Every Man a Menace (8 page)

“When we gonna get there?” he asked.

“We’re getting close,” John said.

Different things that Shadrack had said passed through Raymond’s mind.
I read you the very first night we met. Sure as a song is sung by a singer.

John switched his turn signal on and guided them onto the Hercules exit. Raymond suffered through a quick moment of thinking he’d forgotten his phone before his hand patted it in his left pocket. Then he touched the pocket that held the key and note. John turned left onto a road Raymond had never been on before. They headed up a windy suburban street filled with beige houses set back at intervals, blinds drawn. Raymond became more and more nervous with each turn they made.

Eventually, John pulled into a driveway. The house looked the same as all the surrounding ones. A light on inside made the blinds glow orange. John opened his door and stepped out. Raymond let himself have one second alone before he took a deep breath and opened the door.

For the first time since he’d been released, Raymond looked up at the stars in the sky. He turned and scanned the block again: no sign of anyone else. Everything was silent. There was a chill in the air.

“Come on,” said John, walking toward the house. He pulled open a metal screen door, then turned and looked at Raymond. His face was shaded; Raymond couldn’t see his eyes. It seemed like he was waiting for someone to let them in. Raymond’s nerves grew more raw by the second.

“Who is it?” Shadrack called from inside.

“It’s us,” said John.

When the door opened John placed a hand on Raymond’s back and nudged him forward. Shadrack stood just inside, his face looking either bored or distant. Raymond had to squeeze by him to enter. As he passed, Shadrack pulled his head back like a man avoiding bad air.

The room was empty, the carpet dented where a couch had once sat. Raymond smelled cigarettes. He walked to the center of the room and turned to face Shadrack. The man’s face was unmistakably sad; there was a weariness in his eyes, and his mouth hung flat and loose. Raymond’s chest flooded with dread.

“Go on down that way,” Shadrack said. He pointed down a hallway that led away from the front room. Raymond’s mouth went dry. He wanted to ask Shadrack what was wrong, but he couldn’t. He waited for Shadrack to lead the way, but the man waved him forward.

An orange glow leaked from under the door at the end of the hall. The hall itself was dark and carpeted. Raymond
could feel Shadrack and John behind him; he wanted to turn back, to run past them and get back outside, but he felt suddenly powerless. Something was drastically wrong. He decided to pray—it was something he rarely did, but right then, walking in that hallway, the darkness all around him, he prayed to God to deliver him from this situation. His fear had become complete.

“Go on,” said Shadrack, when Raymond paused near the doorway.

He reached for the door—it was cracked open—and pushed it. Shadrack and John stepped up behind him and forced him into the room. Raymond’s eyes settled immediately on the floor, but it took him a moment to process the fact that it was covered in plastic. It was one big sheet, the kind a painter lays out before a job.

Shadrack, standing in the doorway, said, “Sorry, man. I liked you, I really did.”

Movement came from Raymond’s right side. He looked that way and saw Gloria’s boy, the one with the mustache. He held a gun at Raymond’s head. “No, no, no,” said Raymond.

Raymond heard the shot, felt his head swing like he’d been punched. He felt the ground pulled to his chest, saw his blood and brains thrown on the floor.

Part 2

“Hello friend,” said Mr. Hong, his mouth a few inches from Semion Gurevich’s ear.

Semion sat at a table in the back of a club he owned in Miami. The table was raised up on a tier, overlooking a crowded dance floor. The bass from the speakers rumbled. The lights turned everyone red.

“Join us,” he said, leaning back in his seat.

He gestured at the table. There were two women and another man sitting with him already. They were all dressed and tanned for a night out. Semion watched Mr. Hong glance at them, smile shyly, and say he couldn’t. Mr. Hong looked, Semion sometimes thought, like the kind of man who always wins at the horse tracks. A perennial winner.

The older man bent down to Semion’s ear again. “Usual,” he whispered. “Fish market, sometime now until one week. Have your boy bring the documents to my office.” Semion understood
fish market
to mean a warehouse outside Chiang Mai, Thailand. He understood
documents
to mean money.
My office
meant Mr. Hong’s lawyer’s office, in Miami.

Mr. Hong pulled his head back and looked at Semion. “Good?”

