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.