The request for the meeting came as so many before it:  the call was brief, the details thin, the caller too nervous to speak over phone lines long assumed to be compromised. Face-to-face was the only option.

We met in a privatized restaurant that had once served as the dining facility for the Soviet Red Army elite. A five-minute walk from the Kremlin, the restaurant was now part of a rapidly growing chain of eateries established by a foreign business consortium rumored to be laundering South American cocaine cartel funds.

The caller, John, was easy to spot when I entered the restaurant:  he was the one fumbling with a book of matches, sweating.

He took me through the narrative, occasionally glancing over his shoulder half expecting to spot the two thugs that had visited his office. “You’ve been working on our territory for more than a year,” they’d told him, “and haven’t paid us anything.” Classic extortion attempt – it had been happening all over Moscow regularly for several years and now it was happening to John.

Then John told of their second visit bearing the same message. He had failed to realize that the first overture was the initiation of a negotiation. Amazingly, he didn’t respond and he didn’t seek help. He simply ignored it. With the second meeting, John was unwittingly sinking deeper into a quagmire from which a clean escape was becoming increasingly difficult.

It was the third visit that finally shook him from his ignorance. Whatever patience the thugs had was gone. “The boss would like to see you…now.” Only then did panic set in.

Each new case we worked had its own personality. We could never know for certain where it would lead. We’d taken a missing person case and had found the body, hacked to pieces by the victim’s homosexual lover, stuffed under floorboards in a Moscow apartment, something straight out of Edgar Allen Poe. We’d coordinated an executive protection detail for a corporate CEO whose Russian representative, we discovered, had a criminal record, very close relationships with top crime bosses, and, according to several law enforcement agencies, was active in narcotics trafficking. And there was the case involving the Russian businessman abducted in broad daylight never to be heard from again. We subsequently learned that the security arm of the corporation he’d worked for had done away with more than half a dozen of its own employees, an attempt to ensure that company secrets would never be revealed. As John continued his story, there was no telling the direction it would take.

At that tense lunch with the crime boss John learned the extent of his problems. “We know all about your business,” the well-dressed, polite gangster said. “You have your main office here in Moscow and branch offices in Yekaterinburg and Vladikavkaz. You are importing pharmaceuticals.” The boss went on in some detail, John’s shock deepening with each sentence. “Last year you imported three freight containers per month.” The boss leaned forward and, feigning sincerity, said, “You know, we would like to help the poor of Russia, too. You see to it that one of those containers is directed to us every month.” And then the inevitable seal on the deal: “It would be a shame to see harm come to your lovely wife and two small children. Moscow can be a dangerous place.”

This was unfolding as one of the worst kinds of cases; the range of options was rapidly dwindling even before we got into the game. We’d neutralized threats like this before but we were running out of time.

A quick investigation brought more bad news. Unknown to John, he had been renting his office – a converted apartment on the first floor of a residential building – from an associate of the crime boss. The landlord dutifully passed along every detail of the company and its personnel to his colleague in crime.

Unfortunately for John, as we discovered, the gangsters were the real thing, not punks trying for an easy score against a scared foreigner as was sometimes the case. They wielded serious power on the territory they controlled – and the district police chief was on their team.

By his inaction, John had squandered a valuable opportunity; we had no time to lay the groundwork to go head to head against the group, and getting the police involved was always a time-consuming, unpredictable endeavor.

At 5:30 on a bright Saturday morning we bundled John’s wife and small children into cars with armed escorts and raced them to Sheremetievo Airport to catch the first flight to Paris and out of harm’s way. Nearly three hours later we were back in the city at John’s office. Moving quickly, four of us grabbed as much office equipment as possible and loaded it into two cars. In the middle of this flurry, one of the cleaning staff showed up, so it was only a matter of time until the landlord was informed.

With cords dangling and paper flying, we took as much as we could and stashed it in John’s apartment, posting guards there in the event of a retaliatory strike from the thugs. Returning to claim the remainder of the equipment, we found the doors padlocked and sealed tight.

After several days of round-the-clock bodyguards, sleepless nights, frayed nerves, and more excitement than he ever bargained for, John shut down his office, never to return to Moscow.

June 1995