The Looters (13 page)

The bar in Little Odessa, the Russian sector of the sprawling New York City behemoth, smelled of borscht, sex, and sweat. Beet and cabbage soup and the meat and onion turnovers called
pirozhkis
were heated up in microwaves behind the bar to Nunes’s left. At the bar, two older men wearing fur hats and heavy, old-fashioned wool suits in the warm bar were arguing as they drank vodka and ate pirozhkis. Beefy men, both were built like Soviet T-34 tanks. One had thick black hair swept back, heavy eyebrows, high cheekbones, and a rock jaw, giving him the look of Brezhnev, the 1970s Soviet leader. A red and gold medal making him a Hero of the Soviet Union hung from his lapel.

“A couple former KGB apparatchiks,” Vlad said, “arguing over which was the best way to break a dissenter’s will during questioning.”

Nunes had picked up enough Russian words and body language to understand that the two were really refighting the Cold War, but he didn’t doubt they’d get around to KGB torture methods at some point.

“Big trouble,” Vlad said. He wasn’t referring to the two old men. “That means some fish will be eaten. I don’t want to be one of them.” He wiped sweat from his face with a handkerchief. As he poured another shot for each of them, Nunes could see his hand shake.

Nunes had joined the Russian in tackling a bottle of Zubrówka, a yellowish vodka with a fragrance and slightly bitter undertone created by steeping the liquor in stalks of buffalo grass.

Small fish would be eaten
, Nunes thought. Minnows like Vlad were what the big mafiya fish ate when things went wrong. While Nunes listened to the Russian informer, his eyes made sweeps of the bar. He didn’t want to be in the line of fire if Vlad was terminated. To Nunes’s right a sapped pole dancer with tired blood bumped and grinded for two construction workers drinking their lunch. She probably worked a split shift, coming in midday for the lunch crowd after working half the night.

The Brighton Beach neighborhood got its “Little Odessa” tag after it became heavily populated by emigres from the former Soviet republics, mostly Jews fleeing discrimination. The language and storefront signs on the streets were as much in Russian as English, even though Ukrainians dominated the area. Not only did the Russian culture emigrate, but organized crime Russian style—the mafiya—came with it, bringing along violence and naked avariciousness not exercised by organized American crime since Lucky Luciano put together a national syndicate in the 1930s.

“What’s got everybody kill crazy?” Nunes asked.

Vlad gave the four corners of the bar another nervous check. He was as subtle as a lamb baaing at a pack of wolves.

“Like I said, a guy came to them a couple months ago that wanted to make a big score in a deal to supply arms to an African rebel leader.”

Nunes was working undercover as an art appraiser with no scruples, but there was nothing unique about a connection between art and arms in the international world of crime he operated in.

“You never told me the name of the guy selling the arms.”

“I still don’t know it. He’s American; I know that. He has a Bulgarian deputy defense minister willing to sell him a shipload of small arms—rifles, machine guns, shoulder-launched rockets, that type of stuff. He tells our people he needs money to pay the Bulgarians and ship the stuff to Angola in Africa, where he’ll have a big payday in diamonds from a rebel colonel.”

Drugs ranked number one in the multibillion-dollar international trade in contraband, with military arms coming in second and art ranking third. Major drug deals were sometimes even financed by contraband art. Major art heists were pulled off to get artworks that were used as collateral to buy narcotics for resale. Because there was little formality in purchasing multimillion-dollar art pieces, traffickers could also launder drug money by buying art with cash and reselling it, collecting the money in bank transfers. It took less legal formality to buy a hundred-million-dollar painting than a hundred-dollar car.

Art’s rank of third in the world of crime was not insignificant. That made the illicit trade in works of art often as murderous as that of blood diamonds.

Nunes nodded. “He sells the diamonds through Switzerland, repays the local boys, and pockets the rest.”

“Right. But he needed collateral for the loan from our people. He put up antiquities to front the deal.”

Vlad had already dropped the word “antiquities” on him in the phone conversation that set up the meeting. Technically, it meant artifacts produced before the Middle Ages, but to Little Odessa mobsters it could mean anything that was old and valuable. But to finance a major arms deal the collateral had to be worth millions. Many millions.

