping up my time in Russia. A building was being sold in Manhattan, and we had been hired to look into one of the principals in the deal, a man named Tamir Sapir. Sapir was the founder of the Sapir Organization. I’d never heard of him. I said his name out loud in the office, announcing to Andrei and Zhenya our new subject. Zhenya exclaimed, “Tamir!”

“You know him?”

“Of course. He’s famous. His store was one of the stops when our guys were in New York City.”

Sapir had started an electronics store in mid-Manhattan in the late seventies. Many of his customers were Soviet diplomats and high-ranking officials, many of whom were connected to the United Nations, read: KGB.

“Primakov used to go there when he was in New York,” Zhenya said.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I lived in the same building as him, on the next floor. He was my neighbor,” he replied.

“Primakov” was Yevgeny Primakov, who had held top positions in the KGB. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), which had spun off from the KGB. (The KGB’s domestic security service had come to be known as the FSB in 1995.) The name was new, but it was essentially the same organization. Primakov hadn’t made significant personnel changes and left the structure largely intact for nearly six years, when he became the Russian foreign minister. The officials who had visited Sapir’s store had orchestrated a prof­itable black market of Western goods behind the Iron Curtain. Of course, demand was high. Tens of millions of people wanted to get their hands on electronics. The coach from the Soviet wrestling team in Albany had returned to Moscow with his coveted video player.

And, as I learned, a massive trade in smuggled electronics, among other things, had operated through East Germany with the assistance of the military and the gang of smugglers. The smugglers were famil­iar names: Dmitry Yakubovich, Semyon Mogilevich, Solntsevo, the Taiwanese, Boris Birshtein, Seabeco, and all the others. In 1989, Sapir had accepted an invitation from those officials to become a willing and reliable accomplice in that black market trade. He sent thousands of VCRs, microwaves, TVs, portable tape players, and other electronic goods to the Soviet Union. In exchange, bureaucrats like the Soviet minister of petrochemicals granted Sapir rights to distribute 50,000 tons of fertilizer and 41 mil­lion barrels of oil. Sapir pocketed one dollar per barrel reselling Soviet oil to the largest oil companies in the West. “It was a stroke of luck,” he said. “I was a schmuck in the right place at the right time.” It feels like a little more than luck.

Had Sapir been one of the originating points of the smuggling chain that ran through East Germany? Was money from the Soviet military budget being diverted to his pockets in exchange for electron­ics? How would that store have survived otherwise if Soviet officials had not been the vast majority of his clients? Was all of this happen­stance, or was his presence in the U.S. part of a premeditated plan by the KGB? He certainly had proximity to the smugglers.

His partner in the electronics store was Sam Kislin.

Kislin had set up Trans Commodities, partnering with the Chernoy brothers. Later, the FBI determined that Kislin was a member of the Jap’s organization. Sapir had become wealthy and had moved into real estate. We were tasked with checking him out in relation to the sale of that building in Manhattan. In addition to the subcontractors we had farmed out the assignment to, I had decided to visit Gennady to ask his opinion, which also would give us an excuse to get together.

“Okay, meet me at my office at 3:00 p.m.,” he said.

His office was now at Bank of Moscow, where he was the head of economic security. He’d been there a couple of years already, since leaving the MVD. I remembered him contemplating retirement and telling me about the bank opportunity, wondering aloud if he should take it.

The bank was less than a ten-minute walk from the American Embassy and directly across the street from the Parliament building.

In its previous life, the bank building had been the Moscow mayor’s office.

I had sat in the lobby waiting for the elevator to deliver Gennady to the ground floor.

He arrived and approached me; I stood; he offered his hand. We shook, and he immediately realized something.

“I’ve never told you about this place.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“You remember in 1993, when the tanks fired into the Parliament building?”

“Of course.” That’s not the kind of thing you forget.

He turned and walked across the lobby to the opposite wall. I followed him. He placed his hand flat and started gliding it along the surface. He found what he was looking for.

“Here, feel that,” he said.

I put my finger in the divot he had pointed to and then turned back to him. He glided his hand again and found more divots. “Bullet holes,” he said. “After the pro-rebel demonstrators took over this building, I was the commander leading the counterattack.”

He turned toward the front door.

“We started here at the main entrance and were immediately met with gunfire.” He pointed to the staircase in the lobby. “They were shooting from the top of the stairs, there. The electricity had been turned off, so we had very little light. We pushed them back and swept through the place floor by floor.”

Another moment of Gennady cementing his credentials—like Sasha—as a man’s man, a cop’s cop, and a badass.

I had come to see him about Tamir Sapir. Gennady’s answer was simple and straightforward. “He’s a con man, but you can’t consider him a gangster.” A few years later, the con man and his company became partners with Bayrock Group and the Trump Organization.