The Looting of Russia
An FBI agent and an honest Moscow cop stop the plundering of the national treasury
"Can you take a look at this?" asked Joe Davidson's supervisor at the FBI, handing him a file. Davidson cracked open the folder and was immediately intrigued. A year earlier, in late 1993, an informant had tipped the FBI that a handful of Russian immigrants were throwing huge sums of cash around San Francisco. And shortly after that, Customs had noted the same men bringing a Russian helicopter into San Francisco International Airport.
The men were diamond merchants, Davidson read, who had opened a state-of-the-art diamond center called Golden ADA. They had forged ties to politicians and city officials. They had posed for photos with Vice President Al Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And their helicopter was a gift to San Francisco police--although Golden ADA held the right to use it to ferry shipments of Siberian diamonds from the airport to its center downtown.
A veteran FBI agent, Davidson, 39, had chased the Medellin cocaine cartel and the Gambino crime family. And here, he could see, something was not right. First, San Francisco had never been much of a diamond center. Second, two of the three owners were Armenian immigrants who only two years before had been painting sidewalk curbs. Davidson recalled an FBI seminar on Russian crime. It had focused on how high-ranking officials and mob bosses were looting the former Soviet Union of its precious resources. He walked back into his boss's office. "I want this case," he said.
Davidson, it would turn out, had stumbled across the systematic theft of tons of diamonds, jewelry, silver, and gold from the Russian national treasury. The scheme was abetted by corruption that reached the highest levels of the Russian government, perhaps into the office of President Boris Yeltsin. The story of its exposure resembles a real-life Gorky Park, with the FBI working hand in hand with honest Russian cops. For six months, U.S. News has followed the case, interviewing police, tracking down former Golden ADA officials, and combing through boxes of court records. With special access to investigators in San Francisco and Moscow, the magazine has pieced together the details of one of the grandest schemes of thievery in modern times. The Kamov Ka-32 helicopter was hardly the kind of aircraft one expected to see landing in downtown San Francisco. The huge Russian chopper was designed for military transport, and yet here it was, alighting on a broad rooftop painted in the colors of the Russian flag. The air currents stirred by the Kamov's two blades were so powerful that they smashed nearby windows as it landed.
Two days later, the helicopter was the centerpiece of a gala rooftop reception, with well-tailored guests milling around the big chopper. Among the hundred VIPs on hand were San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan, his chief of police, state officials, and local CEOs. They snacked on caviar and sipped champagne while listening to speeches about how San Francisco would become a major player in the world diamond trade. It was February 1994, and the diamond center that would make all this happen--Golden ADA--was now open for business.
advertisement
