The Evil That Men Do Page 5
“How hard would it be for the New United Islamist Front to nuke a major U.S. city?” McMahon asked.
“Unfortunately,” Jules said, “nuking a city doesn’t take that much skill. If I drop a grapefruit-size chunk of bomb-grade highly enriched uranium on a same-size chunk from a height of six feet and hit it square, I could get 50 percent of the Hiroshima yield.”
“But wouldn’t making an actual bomb be seriously difficult?” McMahon asked.
“Not really,” Jules said. “Once you have the fissile highly enriched uranium, which isn’t that hard to purchase on the black market, a high school student could cobble together a Hiroshima-style nuke. That’s what Luis Alvarez, the inventor of the Hiroshima triggering mechanism, wrote, which is why we have to kill this threat in the cradle and hunt down and eliminate its backers.”
“And you’ve said the New United Islamist Front has the money to finance the building of a nuke and carry out the operation?”
“They get their money from a group of super-rich Saudis,” Meredith said, “led by Kamal ad-Din, and I’ve also said that Kamal and his coven of billionaire killers are protected by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I have some evidence that they’re in league with Putilov—and these are all Tower’s allies.”
“Can’t we do anything to stop that funding?” McMahon asked.
“We won’t even try,” Meredith said. “Tower views Pakistan and the Saudis as allies and has declared their enemies our enemies.”
“I see no difference between the Saudis and the New United Islamist Front,” McMahon said. “From my point of view, Saudi Arabia is nothing but a New United Islamist Front that has made it.”
“And has it made,” Jules said. “The New United Islamist Front’s caliphate is Saudi Arabia.”
“Yet many on the left say we’re too hard on Islam,” McMahon said, “saying most Muslims are moderate and peace-loving.”
“The truth is,” Jules said, “Kamal and his kind pose a far graver danger to those moderate peace-loving Muslims than we do. Kamal and company hate Islamic moderates far more than they hate us. They consider peaceable Muslims to be apostates, and therefore far more dangerous than any possible heretics.”
“And still,” McMahon said, “many moderate Muslims view you and me as the enemy.”
“Maybe,” Jules said, “but when young girls are accused of violating Islam’s so-called sacred laws, you and I don’t stone them to death or cut off their hands or gouge their eyes. We don’t clitorize and behead them. We don’t sentence them to 10,000 lashes or incarcerate them in Middle Eastern hellhole prisons until Gehenna freezes over.”
“True, but they nonetheless accuse us of tarring all Muslims with the same terrorist brush.” McMahon asked. “Our critics point out that most Western Muslims are law abiding.”
“But we can’t compare Islam in the West to the True Faith as practiced in the Mideast. Here, Islam is a small sect, a weak minority. As Sam Harris has written, the West’s Muslims practice their faith in fetters. If they attempted violent insurrection, they’d be instantly crushed. If, however, Islam had the upper hand in the U.S. and Europe, who is to say they would not heed the clarion call of the jihadists in their midst? I’ve lived in that world for twenty years, and I deeply fear that if Islam held sway in the world today, we’d be witnessing a global jihad of thermonuclear proportions.”
“Jules, I would love to discuss this further. We are short of time though, and I want you to talk about your new book. It’s not about Islamist terrorism but about the depredations of the super-rich, focusing on our own president, J. T. Tower. I should tell the audience that you let me have a surprise look at a few chapters. You have come up with the best, most important, most terrifying reportage that I have ever laid eyes on. Anyone out there who doesn’t buy and read Jules Meredith’s book when it’s released should be flogged, jailed, amputated and decapitated…” At that point, McMahon rose from his chair and roared as loud as he knew how: “… LIKE A REBELLIOUS SAUDI WOMAN!”
The audience exploded with shocked but tumultuous laughter while Jules stared at Danny, slowly shaking her head.
“And now I’m told you have a surprise announcement,” Danny said.
Danny McMahon then sat down, and Jules stood.
