Chapter 10

We had all worn latex gloves, so we had little problem in cleaning up after ourselves. We did leave Ivanovitch in the shower where he had died because we wanted to shake up the rest of the Russian mafia. I hoped that my use of the GSh-18 to kill Ivanovitch would help to confuse the situation. The gun was not registered in the US, so I was sure that it could not be traced. I hoped that the cops would think that somebody in the Russian mafia had shot him. Possibly, that confusion would help us, but it certainly would not hurt us.

We headed back to our apartment in the City to digest all that information that we had collected. All of us were savvy enough on computers to transcribe what we had learned into data bases that we could put together to search. Alice worked on the money data to arrange for us to transfer the funds in offshore banks to the accounts owned by Sunshine Enterprises, Inc. At first blush, it looked like we would pick up another $10 million or so. That would certainly pay for this excursion to New York City.

Pete took the list of Ivanovitch's murder victims and hired a local PI firm to check them out to see if there was anybody whom we should help as a result of the murders. They did find several families that were in desperate straits, so we did what we could by anonymously giving them some money. We could not do more than that without the danger of compromising our status.

We now had enough data on three more Russian mafia gangs that we felt that we could go after them. Alexi Romanoff ran one of the gangs that specialized in a protection racket. So far, from all of what we could gather, it looked like the Romanoff gang was concentrating its efforts among recent Russian immigrants who had started small businesses in the City. Between the police resources already being strained too far and the fact that the victims were afraid of any police contact, the Romanoff gang was having a free run.

We knew where to find Romanoff, but we did not know how big his operation had grown. If it were still a small operation, we could knock it off just by eliminating Romanoff. However, if the organization were large enough, somebody else would just move in to take Romanoff's place as the ruler of the gang. We decided that a discrete examination of the gang's headquarters would answer that question. Doug and Hank were chosen for the raid.

It was impossible to hide the fact that the gang's headquarters had been compromised, so we tried to make it look like a couple of common thieves had broken in to find something to sell for drug money. Doug and Hank found a filing cabinet which they broke into and looked for useful information. They did find a little bit of useful information, but not really very much. They did make a mess of the files on paper so that it would be impossible to tell precisely what they had been looking for.

The real information they got came from the two computers they stole. Picking up those two computers was the real object of the raid. We were sure that the gang would think that the computers would be sold at some pawn shop for whatever money they can get, but we expected to get useful data from their files. Agnes was in her element as she dove into cracking the simplistic security on the files and reading what she had found.

As we expected, Agnes came up with a list of the gang's victims and the money collected from each victim. Man, this turned out to be a lot of money, not because the gang was making unreasonable demands, but because there were so many victims. The current income was on the order of $100,000 per week! Agnes immediately began searching for where the money was stashed. She traced the money trail to a bank in Canada that had a connection with a bank in the Cayman Islands. That was going to make it easy to recover the money because she had already had some dealings with that bank through her former employer.

In the case of her former employer, everything had been legitimate and had complied with all relevant laws. Nevertheless, the Cayman bank was so paranoid that she had to deal with a number of passwords and other security measures. Agnes gained access to the Romanoff gang's account because the Cayman bank was still somewhat naïve with the security. Anyway, now that we could reach the money, we were ready to wipe out the Romanoff gang.

Alice and I put together a report for the New York City Police Department and for the FBI of the type that we were familiar with from dealing with our former clients. This report on the Romanoff gang was sent anonymously to the two law enforcement entities, and we sat back to see what would happen. Dammit, nothing happened!

Okay, if the local and federal cops were going to ignore us, we would handle the situation ourselves. So far, none of the victims or their relatives had been murdered by the Romanoff gang, so we were reluctant to go on a killing spree. However, we decided to put as many of the gang members as possible into the hospital for a long stay.

Until the situation changed, we decided to attack the gang members as they made their collections from the victims. We rotated our people in front of the gang's headquarters and photographed people as they went in and out the front door. It took us only three days of that activity to have a complete file of photos of the gang members. These were dumped into the computer and matched to names we had picked up from the gang's files. These were then printed out and used to identify the gang members when they approached a victim.

A victim's place of business was staked out by two of us on a rotating basis, Alice was included, but Agnes was not. We knew which day and the approximate time of the collection visit, so we did not waste a lot of time waiting around for gang members to show up. We let them go into the office and do whatever business they had in mind before we acted.

We accosted the collectors as they left the office and quietly, at gunpoint, marched them into a convenient alley. We use clubs to smash elbows and knees after taking their "collection" from them. We usually got a lot of chatter about how we were going to regret our actions, but that was ignored. A call was placed for Emergency Medical Services as we left our victims lying in the alley. The next day, the money was anonymously returned to the protection victim.

We managed to take care of nearly half of the gang members before they came up with an effective countermeasure. Two men actually made the collection while their backs were guarded by three more men who waited outside the business for the collectors to appear. We were not foolish enough to put two of our people against five of theirs.

We worked on our own countermeasure and came up with a simple solution: we skipped the collectors and attacked the backup men instead. We now put three people onto our attack team and they approached the bodyguards as soon as the other two went into the victim's office. The rest of the operation was the same as we had used against the collectors, and this went on for two days.

The situation petered out, from our point of view, because the gang ran out of people to make the collections. Finally, a visit was made to discuss the matter with Mr. Romanoff. We had known all along where to find him, but we were trying for a bottom up gang destruction operation to see how well that would work. By the time we got around to Romanoff, he was expecting us, and had barricaded himself in his apartment.