“What kind of antiquities?”

Vlad shook his head, shaking off drops of sweat that hit the table.

Definitely hot in here
, Nunes thought,
but not enough to make a man break out in a sweat
. That took fear.

“I know it’s Middle Eastern stuff, but I don’t know exactly what or how much. They had me examine three pieces they said had been picked by random from the whole lot: a vase, a drinking cup, and a marble head. They were all Mesopotamian.”

Nunes got a big jolt of interest. Mesopotamia was the site of a number of great civilizations of the ancient world. More important was its modern relationship to antiquities: The looting of the museum when American troops were entering the city of Baghdad was the greatest tragedy to a national culture since the rape of European culture by the Nazis.

The thousands of stolen items still missing were on the FBI’s Top Ten Art Crimes list, the art world’s version of the “ten most wanted.”

Nunes had been floating in and out of the Russian community for six months, investigating the trade in contraband works of art. He never understood why it took the FBI three-quarters of a century to get serious about the trade in contraband art. The racket was fueled by the trade in antiquities smuggled out of countries of origin, robberies of homes and museums, and the creation of fraudulent works.

His experience with American-style organized crime served him well in dealing with the Russian-style mob. Like its American Mafia counterparts, the mafiya had no central authority but powerful gangs that got involved in almost any action that turned an illegal buck, with the drug and sex trade and business extortion being the staples.

The Russians in many ways were more brutal than the American homegrown variety of gangster. Brighton Beach had a long history as a solid, working-class Jewish community. Over the past couple of decades, it added a criminal flavor to its dimensions as thousands of émigrés landed there after they fled the Soviet Union. Some of the new arrivals had criminal experiences back in the Old Country. And it didn’t take U.S. law enforcement long to discover that criminals who had gone head-to-head with the infamous KGB thought American cops were pussycats in comparison. Getting their “rights” read to them by an American cop was a piece of cake to thugs who had survived KGB “interviews” that often began with a beating.

Nunes had become a familiar figure in Vlad’s company. With Nunes’s own background in art, rather than arranging clandestine meetings with Vlad and worrying about the man being followed, Nunes was brought in to “appraise” works of art. Naturally, everything he was asked to place a value on had been stolen.

He looked over at the stripper on stage. Nunes had empathy for the stripper, who danced as if she were bored to the point of screaming. He had gone through his own burnout. Working nearly three decades on organized crime, drugs, and money laundering, he was ready to flame out when he got assigned to the Bureau’s newly formed Art Crime Team.

Besides twenty-nine years of service, his qualifications included a master’s in art history he had picked up with a decade of night classes at NYU. Part of his motivation for the evening classes had been to stay out of the house and avoid conflict with his wife as their marriage disintegrated and they stuck it out until their youngest son left college to launch a computer game company out of his garage.

On this case, Nunes was “in drag,” as he characterized it, playing the role of a down-on-the-heels art professor appraising stolen art. He worked the case using the name and ID of an actual UT—Austin professor. The real professor was sent off to work a tell in Israel just in case anyone in Little Odessa picked up the phone to check whether the professor was still in Austin.

A friend of Vlad’s stopped by the table and chatted in Russian to him. After he left, Vlad said, “Our kids go to the same school, play soccer on the same team, and that bastard would have me put down if he could make a ruble out of it.”

“Tell me more about the deal,” Nunes said.

The Russian art dealer shrugged. “That’s all I know. It’s a simple business arrangement.”

The scenario of buying on credit and reselling for a profit would be understood by any businessperson. Except here the return on investment was astronomical when everything went right… and the penalty for defaulting was death.

“What went wrong?”

Another shrug. More baaing at the wolves in the place. “I don’t know. Someone defaulted. It’s like paying for a car. Sometimes you don’t pay and they send the collector out.”

Nunes was sure he knew why the deal went south. A news report from Angola stated that a rebel leader had been killed in a plane crash. That would leave the American arms seller with a shipload of munitions or, if he had delivered the merchandise, the rebels or government troops might have the guns… and still have the money.

