Howard Linskey - The Dead

Amrein was a wiry little man in wire framed glasses who looked like a college professor — not the representative of one of the most lethal organisations on the planet. I’d given him a name and now I expected information.

‘You want the history lesson?’ he asked me.

‘Yes.’

‘Those Serbian brothers have been around for a long time. Their names are Dusan, Sreten and Marko Stevic. They started out in one of the hooligan gangs associated with a football team; Red Star in Belgrade. Little more than thugs, with a side-line in drug dealing; very minor but it drew them to the attention of the nationalists and they were recruited into one of the paramilitary units that sprang up during the Bosnian war; extreme right, ultra nationalist, largely uncontrollable. Their unit was linked to atrocities but the numbers involved weren’t large, so they were never pursued. It took the authorities years to bring charges against the big guys like Arkan and Milosevic. They gave up trying to catch everyone who’d slaughtered civilians. It was a very messy conflict.’

‘And when the war was over they turned to organised crime.’

‘What do men of violence always do when the cause they are supposedly fighting for is gone? They fight for money and power instead. The brothers weren’t part of a clan but if one of them wished to assassinate its rivals, without leaving a trail back to them, they would hire the Stevic brothers to do it. They worked for the Zemun and Surcin clans plus the Vozdovac, prospering precisely because they had no clear affiliation to any of them.’

‘They did other people’s dirty work?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and thrived on it.’ He stopped speaking until a woman with a baby in a pushchair coming the other way walked past us. When she had gone he continued, ‘Then everything changed. Ten years ago, the Serbian mafia assassinated the Prime Minister, Zoran Dindic, and the state finally clamped down on everyone. Operation Sablja resulted in ten thousand arrests, including the country’s own Deputy State Prosecutor. The leaders of the main clans were given long sentences, or were killed by police, or they murdered each other. The Serbian mafia has not been destroyed however. New leaders emerged and the Stevic brothers’ influence grew.’

‘What are they doing over here?’

Amrein hesitated as if he was trying to find the right words. ‘They target places for expansion.’

‘What’s their criteria?’

Amrein took a long time to answer, ‘They expand where they see weakness, either from the authorities or…’

‘Men like me?’ I prompted.

‘That would be their appraisal, not mine,’ he said, ‘but Serbian criminals are noted for the brutality of their methods. It is a legacy of the ethnic cleansing from the war, where torture and mutilation of captured soldiers or civilians was so commonplace as to be no longer noteworthy. Understandably, these methods deter business rivals. Fear is a powerful weapon,’ he reminded me.

Amrein was right. We both knew the power of fear. Was I scared of these Serbian brothers; the war criminals who would enjoy cutting me into pieces if they got the opportunity? Who wouldn’t be?

‘How are they getting away with this?’

‘It seems they are listed as high-level criminal sources.’

It was one of the oldest tricks in the book, but still one of the most effective and so hard to disprove. If I was a bent copper, being paid to turn a blind eye, I would do exactly the same thing. I’d list the criminal paying me as my grass. Whatever they were involved in, I’d argue, it was far less important than the information they provided. It’s often forgotten that a great deal of police intelligence on crooks is provided by other crooks, for a whole variety of reasons. Some are paid and some are looking to get their own crimes overlooked or sentences reduced by cooperating with the authorities. Others just do it to get their own back on former associates or to eliminate the competition. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; there is no code.

‘So who’s protecting them?’

‘It goes high. We think an Assistant Chief Constable.’

‘Bloody hell. That would explain it. Are you sure?’

‘Our people heard they’ve got something on him. They are most likely paying him as well.’

‘The classic combination of bribery and blackmail,’ I conceded, ‘which ACC is it?’

‘Brinklow.’

‘What can we do about this?’

‘It will be difficult,’ he told me, ‘with his support they are untouchable by anyone from inside Lothian and Borders Police and there’s a lot of politics. They don’t like outside interference.’

‘What about SOCA?’

‘Won’t be interested, unless we can provide conclusive proof Brinklow is on the take.’

‘And you don’t have that proof?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Amrein, we pay you a lot of money to fix things like this.’

‘I feel sure we can come up with it,’ he told me, ‘in time. Leave the Serbian brothers to us,’ he urged me.

We’d reached the stone footbridge over the River Wear. ‘There is one other thing,’ he told me, when we crossed to the other side, ‘and I suspect you will not like to hear it.’

At this point it was hard to imagine how my day could get any worse, but it did. ‘Yaroslav Vasnetsov insists upon a meeting.’

Have you ever wondered what it must be like to have money? I mean real money, not just a few thousand dropped on you by a long-lost uncle you never knew, who dies and leaves it all in his will. If you’ve ever wondered what it must feel like to have fifty grand tucked away, a hundred maybe or, if you actually have the imagination, to ponder what you’d do with a million quid, then you know just how much it can change your life. No mortgage, a big house, all bought and paid for, the flash car most people only get to see in their rear-view mirror, before it flashes past them in the fast lane. If you want enough to buy anything you could ever want, including high-end, three-grand-a-night hookers, plus mountains of coke and vats full of Cristal, then you’re probably already thinking you might need at least a couple of mil, more maybe.

Me, I reckon it would take about four million just to put you in a position where you can actually tell the boss to go fuck himself and his crummy job, to set yourself up so you never need to earn another penny, to be in a position where you can look after yourself and your whole family for the rest of your days.

Now imagine that, instead of four million, you had a hundred or two hundred times that? Serious money. That’s your own Lear jet, taking you off to your personal Caribbean island with wall-to-wall Playboy bunnies flown in, until you get bored with them all and send out for more. Let’s say you have two hundred and fifty times that four million and now you are a billionaire? You’re financing art galleries, museums, Hollywood movies, presidential campaigns.

Now imagine you have twenty times that amount. Twenty billion dollars. What does that make you? It makes you Yaroslav Vasnetsov.

His front lawn was the size of a cricket pitch and the driveway leading up to it from the main gate was so long we were chauffeured down it. The house was enormous; one of those neo-gothic piles with gargoyles that peer down at you from the buttresses. It looked like it had been purchased from the estate of Aleister Crowley; a Hammer House of Horror film-set in the heart of leafy Surrey.

We went through a marbled hallway and I was conscious of how many people were busily going about their business. This wasn’t just the man’s home, it was the hub of the Vasnetsov empire.

Yaroslav Vasnetsov was not born to wealth, but into a dirt-poor Georgian family who could barely afford to feed him, or the rest of his siblings. When he was still young, his father moved them all from Georgia to St Petersburg, craving the opportunity a big city could provide. Vasnetsov’s first foray into private enterprise was selling toys from a market stall but now, at just forty-five, he had amassed one of the biggest fortunes in the world, estimated at between fifteen and twenty billion dollars, depending on which newspaper’s estimate you believed. To fathom how he was able to do this is to understand Russia at the end of the Cold War. When Boris Yeltsin came to power he swept away the Communist old order and plunged his nation into an era of unrivalled corruption. If you bankrolled politicians you got the opportunity to plunder the state’s wealth by buying up enormous companies for fractions of their true value. Vasnetsov already understood how to make money by buying political influence and paying off local crime lords, so he merely took this know-how to the next level. His investments were shrewd and the state-owned oil companies and aluminium plants were privatised, modernised and soon began to deliver the billions he now enjoyed.