“Yes, good, you old bastard,” Semion said. “I love you, you know that? I love the way you dress!”

“Good,” said Mr. Hong. He nodded to the other guests at the table, gave Semion’s shoulder a final squeeze, and walked away.

Semion took a moment to reflect on how blessed his life had become. The man sitting across from him winked.

“Who was he?” asked one of the blond women.

“He’s a real estate man,” said Semion. “A rich bastard. I love him.”

It was seventy-nine days before Raymond Gaspar would be killed.

Semion Gurevich was thirty-five years old. He was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russia; when he was three, his family immigrated to Israel. They settled first in Kiryat Ono, and then in the Yud-Yud Gimmel section of Ashdod. It was a rough neighborhood, but Semion learned to blend in. Even as a troublemaker, he graduated high school with decent marks. He scored a high health report as well, and shortly after graduation he was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Forces. After seven months of dusty calisthenics, endless target practice, bland food, and crowded dorms, he found himself stationed near the Egyptian border. He spent his days caught between boredom and tension. He did things that still bothered him even now during that time: he broke
an old Arab’s nose with the butt of his gun; he tossed stun grenades at a group of children. But he survived.

Semion had grown up around drugs; there was plenty of heroin in Ashdod. He’d smoked it a few times in high school; he sniffed dirty cocaine at parties. He’d even sold a bit of ecstasy during his final year of high school. It was only natural that he fell in with the few soldiers in his unit who sold heroin.
We’re doing God’s work,
said one of them.
Selling drugs to Arabs.
At that point they were still just making beer money.

After finishing his service, he settled in Tel Aviv. A month later he began to think about selling drugs in earnest. With the contacts he’d made in the army, and the friends he’d made growing up in Ashdod, he was soon able to make good money importing heroin from Lebanon and selling it in the streets. His parents had raised him to be tolerant, and it served him well: he worked with Arabs, Africans, Bedouins, Jews, and Russians—and he insisted on mutual respect. He was a hustler, and he liked making money. It made him feel powerful.

After the first few years, Semion didn’t even have to stand on the street anymore; he could sit back and manage the men. But one summer—a particularly hot one in his memory—Semion got into a conflict over territory with a Russian gangster named Abram Gorin. Semion’s group had gone through a series of small expansions, adding a few men to their street crew along the way, and spread two blocks west to Sderot Har Tsiyon. This area turned out to be one that Gorin thought of as his own.

The Gorin gang operated on a different level: they were international. They had a reputation. One night, after Semion had drunk too many beers in a bar on Rosh Pina, a handsome-looking Russian man—bald, with bright blue eyes—stepped in front of him on the street and grabbed him by the shoulders. It was a friendly gesture, like an uncle measuring a nephew. Speaking Russian, the man said that Mr. Abram Gorin wanted Semion to know he was no longer allowed to sell heroin in Neve Sha’anan. He looked Semion in the eyes. “Do you hear me?” he asked. Semion didn’t speak Russian perfectly, but he understood this, and, unable to do anything else, he nodded his head.

The next morning, when he woke, Semion felt equal measures of guilt and fear.
What had happened?
It was as if he’d been told he had cancer: one day he was healthy, the next he was not. Still, a depressed kind of disbelief kept him from telling his men to stop dealing. Six days later, his friend Schmuel Teper—a funny, chubby man—was pushed in front of a moving bus. Schmuel survived, but he would never walk again.

A week after that, the same Russian man approached Semion outside his home. It was early in the day, but the sun had already heated the dusty streets. The man wasn’t rude to him; he simply smiled and scanned the area with his eyes, and then, having satisfied himself that they were alone, beckoned Semion toward him with two fingers. When Semion stepped closer he told him that he had to leave Israel. He made the visit feel like a favor. When Semion managed to nod the man slapped him on the back and walked away.

The next day, Semion called his group together. He invited them all to his apartment—a rare occurrence—and explained that they had to take some time off. Abram Gorin himself had insisted on it, he said. “We take a break,” he said. “Lay low. See how it shakes out.” He expected the men to resist, to call for war, but nobody did. Nobody argued. Three months later, Semion moved to Miami.