There was a woman living with him, who, as far as we could tell, was not associated with the gang activities. We got into the apartment because the woman answered the door when Alice rang the doorbell. She was not expecting anything, so she opened the door to speak to Alice, and that was when we all charged into the apartment.

Romanoff had foolishly left the apartment to pick up some beer, and it was while he was gone that we attacked. Before Romanoff got back, his female companion was disabled with cable ties and sitting on the floor of a small closet. She didn't have long to wait before Romanoff came back. Naturally, we had been watching for him, so we were out of sight when he unlocked the apartment door and came in.

He was carrying a six pack of beer in each hand as he walked toward the refrigerator. I stepped up behind him and jammed the muzzle of my pistol into the small of his back. I have to give the man credit for having fast reflexes: he dropped the six pack in his left hand to the floor and whirled around to escape my gun and swing the other six pack at my head.

Naturally, I had to jump back to escape the swinging sixpack, but Doug stepped into view, brandishing his gun and ordering Romanoff to raise his hands. Romanoff could see that he was in an impossible situation and did as he was ordered. Alice fastened his hands behind his back with cable ties, and we marched him to the kitchen table.

We didn't have much to ask Romanoff, since we had access to all of his records on the two computers. All it took was breaking his knees for Romanoff to answer anything we asked. When that was over, I explained to him the purpose behind our attacks and why we were letting him live. Then I broke his two elbows and left him lying on the floor.

His girlfriend was released from her bonds and allowed to call for medical help. We were not worried about being identified because we had all worn latex gloves and stocking masks. The woman was so hysterical that I doubted that she could have described us in any case, but we had not taken any chances. We left in plenty of time to miss the authorities, but I did leave a note pointing out that Romanoff was the same Alexi Romanoff as was mentioned in the report that had been sent to police headquarters.

As much as possible, their money was returned to the protection racket victims. Of course, this was done anonymously, so we didn't get any feedback. However, we did not expect any, so I guess everybody was happy with the results. That set a precedent in which we returned any recovered money to the victims if it was possible; otherwise, we added the money to the coffers of Sunshine Enterprises, Inc.

The other two Russian mafia gangs that we had identified were treated in a similar way, but we did not bother to write a report for the cops on either one of them. The third gang we broke had been hijacking beer delivery trucks and selling the contents. Since insurance had covered the original losses, we put the money we recovered to our own use, and that paid for our activity in New York City.

Frankly, all of us were tired of New York City and wanted to go back to Boston. We packed up to return to our old haunts, and felt much better for the return. However, as Murphy's Law required, we got back to Boston in time for the first snow of the season. Fortunately, the first snow was usually a light one, so we actually enjoyed the sight of everything covered in a layer of white. It wasn't even enough snow to require plowing, so it was covered with a layer of dust and dirt by the next day. Oh, well, it was nice while the clean snow lasted.

We did some checking around through our old contacts and found that the Russian mafia was now back in business in New England and going strong. Well, no rest for the weary, but we admitted that we would get bored very quickly if we didn't have some crooks to chase.

Our first case was another one of those protection racket deals very similar to the Romanoff case in New York City. This took a little longer to track down than had the previous case simply because we had to start nearly from scratch in gathering the details that we needed to find the perpetrators. This time, the boss lived on an estate in a suburb just outside Route 128.

There had been four murders associated with this particular gang, so we had no qualms about killing them. I had my friend who had made up my air pistol to modify a rifle to operate off of air. In the interest of simplicity, this was a single shot rifle that used the same slug as the old military .30–06. This had two pressure settings: a low pressure setting that made the rifle virtually silent and a high pressure setting that made the rifle equivalent to a shorter range sniper's rifle. The latter setting was good for nearly half a mile of accurate shooting, and that was plenty good enough for us.

I admit to being somewhat selfish and reserved most of the use of the rifle to myself. This rifle was really good in our campaign against the protection racket. In either pressure setting, the .30-06 bullet was an effective killer, and it was certainly accurate enough within the range limitations.

It took almost a month to gather the information we needed to have the sheets of photos and names of the gang members. This time, we didn't fool around. We simply identified a gang member making a collection and shot him at close enough range to use the low pressure setting of the rifle. Since there was no way to back off and say "oops, I'm sorry" if the wrong person was shot, we made damned sure that I was shooting the right person. Also, I didn't shoot if there was any chance of wounding an innocent bystander. The result was that I could not take out every prospect on the first try, but I never shot anybody who did not deserve it.

Sure, we had evolved into a vigilante group that had no compunction about killing people who deserved it. The situation, especially with the Russian mafia, had become desperate, and the normal law enforcement authorities could not cope with what they had to face. I make no excuses, and claim that we fell among the good guys, even if a lot of people would have disowned us if they had to make a choice in public.

Nevertheless, between terrorists and devoted criminals, the average person was nothing but a walking target. American society simply was not geared for this type of activity, so there had to be a new force to arise and protect them from the chaos that was boiling around them. In many ways, American life was devolving back to what was present in the old Wild West. Sunshine Enterprises, Inc. had become the modern equivalent of the old-time bounty hunters, but we had not yet achieved legal status. Perhaps we would do so as society continued to change, but we were not going to wait for that change!

The criminal element had better watch out because we were coming after them. Not only that, but we were already formulating plans to increase the size and scope of Sunshine Enterprises, Inc., so that we could become active all over the country. There were places in America that needed us even more than Boston or New York City, and we wanted to go to work in those places as soon as possible.