Lazarenko's arrival, meanwhile, threw the U.S. government into a tizzy. Ukraine was calling for his head, and the Swiss were preparing to file for his extradition. While the State Department madly debated the options, Lazarenko was detained until his asylum petition was considered. At his own request, he was transferred to Marin County Jail so he could be closer to his family. He was eventually moved to the Camp Parks Federal Correctional Institution in the Contra Costa County town of Dublin.
For Earl and Boersch, Lazarenko's surprising appearance was also problematic. He had always been a secondary concern in the investigation. Most of the evidence Earl had accumulated against Kirit-chenko implicated Lazarenko, but there was not enough for an indictment against either of them.
Still, the endgame was on. Earl's Swiss colleagues had gathered enough evidence to include Kiritchenko in their case against Lazarenko and asked the agent to present the extradition warrant. One morning at 6:00 a.m., Earl knocked on the door of Shangri-la, finally coming face-to-face with a bleary-eyed Kiritchenko. After eighteen months, his covert investigation had just become overt.
Earl's Victory was tempered by a decision by the Bureau of Prisons, which, over the objections of Earl and Boersch, put Peter Kiritchenko and Pavel Lazarenko in the same jail cell at Camp Parks, two miles from downtown Dublin and thirty long miles from Shangri-la. For six months, the two men would spend all day together plotting a defense.
Their confinement was a classic example of what game theory calls, with good reason, the prisoner's dilemma. Given two prisoners, both implicated heavily in a case, the best group outcome is achieved if they refuse to cooperate with the prosecution. But while sticking together may save them both, each prisoner knows the surest ticket to freedom-or a favorable plea bargain-is to betray the other.
Under these psychologically grueling conditions, paranoia set in. Though the available evidence indicates that Lazarenko had not met with Earl or Boersch to discuss cooperating, Kiritchenko believed he was about to be betrayed and did the only rational thing. He asked for a meeting with Earl and Boersch. Earl did not want to give up on prosecuting Kiritchenko, whom the FBI not only suspected of masterminding the money laundering but was investigating for deeper connections to Russian Mafiya. But Kiritchenko was what the case against the bigger fish needed: an eyewitness who could put a human face on the complex financial transactions for a jury.
The government's ultimate offer hinted at just how badly it needed him. He would cop to one felony count of interstate transportation of stolen property, for which he would be allowed to appeal any sentence over thirty-seven months. But when it was all over, he and his wife and daughter would go back to their enviable lives unscathed and with guaranteed green cards to boot. Apart from a $3 million "voluntary restitution," he'd be allowed to keep everything he owned: his $11 million Shangri-la, all his businesses and other properties-including a $3 million condo in Los Angeles-and his yacht. After accepting the offer, Kiritchenko packed up his belongings and walked out of the cell with Lazarenko watching. He had won his freedom-and broken his brotherhood- by telling Earl where the money had come from and gone.
Itwas quite a tale. As the Soviet Union crumbled, Kiritchenko, a low-level Communist functionary, had rushed into the void left by the central government, hoping to set up a small import-export company to trade in the resource-rich Dnepropetrovsk region. He learned that the regional governor, Lazarenko, controlled everything and demanded a cut of the business done on his turf. On January 13, 1993, Kiritchenko met with Lazarenko in a Warsaw hotel. The two walked to a nearby financial institution called American Bank in Poland, and the trader gave the governor $40,000 to open a dollar account. It was a down payment, Kiritchenko said. As they left the bank, Lazarenko told him, "I work with everyone fifty-fifty." For the next five years, Kiritchenko faithfully sent half of his profits to Lazarenko, who in return made Kiritchenko a very rich man.
When Earl and Boersch heard that story, they saw the potential underlying crime under Ukrainian law. As long as they could convince a jury that the lowly commodities trader had been, in that moment, victimized by the all-powerful politician's scheme, it was extortion. Alone, that seemed enough to pursue the money-laundering charge.
Yet the rest of Kiritchenko's story complicated matters, for it was not a victim's tale. He quickly became Lazarenko's partner, often traveling between Marin County and Europe to serve as bagman. Well acquainted with European banking, he opened Swiss bank accounts, making sure money from Lazarenko's rapidly growing wealth was flowing smoothly out of Ukraine. The two men flew together to Panama to purchase Panamanian passports for $100,000 (to allow them to travel on the down-low), to Switzerland to meet with their bankers, and to Hawaii and Canada to vacation with their families. It was a deal so sweet that Kiritchenko forgot to stop paying Lazarenko when he was booted out of office.
When Lazarenko became a political hot potato, Kiritchenko's importance to his patron only grew, he told Earl and Boersch. Now the safety of Lazarenko's wealth depended on him. With investigators breathing down Lazarenko's neck, Switzerland was no longer a haven. That's when Kiritchenko approached Liverant, the co-owner of EuroFed, and bought a discreet place to stash money. After a quick trip to Antigua to check out EuroFed's books, Kiritchenko paid $1.1 million for two-thirds of the bank. Soon the two $48 million checks withdrawn from the Swiss accounts poured through the Bahamas and into EuroFed.
Earl and Boersch thought they had more than enough. They approached Robert Mueller, who was then head of the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco, and presented their case.
Mueller's reply: "Go ahead. Indict."
The grand jury indictment of Pavel Lazarenko came down in May 2000, charging him in a sweeping conspiracy to launder what eventually became $114 million through San Francisco financial institutions. It would be an international prosecution the likes of which had never been seen. The last time the government had put a former head of state on trial, armed forces had invaded Panama in Operation Just Cause to capture General Manuel Noriega. This time, the government enlisted a Bay Area jury to call a former prime minister to account.
Even so, the prosecution's case shared elements of a foreign invasion. It represented a zealous expansion of American jurisdiction across the world. If Lazarenko was convicted, it would give U.S. attorneys the authority to judge whether anyone anywhere had committed fraud or extortion under their own nation's legal code, and then to hold them accountable in U.S. courts, as long as their money had moved through ubiquitous dollar accounts.
The world's crooks and their cronies weren't the only ones watching Lazarenko's case. Anyone in America who moves large, sometimes mysterious sums for a living, including investment bankers and real-estate brokers, had a stake in the outcome. It's illegal to deliberately ignore the tainted source of a deposit. So far the FBI and IRS have worn kid gloves on such "willful blindness" cases, never once criminally charging a U.S. bank in a money-laundering case. Still, finance watchers have wondered if the winds could shift. (In this case, the city's bankers were never called to testify. Yet in August the Justice Department launched a criminal probe into a Washington, D.C., bank's possible role in laundering money for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and other foreign officials.)