The surge of terrorist groups and rebel armies in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America created a high demand for weapons that could only be purchased on the black market. When the Soviet bloc disintegrated, the world’s largest supply of surplus military weapons was suddenly created—along with legions of generals and munition depot guards willing to sell them.

Because of their connections in the Old Country, the illegal arms trade was perfect for the Little Odessa mafiya who funneled pistols to shoulder-launched missiles and tanks out of the country on Black Sea ships sailing out of the original Odessa and former Soviet republics.

Despite Vlad’s contention that the American had put together the deal, Nunes was reasonably sure that the local Russians were getting something from both ends of the Bulgarian arms purchase.

No honor among thieves was one of the principles of businesses on both sides of the law.

“What’s going on between the American and the locals?” Nunes asked.

“Our people would rather have the cash electronically deposited in their accounts than a bunch of old relics. I’ve heard the American has a source for buying back the collateral. If he can’t, they’ll keep his collateral and…” Vlad tapped his head with a finger.

Nunes got the message: Like the legal executioners in the old Soviet Union, the Odessa mafiya used the traditional method of a single bullet to the head. The Soviets did it to save on bullets… the mafiya considered it an advertising gimmick.

To welsh on a deal with the mafiya was not exactly akin to failing to pay a credit card.

Who could put up millions of dollars in contraband antiquities? The archaeological sites of the world were all sources of smuggled relics that could finance a criminal arms conspiracy: Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Angkor Wat, India, Mesoamerica, and Peru were all rich sources of antiquities with dirt on them.

The largest source of all was the looting of the Iraqi museum. That pieces would start showing up in the art world was inevitable. And that they would be hard to trace was one of the curses of preserving the cultural heritage of third-world countries.

The Iraqis had not been efficient about cataloging the enormous number of items in their collection. The museum held over 150,000 items, and only a small percentage of the pieces were properly cataloged and photographed. And many of the catalog records were destroyed by the looters for the express purpose of making it difficult or impossible to track pieces.

The problem of not preserving and protecting its natural heritage wasn’t unique to Iraq—it was epidemic in third-world countries, which was why so much of their cultural heritage ended up in the rich museums of Europe, the United States, and the Far East.

To make a significant recovery of the missing relics would be Olympic gold for Nunes, capping off his career with a big win.

He had to consider whether Vlad was the actual source of the Mesopotamian art to the Russian mob. He could be fencing stolen items from the museum heist for the person he was describing as the “American.” Vlad was sweating a hell of a lot for a deal that went sour and his small part in it. But Nunes’s gut told him that Vlad wasn’t the source.

The Russian ran a small-time art galley specializing in Russian icons, religious images typically painted on wood panels in Eastern Europe. Naturally, the icons were smuggled out of Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics, but it was a business that dealt in art pieces worth hundreds and thousands of dollars, not millions. Nunes had gone after him because he figured the man’s Little Odessa location would bring him into contact with other illegal art transactions.

When Vlad had been approached by a local mafioso to find an expert to appraise contraband art being offered as collateral, Vlad had come to the FBI with the information.

His motivation to cooperate with the feds didn’t arise from his sense of responsibility as a citizen. Because almost everything in his shop was stolen and smuggled in, he was trying to work off about a hundred years in prison by cooperating with the FBI. After his usefulness ended, he was destined to have his disappearance orchestrated by the Witness Protection Program.

This wasn’t the first time Nunes had investigated art with a Mafia—or mafiya—connection. Many of the items that had appeared on the FBI’s Top Ten Art Crimes list had a connection to trafficking in drugs and arms because organized crime got involved somewhere along the line.

The Bureau’s Top Ten Art Crimes list included the $300 million robbery of the Gardner Museum in Boston, a 1990 low-tech heist in which two thieves dressed as police officers conned the guards into letting them into the museum at night. The haul, which has never been recovered, included thirteen works, among them paintings by Vermeer, Manet, Degas, and Rembrandt, but the thieves, who were suspected of having Boston Mafia connections, were definitely not art connoisseurs: They took the bronzed top off a flagpole and left behind Titian’s
Rape of Europa
, the most valuable piece in the museum.