Thread
As some of you know, I’ve spent a lot of time with Russian oligarchs; especially while writing my book Once Upon A Time In Russia, which many of you have read. So I figure it’s time for the crazy fucking Russian oligarch thread… 1)
For those of you who haven’t met me in person- in real life I’m pretty terrified of most everything. I’m not particularly brave and I have a well developed flight reflex. Things get scary, I get moving… 2)
But sometimes I do get involved in pretty dangerous situations because of my books. Once Upon A Time In Russia was one of those situations. This book, like most of my books, started with a phone call… 3)
This time it was from a big Hollywood director. At the time he was one of the top directors in Hollywood. A bad boy, wild, crazy; over the years he had pitched me many stories and I’d always turned them down, because they were always way to dangerous… 4)
Once he called me and told me he wanted me to hang out with a bunch of gun runners in Miami. I asked how dangerous it was- he said on a scale of one to ten- a seven. I said I wouldn’t do any sevens, nothing more dangerous than a three. But he kept on pitching me stories… 5)
In 2015, he called me out of the blue. Ben, I’ve got a really big story, but I can’t tell you what it is. I asked why- and he said if he told me, I’d never do it. I almost said no. But over the call he convinced me that finally this was a book that I couldn’t pass up… 6)
The catch- I had to fly to London the next day to meet the main character. So the next day, I got on a plane to London. When I landed I headed straight to a fancy hotel to meet him- and when I pulled up, i noticed tons of armed bodyguards waiting outside the hotel bar… 7)
These weren’t your average bodyguards, these were huge guys with ear pieces. But I went in. The place was nearly empty- except up at the front was one guy with more bodyguards. I recognized him immediately. One of the biggest, most famous Russian oligarchs… 8)
For those of you who don’t know, these Russians are multi billionaires who made their money during the crazy 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and was replaced by unbridled crony capitalism. The man at the bar had made 18 billion or more in oil… 9)
For whatever reason, this director had convinced him to tell me a story. And it was insane- about how the oligarchs had picked Putin to run the country- they thought they could control him. How Putin turned the tables on the oligarchs and became the biggest oligarch of all… 10)
At the end, one of the main characters of the story was found hanging from his scarf in his bathroom, and the guy I was talking to became one of the richest men in the world…11)
By the end of the meeting I was terrified, but also I wanted to write the story. For the next six months, I would fly back and forth to London once a week, and meet with these billionaires, often in bars and clubs and sometimes in the owners box of football teams… 12)
As I got deeper into the story they started telling me some intense stuff- involving murders, some solved, some unsolved. I started getting nervous I was going to write something one of them would read, then decide it wasn’t what they wanted out there- and then… yikes… 13)
One story stood out. In the book there’s a scene where these two oligarchs were trying to buy an oil refinery from an old Soviet general. They met with him in Siberia and asked him to sell it to them. He laughed at them and refused. So they flew back to Moscow… 14)
That night, the general went swimming in the Irkutsk river and “drowned”. His bodyguard, the only witness, got into a bar fight and died…I wrote this chapter, read it, then called the oligarch, and said- “so this scene makes it look like you, um, had the general murdered..” 15)
There was a pause, then the oligarch said “yes, it does make it seem that way”. I paused as well. “so, do I have the story wrong somehow?”. There was another pause. “No, it is fine”. And I asked “how is this fine?”… 16)
And he told me, when you think of Russia in the 1990s don’t compare it to America in the 1990s. Compare it to America in the 1890s. In the 1890s, if a business rival disrespected you, you took care of him. Same with Russia in the 1990s… 17)
The process of writing the book only got more intense from there. At one point in my research I was in a bar when a large bodyguard came up right behind me and suddenly shoved something in my pocket. He leaned close to my ear and said don’t look until you are home…. 18)
I was terrified- these were people from a place associated with polonium poisoning, nerve toxins, etc. When I got back to my hotel I quickly reached into my pocket and retrieved… a computer memory stick. I had no idea what was on it… 19)
The next day when I flew back to Boston, I had lawyers ready in case I was stopped. I got through customs, got to my office and put the card in my computer. On it was 10,000 pages of depositions from a trial involving murder, payoffs, etc leading all the way to the Kremlin…20)
It included just about everything I needed to write my book, including first person interviews and depositions. I have no idea who had given it to me or why- but it was incredible info…. 21)
The next week I went to New York for one of my last meetings w one of the oligarchs. We met at the mandarin NY where he was staying, and we were walking through Columbus circle to get to a restaurant… 22)
As we went, behind us were 3 college kids, loud, drunk and having fun. I could see the oligarch was getting annoyed at the noise. He wasn’t a huge man, but strong, like a bulldog. The kind of guy you underestimate unless you look at his hands, which were the size of anvils…23)
Anyway he glances at the college kids, then at me. “they are very annoying”, he says, in his heavy Russian accent. I shrug. Then his eyes went cold. And he says “should I do something about them?” Right then I knew that if I had said yes, something terrible would happen… 24)
I shook my head, told him they were just college kids having fun. And he finally shrugged and smiled and we got to the restaurant and he never mentioned it again. But deep down to this day I still think about that moment and I get chills… End)
In case you read this far… end) end):) 
