Agents from our New York office were all over the murder scene on Long Island. Photographs of the two victims had been shown to the high school students who’d seen the Connelly abduction, as well as to Audrey Meek’s children, and eyewitnesses at The Halyard in Newport, Rhode Island. Several of them identified the couple as the kidnappers. I wondered why the bodies had been left there? As examples? For whom?
Monnie Donnelley and I regularly met at seven before I had to attend orientation classes for the day. We were still analyzing the Long Island murders. Monnie was pulling together everything she could find on the husband and wife, as well as other Russian criminals working in the US, the so-called Red Mafiya. She was hot-wired into the Organized Crime Section over at the Hoover Building, and also the Red Mafiya squad in the Bureau’s New York office.
‘I brought “everything” bagels from D.C.,’ I said as I entered her cube at ten minutes past seven that morning. ‘Best in the city. According to Zagat anyway. You don’t seem too excited.’
‘You’re late,’ Monnie said without looking up from her computer screen. She’d mastered the droll, deadpan-delivery style favored by hackers.
‘These bagels are worth it,’ I said. ‘Trust me.’
‘I don’t trust anybody,’ Monnie replied.
She finally glanced up at me and smiled. Nice smile, worth the wait. ‘You know that I’m kidding, right? It’s just a tough-girl act, Alex. Give with the bagels.’
I laughed. ‘I’m used to cop humor.’
‘Oh, I’m honored,’ she muttered, deadpan again, as she looked back at the glowing computer screen. ‘He thinks I’m a cop, not just a desk jockey. You know, they started me in fingerprinting. The absolute bottom.’
I liked Monnie, but I had the sense that she needed a lot of support. I knew she’d been divorced for about two years. She’d majored in Criminology at Maryland, where she had also pursued another interesting passion – studio arts. Monnie still took classes in drawing and painting, and, of course, there was the mural in her cube.
She yawned. ‘Sorry. I watched Alias with the boys last night. That will be grandma’s problem when she has to get them up this morning.’
Monnie’s home life was another thing we had in common. She was a single parent, with two young kids, and a doting grandmother who lived less than a block away. The grandmother was her ex-husband’s mother, which told the story of the marriage. Jack Donnelley had played basketball at Maryland, where he and Monnie met. He was a big drinker in college, and it got worse once he graduated. Monnie said he’d never recovered from being all-everything in a Pennsylvania high school, and then just another guard for the Maryland Terrapins. Monnie was five foot even, and joked that she hadn’t played any kind of ball at Maryland. She told me her nickname in high school was Spaz.
‘I’ve been reading all about women being traded and sold from Tokyo to Riyadh,’ she said as she chewed a bagel. ‘Breaks my heart and it pisses me off. Alex, we’re talking some of the worst slavery in history. What’s with you men?’
I looked at her. ‘I don’t buy and sell women, Monnie. Neither do any of my friends.’
‘Sorry. I’m carrying around a little extra baggage because of Jack the Rat and a few other husbands I know.’ She looked down at her computer screen. ‘Here’s a choice quote for today. Know what the Thai Premier said about the thousands of women from his country sold into prostitution? “Thai girls are just so pretty.” And here’s the Premier on ten-year-old girls being sold. “Come on, don’t you like young girls, too?” I swear to God, he said that.’
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 US?’
‘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.’
‘I kind of like the Russians for this,’ Monnie went on. Then she 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 Mafia 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, 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 Forty-Eight
I had never really stopped being a student since my days at Johns Hopkins, and it had served me well in the Washington P.D., even given me a certain mystique. Hopefully, 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 in loose networks which cooperated, but weren’t dependent on one another. At least not so far. A major benefit was that the loose style of organization avoided RICO Mafia 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 low-lifes, especially the brigades involved with prostitution. According to the Bureau’s Organized Crime 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 as among their top-five choices for when they grew up. Several historical anecdotes in the file had been inserted to represent the mob 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 eyes poked out, thus ensuring that he could never create a finer cathedral for anyone else.