Читать книгу Putin’s People онлайн | страница 6

Vyacheslav Ivankov (‘Yaponchik’) – Mobster dispatched by Mogilevich to Brighton Beach, New York, to oversee the Solntsevskaya’s criminal empire there.

Yevgeny Dvoskin – Brighton Beach mobster who became one of Russia’s most notorious ‘shadow bankers’ after moving back to Moscow with his uncle, Ivankov, joining forces with the Russian security services to funnel tens of billions of dollars in ‘black cash’ into the West.

Felix Sater – Dvoskin’s best friend since childhood. Became a key business partner of the Trump Organization, developing a string of properties for Trump, all the while retaining high-level contacts in Russian intelligence.

It was late in the evening in May 2015, and Sergei Pugachev was flicking through an old family photo album he’d found from thirteen years ago or more. In one photo from a birthday party at his Moscow dacha, his son Viktor keeps his eyes downcast as Vladimir Putin’s daughter Maria smiles and whispers in his ear. In another, Viktor and his other son, Alexander, are posing on a wooden spiral staircase in the Kremlin presidential library with Putin’s two daughters. At the edge of the photo, Lyudmilla Putina, then still the Russian president’s wife, smiles.

We were sitting in the kitchen of Pugachev’s latest residence, a three-storey townhouse in the well-heeled London area of Chelsea. The late-evening light glanced in through the cathedral-sized windows, and birds chirped in the trees outside, the traffic from the nearby King’s Road a faint hum. The high-powered life Pugachev had once enjoyed in Moscow – the dealmaking, the endless behind-the-scenes agreements, the ‘understandings’ between friends in the Kremlin corridors of power – seemed a world away. But Moscow’s influence was in fact still lurking like a shadow outside his door.

The day before, Pugachev had been forced to seek the protection of the UK counter-terrorism squad. His bodyguards had found suspicious-looking boxes with protruding wires taped to the undercarriage of his Rolls-Royce, as well as on the car used to transport his three youngest children, aged seven, five and three, to school. Now, on the wall of the Pugachevs’ sitting room, behind the rocking horse and across from the family portraits, the SO15 counter-terrorism squad had installed a grey box containing an alarm that could be activated in the event of attack.