Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 233 – 3,410 words
Columns :: Mogadan prison may shed light on mystery killers

MOSCOW, January 28, 2007 -- Comments:   Ratings:

Moscow gets its winter back
Drug spectre fails to materialize
But Igor’s cock does
It was only Demidrol
Rising BP under control again
Times of London reports “third man” killed Litvinenko
“Third Man Theme” unraveled? – Mogadan “Rent-a-gade”
Accused killer of banker opens new can of worms
Russians peg inflation at 20%
“Honey” pushes Peter fantasy up a notch
Grandfather’s railroad watch turns up unexpectedly
Fan e-mail boosts Red Queen’s vanity



MOSCOW, January 28, 2007 -- Winter has finally arrived in Moscow. Temperatures have dropped to a normal two to ten degrees (F) for this time of year, and skis are suddenly popping out -- on metros, on cars, on shoulders. I saw a family outfitted with them in my courtyard today.

Of course, there is the flip side: Student Dima said he spent six hours on the road last Thursday. It took him an hour to drive to work, but five to drive home in the snow-snarled rush-hour traffic.

Today was a beautiful winter day with the blanket of snow sparkling in the rare January sunshine. Muscovites are smiling again – except the homeless. You can’t help but wonder how many of them have frozen to death so far.

Depriving the homeless of shelter in Moscow’s freezing winter weather is, after all, Hizzoner Lord Mayor Luzhkov’s way of keeping the city’s population of “BOMZHI” within acceptable limits.


Drugs again? I was sure of it when I went to take a pee last Sunday night and there was somebody in the bathroom. I peeked through the space between the door and the jamb and could see Denis’ hands putting white powder into a creased metro card as if he were getting ready to do a line of coke or shoot some up.

Was he alone? I checked to see if Igor was in either bedroom . He wasn’t.

By the time I got back to the bathroom door, the white powder had disappeared and Denis’ hand was shaking something.

Oh, shit!

I knocked on the door: “I’ve got to pee.”

“Just a minute.”

After a couple of minutes Denis and Igor emerged.

“Why is the door locked?

“I was going to take a bath,” Igor replied. “We were just talking.”

“Why do you have to lock the door to talk?”

No response.

I was furious! This is the last straw! What’s worse, if Denis is doing drugs, Igor is a party to it, because he was in the bathroom with Denis. And Denis and Sergei are very close. He couldn’t be doing drugs without Sergei knowing about it. Is this a conspiracy between them? And how long has it been going on?

If he’s doing coke, that would explain why he can’t sleep at night. Of course he can’t sleep if he’s getting higher than a kite on coke every night at bedtime. And Igor and Sergei can’t sleep either? Maybe they’re all doing coke!

I’ll get to the bottom of this!

It was 1:30 a.m. I announced that everyone, including Sergei had to be in bed by 2 a.m. To my surprise, they all agreed.

By the tone of my voice, Sergei knew I was pissed.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I’m going to bed.”


Igor, to my surprise, actually came to bed too. Still figuring out how I was going to deal with this, I was lying with my back to him. I didn’t roll over toward him as I usually do when he got in bed.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night.”

We lay silently for a few seconds. Then: “What happened?”

I rolled over to face him. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I don’t want to talk about it now.”

He seemed unusually sweet and receptive. I moved my hand to his shorts and felt his cock.

He didn’t move.

“Do you want to play?” I asked.

“If you want.”

Holy hemorrhoids, Batman! Am I dreaming?

And so we had sex – real sex this time, with his full participation. I pulled his shorts down around his knees. On previous seductions, there had been no pre-cum, but tonight the pre-cum started the moment I first deep-throated his cock, and continued to flow profusely.

It didn’t take long for him to come – maybe 15 minutes.

I had had three Street cocktails by this time and couldn’t come myself. So early Monday morning while he was still asleep I played with his stiff dick again, and this time prevented another case of prostate cancer.


Monday evening I cornered Sergei: “You and Denis are good buddies, right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you aware he’s doing drugs? Cocaine?”

“I knew he used to do drugs, but not now.”

I recounted what I had seen the night before.

“Dane, that’s not coke. That was Demidrol. He takes it to help him sleep. He mashes the tablets into a powder and adds water and injects it. It works faster.

