Heidi Blake - From Russia with Blood

Young said he’d pay £10 million—double what Woodperry would be worth on the open market—if Moussavi was prepared to accept cash. Then they’d declare a sale price of £2 million on paper, keeping the remainder off the books and tax free. Moussavi didn’t like that idea, but he’d come around to the notion of off-loading Woodperry, and he told Young he’d happily accept market value if the money came by bank transfer.

It didn’t take the Oxford academic long to spot that something was amiss once the deal got under way. The first clue came at the Dorchester, when Young pulled £45,000 out of his briefcase to jump-start the sale but asked Moussavi to make out a receipt for £50,000. So he’s obviously accountable to someone, Moussavi thought, and he’s taking a little bit off the top . That alone raised enough questions in his mind for him to task an elite real estate agency with checking out Young’s background. The agent called him back sounding perplexed.

“I’ve looked and looked, and there seems to be nothing there,” he said. “I’ve no idea where his money comes from.”

When Moussavi asked Young directly about his wealth, the Scotsman said he had made his first money in property and invested millions in a chip-and-PIN internet technology company with help from a brilliant Soviet mathematician. Not long after, Young turned up at Woodperry with a beetle-browed stranger who wanted to look around the grounds. The small, suited newcomer spoke in a heavy Russian accent with a hurried air. Was he the Moscow-based benefactor who had helped Young make his big technology investment? Was this the person whose money was really going into the purchase of Woodperry House?

Young was splashing cash in all directions as he prepared to take ownership of the Oxfordshire mansion. Just as claimed, he pumped £2.6 million into an internet chip-and-PIN firm, taking a 50 percent stake alongside the Finnish billionaire and Conservative Party benefactor Poju Zabludowicz, and soon after that began lining up a £2 million investment in another internet venture with the retail tycoon Sir Philip Green. He had, he liked to boast, joined the billionaire’s club. But still, when the property agent chased Young for details of which bank he would be using to pay the asking price for Woodperry, it seemed he was stalling—as if he was having trouble finding a way to marshal the cash. Spooked, Moussavi phoned him and got tough.

“You’ve got twenty-four hours to pay, and then you’re going to forfeit the asset and I’m going to sue you.”

Young was unfazed. “I’m going to deposit cash into the account tomorrow,” he said.

“Do you really mean cash?” Moussavi asked, still somewhat disbelieving.

“Kaveh, I mean cash. Are you sure you don’t want to accept it?” Moussavi said he was sure. He wanted the money aboveboard, by bank transfer, not under the table. Lo and behold, the next day the millions arrived in Moussavi’s account by transfer from Coutts—the queen’s bank.

The Youngs were blissfully happy in their new two-hundred-acre mansion. They enrolled their two daughters at the ultraexclusive Dragon School, in Oxford, alongside the children of a glittering array of celebrities, and Michelle loved being the lady of the manor, overseeing a grand redecoration and marshaling armies of domestic staff to keep the house shipshape. She woke up every morning, looked out the bedroom window at the rolling grounds, and felt amazed that she was mistress of all she saw. When the snow fell in January, she bundled the girls into down-filled jumpsuits, and the family ran outside to tumble around on the marshmallow lawn.

But in the quiet rural community surrounding their stately home, the Youngs were causing a stir. When they hired an upscale local architecture outfit to redevelop Woodperry, the firm’s owner rang Moussavi, an old acquaintance, in a state of consternation.

“Mr. Moussavi, there’s something that smells very bad about these people,” he said. “I’ve seen their furniture! This is clearly new money. Where did they get it from?”

Meanwhile, Michelle was ruffling feathers at the school gates by boasting of her extravagant lifestyle—the exotic holidays and diamonds and twice-weekly dinners at Raymond Blanc’s double-Michelin-starred restaurant, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Young wasn’t making things any better by tearing around the country lanes at top speed in his Porsche, often leaving the engine running noisily outside the quiet local pubs. Those who did welcome the wealthy new family into the community on first appearances quickly began to smell a rat on closer inspection. Young’s claim to have been educated at Stowe—one of Britain’s most exclusive boarding schools—was belied by his habit of passing the port the wrong way at dinner.

Moussavi was becoming increasingly suspicious when one day, around a year after the sale of Woodperry went through, he received a knock on the door of his new nearby home from a plainclothes detective. The man was from Special Branch, the national security wing of Scotland Yard, and he wanted to talk about Young. The Yard had suspicions, he said, that the buyer of Woodperry was involved in the laundering of Russian money. Might Moussavi know anything about that?

The academic said he didn’t—though he spilled the beans about Young’s proposal to buy Woodperry off the books in cash—but he privately resolved to find out more. He began making his own inquiries into how Young had really come into his fortune. When he put that question to a mutual acquaintance—a local wheeler-dealer who had become friendly with the new arrivals—his question met with a look of surprise.

“Don’t you know?” the man asked with amusement. “Scot is Boris Berezovsky’s bagman.”

Suddenly the picture got a lot clearer. Moussavi knew all about Berezovsky, the notorious Russian oligarch who had made a vast fortune buying up state assets at rock-bottom prices under the country’s increasingly drunken president, Boris Yeltsin, and had siphoned much of it offshore to buy himself lavish properties and yachts all over Europe. So that’s where all the money came from, Moussavi thought. Young was, in his estimation, just a greedy barrow boy who knew how to bullshit his way in the world, but getting involved with the Russian robber barons was a dangerous business. From then on, Moussavi had a strange premonition about the new man in his mansion. It’s mathematically probable , he thought, that Scot Young will end up dead.

ii

Moscow and St. Petersburg—1994

The Moscow sky was choked with snow as a small, stout tycoon climbed out of his limousine, his black eyes glittering with restless energy. Boris Berezovsky hastened toward the grand prerevolutionary mansion that served as his command center, followed by a phalanx of bodyguards. The godfather of the oligarchs was rarely unhurried, and today was no exception. Berezovsky was expanding his empire.

The building, a restored nineteenth-century merchant’s residence, was set in an exclusive enclave of central Moscow close to the Bolshoy Ustinsky Bridge, over the frozen Moskva River, from which the Kremlin’s domes could be seen blooming brightly against the iron sky. Berezovsky had shut off the road leading to his headquarters by blocking it at both ends, turning it into a private club for Moscow’s emerging business and political elite. Inside, it was smoky and sumptuous, with stuccoed ceilings, grand chandeliers, and ornate Italian furniture arrayed around a bar stocked with the finest wines rubles could buy.

The renowned Soviet mathematician, engineer, and chess obsessive had transformed his fortunes since the fall of the USSR, and now, in his midforties, he could call himself rich for the first time. As soon as the Iron Curtain came down, he seized the moment to start importing German cars and the enterprise exploded as Russia opened up for business. Berezovsky soon became the biggest distributor for the state-owned car manufacturer, Avtovaz, profiting massively by acquiring its Ladas in bulk on consignment and paying for them later, once the money had been devalued by rampant hyperinflation sparked by the sudden removal of Soviet price controls. His company, Logovaz, had made hundreds of millions that way, and it had become the official Russian dealer for Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, Chevrolet, and several other prestigious Western marques. Logovaz was among the first big success stories of the new capitalist Russia. But Berezovsky always wanted more.