A few of his friends from the army—Russian Israelis, like himself—had been living there, and they helped him find an apartment in South Beach, in a tower overlooking Biscayne Bay. He didn’t bring much—a bag filled with clothes, a computer, a razor, his toothbrush. He had a good amount of money saved.

One of his friends in Miami was Isaak Raskin. Isaak, a short man with the kind of strong jaw and dimpled chin normally associated with Hollywood actors, was preparing to open a nightclub called Ground Zero; Semion invested cash in it. The club did well, and over the next four years they opened three more. For a time it seemed like Semion might leave the drug trade behind. But eventually Isaak, who had connections in the shipping business, began talking to him about setting something up.

They would do things differently he insisted. No selling on corners to Arabs and Africans. No heroin. No rival gangs. They were going to be middlemen, and they would focus their attention on a benign corner of the market: ecstasy.

“Listen to me,” Semion said to Isaak, arranging his words like a drunken professor. “If we’re going to do this, we have to stay small. You get too big you attract the wrong type of
attention. Trust me. I know this. We stay small; we make good money. But we stay small.”

Isaak, for his part, simply frowned and nodded, as though he couldn’t have agreed more.

A man named David Eban, another friend of Semion’s from Israel, introduced him to a Flemish group that cooked drugs in a lab outside of Ghent. Eban agreed to sign on as a courier, and began to move the product across the Dutch border, to Rotterdam. Isaak had a cousin who worked as a second mate on an Israeli freighter that operated a line from Rotterdam to the Port of Virginia. He could walk right onto the ship with fifteen pounds of pure MDMA stashed in the false bottom of a duffel bag. Another Israeli, Mark Orlov, would meet the ship in Virginia. The cousin’s cut—7.5 percent—was a ridiculously high price for a mule, but Semion and Isaak were not running a typical operation. There were less than ten men involved, no amateurs.

Semion kept the circle of dealers he sold to small. He never met them in person—Orlov took care of that—never communicated with them, and gave them a fair price. They always wanted more. After two years, Semion and Isaak were splitting almost a quarter million dollars every month.

All of this worked smoothly until, on a cold day in November, members of Belgium’s federal police unit stormed the mobile trailer where Semion’s Flemish chemist had set up shop. David Eban narrowly avoided arrest by fleeing Europe. They needed a new source.

It was Isaak who came up with the Southeast Asian connection. One of his oldest friends, Moisey Segal, lived in Bangkok. The picture Isaak painted of the man hinted at deep criminal connections. When Semion wondered if Moisey could be trusted, Isaak dropped his head, raised his hand like he was under oath, and swore that Moisey was their man.

“I know this guy,” he said. “I’ve known him since we were schoolboys. You can trust Moisey Segal with your life.”

Semion and Isaak flew together to Bangkok. Moisey—handsome, skinny, tattooed, with a shaved head—looked more like the drummer of a punk band than a member of a criminal gang. Semion was prepared to not like him. He expected Moisey to be a blowhard, but—almost against his will—he found himself charmed.

They stayed for nine days at a hotel near Sukhumvit. Moisey seemed genuinely curious about Semion; he asked question after question and listened to the answers like each one might offer a valuable lesson. Underneath this curiosity, Semion sensed a simmering core of discontent: it only made him like the man more. Every time Isaak would ask when the meeting with Moisey’s connection would occur, his friend would first wave him off, as if the question was unreasonable, and then nod his head, as if it made perfect sense. After looking at his phone for missed messages—there never were any—he would wipe his nose, sniff, shrug, and say, “So, we wait.”

They drank every day. Moisey took them to underground bars, rooftop bars, riverfront bars. On the fourth night, in Isaak’s hotel room, he made them smoke
yaba
—little red
amphetamine pills that tasted like chocolate. Moisey crushed one with his lighter, cooked the powder on chewing gum foil, and sucked the smoke in with a straw. When they’d all had enough, Moisey crumpled up the foil, threw the straw under the bed, and shouted at them: “No gear! It’s fucking genius!”

That same night, he brought them to a dance club populated with Thai prostitutes. Before they entered the place, they sniffed bumps of crushed Viagra off one of Moisey’s keys. Semion knew his hangover would be hell, but for some reason he couldn’t say no. Isaak, for his part, didn’t appear to be bothered by any of it. He kept talking and laughing as though he didn’t have a care in the world.