“Dane,” he added, “if Denis was taking drugs and I knew it, I’d kick him out, just like I did my brother. I wouldn’t let anybody do drugs in this apartment.”

So that crisis is resolved. But I looked up Demidrol (Demidrolum in English) on Google and it’s an anti-histamine with a sedative effect. It’s not supposed to be used like sleeping pills. In any case, it doesn’t seem to be doing any good. He still stays up all night and sleeps all day.

So does Igor, but he is trying to come to bed earlier. He came to bed at 2:00 this morning. I reminded him of our agreement. “Do you want to play?”

“If you want.”

But he never really got a hard on. I played and sucked, and finally he said his heart was hurting him. It had started in the bathtub, and it felt like it was hurting inside his heart. We took his BP and it was 115 over something. I’m sure it wasn’t his heart; but our sex session was over in any case. But at least he tried. And he’s been his usual loving and affectionate self day today. We have a delightful relationship. If we can add comfortable sex to it, it will be perfect.

On Thursday afternoon, we had just returned from doing a grocery shop. I had promised to give him 200 rubles to go visit a friend and bought him a pack of cigarettes.

“Can we play tonight?”

“If you want to.” We kissed each other on the lips.

But he didn’t return until the next morning, and it was pretty obvious he’d been fucking some little podruga all night long. There was a full pack of rubbers on our desk. But again, I don’t care how many girls he fucks as long as he lets me play with his cock.


Between the upside down schedule everybody in the apartment except me was keeping and the noise they were making at night and the foul mood it put me in and my deteriorating diet and the mixed messages I’d been getting from Igor, my blood pressure had been steadily creeping up.

It started on my trip to Spain, continued in Novosibirsk, and continued after I got back to Moscow. 150s was almost routine and 160s was not unusual.

I decided a lot of it was stress from my “family,” and I used the “drug” episode to lay down the law: Everybody has to be in bed by 2:00. I don’t care if they don’t sleep, but they’ve got to be in bed. And no noise after midnight.

And of course Igor’s “whenever I want” policy has relieved my uncertainty over our relationship. If we don’t have sex, it’s because of external factors, not because he’s not willing to.

So I’ve pretty much eliminated the stress.

And as I mentioned last week, I’ve added “Hopback” to my medical regimen.

And finally, I’ve added three cloves of raw garlic a day to my diet.

Suddenly, last week my blood pressure started coming down from its steady level of 150s and 160s to the 120s and 130s, and this morning it had actually dropped to 118/79 – about the same as teenaged Igor.

I’m going to remove the Hopback and see if the control continues without the added medication. What I’m hoping is that the garlic is doing its thing. It did once before in my 40s when my BP got up to 145 and the doctor prescribed HPB medication. But instead of taking it, I went on a diet of vegetables and raw garlic. The next time I went to see him, it was normal.

Anyway, I like the taste of it, and if I chew enough gum, nobody notices – I hope.


That staid newspaper of record, The Times of London, has reported that Scotland Yard has fingered the guy who slipped the polonium-210 into Alexander Litvinenko’s tea (Chapt. 227). It was neither Dmitriy Kovtun nor Andrei Lugovoi, the two prior prime suspects, but a mysterious “third man” not previously even mentioned.

Mr. X is known only as “Vlad.” The Times said Heathrow cameras recorded him arriving on the same plane from Hamburg as Kovtun, and described him as tall, early 30s, with short black hair and “distinctive Central Asian features.”

According to the Times, Vlad met with Litvinenko, Kovtun, and Lugovoi in the Millenium Hotel on Nov. 1 to discuss business ventures. His cover story was that he could help Litvinenko win “a lucrative contract with a Moscow-based private security company.”

A friend of Litvinenko’s is also quoted as saying that Litvinenko on his death bed recalled that it was indeed Vlad who fixed him the fateful cup of tea.

Case solved, right?

Wrong. The next day’s Moscow Times quoted Lugovoi saying there was no such person present at their meeting.

“It would be quite easy to check….All this was recorded by the cameras” in the hotel, Lugovoi told the MT. There are many witnesses who could confirm that there was no third person present at the meeting, he insisted.

Scotland Yard, of course, is not commenting.

