Earl's hopes for a conviction were tied precariously to the tangled paper trail he'd accumulated. The defense, meanwhile, hammered away at Kiritchenko's credibility, their three-pronged strategy narrowed to a single-minded smear campaign. Lazarenko's team trotted out Ukrainian after Ukrainian to testify to the heartfelt friendship between the partners, painting Kiritchenko as a traitor and liar who had every incentive to turn on Lazarenko. In the end, Weinberg argued to the jury, "It all comes down to this: Do you believe Peter Kiritchenko beyond a reasonable doubt?"
The answer came at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 3. After deliberating for about twenty-four hours over four days, the jurors filed into the packed courtroom.
The foreman handed the verdict to a U.S. marshal, who passed it to Judge Jenkins. He examined it without expression and gave it to his courtroom deputy. She stood and read. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. She said it again and again, twenty-nine times in all. Guilty on all counts and all underlying crimes-the jurors had checked every box on the verdict form.
Lazarenko did not flinch as the verdict was read. When the deputy had finished, he turned to Weinberg and asked, "Where shall I go now?" Weinberg wasn't sure.
The verdict left confusion in its wake. Though Earl, Boersch, and the rest of the prosecution team quietly accepted congratulations from colleagues who had crowded the courtroom to hear the jury's decision, they knew enough to downplay the results. By checking every box on the verdict form, the jurors had affirmed what appeared to be incompatible theories about what crimes had been committed in Ukraine. Their subsequent refusal to talk to anyone, rare in legal circles, left everyone wondering what-beyond exhausted sighs-went on during deliberations. "I don't think this jury had any idea what it was charged with deciding," says Wein-berg, and the speed with which the jurors returned the verdict made it hard to disagree. "And I don't think the United States should be able to impose its view [of financial law] on the world."
The defense attorney wasn't alone. The precedent, if upheld, "invites a jury to say, 'This just generally looks sleazy,' " says Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor and expert in white-collar law. "It makes prosecutors the moral arbiters of world capitalism."
But Bryan Earl was characteristically clear-eyed in defending what the government had done. "We weren't out fishing; he came to us. And he brought his money, and he brought himself, and he bought a big house and tried to set up his hiding place in the United States," Earl says with sincerity. "That doesn't strike me as us trying to impose our will on somebody else."
In Earl's mind, he was just doing his duty to his country: enforcing the laws on the books, never mind the precedent or the political fallout. But the agent's priorities were back in evidence when Mueller, now head of the FBI, phoned Earl to congratulate him on securing one of the FBI's top convictions ever. Mueller spoke to a colleague of Earl's, complimented their work, and asked to talk to Earl. But the agent was at his daughter's kindergarten graduation, where he'd asked not to be bothered.
Epilogue
Pavel Lazarenko is still under house arrest in a San Francisco apartment; government arguments that he should return to jail were rejected. He will be sentenced this fall and could face as many as fifteen years. Doron Weinberg and Dennis Riordan will have many avenues to appeal the conviction-the appeal will begin in 2006- and are confident they will make him a free man.
Lazarenko's Novato mansion was put on the market for $12 million.
Peter Kiritchenko lives in the $3 million condo he owns in Beverly Hills. He will also be sentenced this fall but, according to the terms of his plea agreement, should face a sentence of no more than thirty-seven months.
The Ukrainian presidential election will take place October 31. President Leonid Kuchma will not run for reelection, but his hand-picked successor is expected to square off with a young and popular Western-style reformer. The opposition has promised a revolution if Kuchma does not deliver a fair election.
Martha Boersch announced she was leaving the U.S. attorney's office. She will join the San Francisco offices of Jones Day, where she will specialize in white-collar defense.
U.S. attorney Kevin V. Ryan, a successor of Robert Mueller in San Francisco, vowed to prosecute other "corrupt public officials at home and abroad" using Boersch's legal theory and tougher money-laundering laws passed as part of the Patriot Act.
Bryan Earl still lives in San Francisco and works on the Eurasian Organized Crime Squad but is interested in joining the FBI's international programs to help fellow agents coordinate and assemble similar transnational investigations.
Justin Kane is now a freelance writer in Washington, D.C. He wrote and reported "To Catch an Oligarch" with the support of the Center for Investigative Reporting, where he was an intern and an associate. His work has also appeared in the Financial Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Radio Free Europe. He is a 2002 graduate of Swarthmore College.
Jason Felch wrote and reported this story as fellow at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and Legal Affairs.He is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times.
Shortly after this story was published in October 2004, the dioxin-scarred reformer Viktor Yuschenko rode a wave of popular support to triumph. Pavel Lazarenko watched the Orange Revolution unfold on satellite television from his undisclosed Bay Area apartment where, under house arrest, he still awaits sentencing.
The Western media portrayed the bloodless revolution as the victory of democracy over the thuggish post-Soviet regime of Leonid Kuchma and his lackey Viktor Yanukovych. But there are no angels in Ukraine. Yuschenko's first act as president was to appoint a former Lazarenko crony, Yulia Tymoshenko, as his prime minister.
In the months after the first, fraudulent election, Tymoshenko's movie-star looks and firebrand speeches in Kiev's Independence Square had made her a hero of the Orange Revolution. Yet only nine months earlier, Lazarenko's U.S. prosecutors had cast her as Ukraine's Kenneth Lay. They argued that she had paid Lazarenko an $86 million bribe in exchange for state natural-gas concessions. The deal had made Tymoshenko at least $400 million, with estimates running into the billions, and earned her the moniker hazova princessa, "The Gas Princess."
The U.S. charges connected to the bribe were dismissed because no harm to the Ukrainian state could be proved, but there is no denying the two were close partners. During Lazarenko's war with Kuchma, Tymoshenko's capital helped fund Lazarenko's opposition party. When Lazarenko fled Ukraine, she faced the wrath of Kuchma, who opened a corruption probe into her business activities. Allegations of bribery, money laundering, corruption, and abuse of power briefly landed her in jail, though formal charges were never filed. As recently as 2003, Russian officials issued international arrest warrants for her, accusing her of bribing Russian defense ministry officials in the mid-1990s.
Like Lazarenko, Tymoshenko has dismissed the allegations as political moves by a rival bent on her destruction. But even Yuschenko, who first hired her five years ago to help fight corruption in the energy industry, admitted then, "You need a crook to catch a crook."
Today, she is almost equally beloved and despised by Ukrainians, 44 percent of whom backed Yanukovych. To supporters, she is Ukraine's Joan of Arc; to critics, she is the devil in Dolce & Gab-bana. Her appointment suggests that, despite the revolution, dismantling Ukraine's entrenched oligarchy-particularly one created by state-sanctioned corruption-will take more than merely dethroning Kuchma.