The Times has built its world reputation on accuracy of reporting. It seems unlikely that they would screw up so monumentally on a major international murder story as closely followed as this.

The only follow-up is a story in the Moscow Times saying that the Guardian is reporting that Scotland Yard wants to extradite Lugovoi as the “prime suspect.”

A former Soviet intelligence officer now living in London, Boris Volodarsky, was also quoted as saying that Lugovoi and Kovtun probably were nothing more than accomplices in the killing “because they are not professionals.”

Was Vlad, then, the “professional” who pulled off the job?


This third man theme, where a mysterious, always unidentified third party crops up unexpectedly as the prime suspect, seems to be a common occurrence in high-profile Russian theft, murder, and assassination accounts.

A mysterious, young – of course unidentified -- man was captured by cameras in the grocery store as he followed closely behind Anna Politkovskaya before she was murdered minutes later in the elevator of her apartment building (Chapt. 221).

Why aren’t these guys ever identified? How can mystery killers slip so easily into and out of high-profile murder scenes?

One of my Institute of Diplomacy students, Andrei, may have provided a clue to the answer:

Andrei’s former girlfriend is the granddaughter of the guy who runs the federal prison in Mogadan in far eastern Russia. This quasi-Asiatic city is known far and wide as the most violent and lawless city in Russia. High-profile assassinations – of governors, businessmen, etc. – are run-of-the-mill here. The murders are never solved.

It seems the Mogadan prison has instituted an ingenious rent-a-killer plan that offers something for everyone.

The idea is that if you want to knock off a well-known politician or businessman, you come have a chat with the superintendent of the prison. He will help you match your crime to the professional who can best commit it. He arranges a meeting between the customer and the “specialist,” who arrive at the details and the price.

The Super, of course, gets a hefty chunk roughly corresponding to the enormity and risk of the crime.

At the appointed time, said “specialist” is sprung from prison, outfitted appropriately, and flown to his destination. A mysterious, unknown assailant is spotted by cameras or witnesseses speeding away from the scene of the crime. Nobody has ever seen him before and nobody can identify him.

After the deed is done, he goes back to his Mogadan prison cell. The money is given to a person he designates – wife, girlfriend, partner on the outside, etc. The prisoner lives a life of comfort and ease and maybe gets an early out. There is no record of money exchange and the “suspect,” if he ever becomes one, has a perfect alibi.

He was sitting in Mogadan prison the entire time. The superintendent will vouch for that.

So everybody’s happy except the victim.

Was “Vlad” a Mogadan specialist, if there even was a Vlad? Was Anna killed by an anonymous Mogadan rent-a-gade? We’ll never know, because these crimes are almost never solved.

According to a recent poll, almost two-thirds of the Russian population think the Litvinenko murder falls into the same category: It will never be solved.

Maybe now we know why.


One recent high-profile murder case that has been “solved,” say prosecutors, is the assassination of Central Bank official Andrei Kozlov, who was gunned down last September as he left a local sports club (Chapt. 219).

But his accused killer, Moscow banker Andrei Frenkel, is fighting back.

Not only is he innocent, he insists, the Central Bank was and still is riddled with corruption and – rather than trying to curb money laundering, is making complicity in an asset-to-cash scheme mandatory for member banks. So Kozlov wasn’t the squeaky-clean reformer that he’s been painted by the Central Bank and the mainstream press.

Frenkel’s letter, published on the Kommersant newspaper web site, charged that money laundering is actually fairly rare in Russia. Instead, banks make their illicit money by converting easily-traced non-cash assets into harder-to-trace cash.

According to the Moscow Times, Frenkel said the Central Bank “made willingness to assist in such operations a condition for admission to the federal deposit insurance program for many small- and medium-sized banks.”

Of course, Frenkel is not exactly squeaky clean himself. The Sodbiznesbank, of which he is a cofounder, was closed by Kozlov last year on charges of money laundering. But now the question arises, how justified was the charge against his bank, and is he the victim of a government conspiracy in the murder rap?

Prosecutors contend his charges are just a smoke screen to divert attention. But corruption is so universal here that Frenkel is probably quite safe in accusing the Central Bank of participating in it.


Prices here seem to be going up almost daily, despite the government’s claim that inflation is still running at less than 10%.

Part of the price fluctuation is attributable to where you buy your stuff – whether in markets, in sidewalk kiosks, or in supermarkets. Kiosks, with the lowest overhead, seem to be the cheapest, with markets and supermarkets vying for the most expensive.

But there’s no denying that food prices have increased sharply.

According to a recent poll. Nearly 47% of the population think inflation is running at more than 20%.

About half of those who said inflation was higher than 20% also said they did not have enough money for food, according to the poll by the Levada Center, a high-respected independent polling company.


My Peter fantasy got a boost when he and I met the Sunday after I returned from Spain and Novosibirsk. At a nearby restaurant I gave him the gifts I had brought him – a bottle of scotch, a set of shot glasses from Madrid, and some refrigerator magnets he had requested for a friend.

He seemed overwhelmed that I had remembered him with such largesse. He was effusive in expressing his appreciation of our friendship, and reiterated his desire to take a trip with me – probably to Ukraine – next summer.

During the course of our conversation, I let a “honey” slip out.

“Peter,” I said, “I just called you honey. It’s a term of endearment that I sometimes use with my close friends. I hope you weren’t offended by it.”

“I know what it means,” he smiled, “and I’m rather flattered by it. I like it. I don’t mind if you call me that.”

I don’t know quite how much I should make of that, but I think I’m safe in saying it bodes well. My heart flutters just a tad to think of him as an addition to my list of honeys.


It was like Christmas in January last weekend when Sergei came marching into my room with the silver pocket watch that belonged to my grandfather Lowell – my most prized possession -- that I hadn’t seen for six months and was beginning to fear might have been stolen with the rest of Andrei’s loot.

Sergei had found it under the mattress of his bed.

I had given it to Anton a long time ago to keep in the locked trunk in his room. When he left last June, he gave me the key, which I subsequently lost. I forced open the trunk and that’s the last time I remember seeing the watch.

I think I may have decided that under the mattress was the safest place to keep it. I am getting more absent minded, and I think I remember thinking I don’t know where would be the safest place and simply popped it under the mattress till I could think of a better repository.

Anyway, I was overjoyed. It’s an old silver alloy Elgin made in 1885, which is about the time my grandfather – who was the illegitimate son of my great grandfather -- must have graduated from high school. I suspect it was given to him as a graduation present. In any case, he carried it all his life, and since I was named after him, the Lowell family decided I should inherit his railroad watch – the only thing of any value the poor old beggar possessed when he died in 1940.

I have nursed it and cared for it and lived in constant angst that somebody might steal it. So finding it again was a big psychological boost.

With it I was given a watch chain woven from my grandmother Lowell’s long red hair. Tragically, it was stolen from my apartment near Otradnoye Metro Station several years ago, but somehow I’ve managed to hang on to the watch.

It’s a constant reminder that there are bastards, and then there are bastards. And you don’t have to be illegitimate to be one.


The red queen got a marvelously supportive and flattering e-mail from Jason Garrett, who describes himself as a 35-year-old Brit living in LA.

“I came across your blog about six weeks ago,” he wrote, “and started at the very beginning, devouring the whole thing. I loved it. Unfortunately, I now have to wait patiently for your regular updates.

”It is enormously interesting. Funny, sad, poignant, triumphant. I love you as the main character. It is a very interesting life that you are living. I confess to being a little jealous. Jealous that you are free enough to follow your passions and live your life the way you do.”

Jason is a documentary film maker, and plans to come to Moscow in June to do some sort of documentary here. He recently finished his first solo effort, a film called "Mr. Leather," which he describes as “sort of Miss America Goes Gay Leather.

“I chose this subject, not because I am into Leather, but because it seemed to be a great story. A Leather Beauty contest!”

He says it has played at festivals around the world, and has been picked up for a TV/DVD release scheduled to come out in about a month. I will try to persuade Ed Mishin, who runs the gay book store here (Chapt. 229), to carry it. I definitely want to see it. I’ll let you know when it’s released.

In the meantime, the Red Queen thanks you, Jason, for your ego-boosting e-mail. Her vanity and sense of self-importance is quite out of control today.

She’s looking forward to your visit in June.