“My friends,” Jules began, “this week on my blog, www.TheJulesView.com, I’ll be posting a series of articles for immediate release to the public and the media. In my new book, Filthy Lucre: J. T.’s Tower of Financial Power, I’m exposing President J. T. Tower—who is also the owner of a lethal petrochemical empire, a dangerously deceptive consortium of Wall Street hedge funds, a chain of horrifyingly exploitative casinos and one of the most corrupt real estate development companies in the world—as the fascistic bastard that he is. With your permission, Danny, I’d like to read a segment of a new blog I will post tomorrow.”
“Please do.”
Jules Meredith began:
Three years after President Tower’s election, we are now witnessing the rise of a J. T. Tower financial/political imperium run by Tower and a cadre of supercilious oligarchical billionaires. Profit and power are their sole raison d’être, and they destroy anything and anyone who gets in their way or even voices dissenting opinions. They view the U.S. Treasury as a cash hoard to be plundered, the federal regulatory agencies as enemies to be destroyed and the electorate as their lawful prey. Distrust and hatred of government is their rallying cry, and for a time they infected the Body Politic with that same anti-government rage.
It was not always thus. For decades the U.S. public feared big business more than they feared their government. The Great Depression and fear of the Wall Street fat cats who caused it—and who grew rich exploiting workers—made the American public skeptical of predatory plutocrats. Then the elites turned the public’s hatred toward government; unfortunately for the public, government is the only entity capable of reining the plutocrats in.
But the American people are now awakening from their long dark night of anti-government paranoia and have taken the Senate back. After the American people witnessed repeated orgies of upper-bracket tax cuts, Wall Street deregulation and Bill of Rights infringements alongside the simultaneous rise of the new Tower Oligarchy, the electorate’s fear of rapacious elites has returned with a vengeance.
Tower and his plutocratic pack are no ordinary band of psychopaths. They are men who have made their fortunes bilking entire nations out of trillions … men engaged in enterprises so preposterously profitable that there is no way they cannot be exploitative. For unlike the robber barons of the 19th century, Tower’s billionaires produce almost nothing that is useful or socially redeeming. Instead they rip the public off with their Wall Street skim-scams, through fiscally destructive mergers—yes, 80 percent of mergers line the coffers of the key players but impoverish everyone else—through their predatory casinos and, of course, through their debt-derivative con games that Warren Buffett has called “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Theirs is an avarice so arrogant, a self-entitlement so maniacal and a hubris so soaringly grandiose that at some level these people have to be … deranged.
They have to be stopped. The fate of this nation depends on it. We all have to stop them.
“So, J. T. Tower,” Jules shouted, pointing her finger into the TV camera, “I’m coming after you. I got your name; I got your number; I know where you live. I’m fouling your nest and shitting where you eat and sleep. I’m dragging your dirty laundry into the streets and pissing on your grave. I’m going to make that UN global expropriation movement look like a trade union beer blast. I’m burning you down to bedrock and sowing your fields with salt like Carthage. And this is just the beginning, Jimmy Boy. When I’m done with you, there won’t be enough left for the birds to carry away. When my book comes out, you’re going read my words and weep. So give it up, bitch. Eat shit and die. You’re going down hard.”
Jules Meredith turned and walked off the proscenium, stage left.
For the first tim
e in his professional life, Danny McMahon looked … shaken.
Clearing his throat, he finally rasped:
“And now for my closing remarks.”
5
Putilov had made his gargantuan fortune the old-fashioned way: He’d stolen it.
Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov had just suffered through another one of Tower’s secret, encrypted Skype calls. Try as hard as he could, Putilov couldn’t make Tower stop phoning him. The prick had some perverse need for Putilov’s approval, a sick compulsion to get Putilov on the phone and tell him how they were both the same, they were both … self-made men. He actually had the chutzpah to boast that he’d gotten nothing from his father but a small loan, which he’d parlayed into billions, that he was an up-by-the-bootstraps billionaire who had earned everything he had and that he’d gotten it all through hard work, guts, resilience, brains, self-reliance, resourcefulness and … rugged individualism.
Maybe Tower was genuinely psychotic. Putilov hadn’t considered that contingency before—that Tower was, in fact, a dyed-in-the-wool lunatic who was incapable of telling truth from illusion and who believed the outrageous lies he was fabricating about his life and the mountains of mendacity he continually tried to pawn off on Putilov as “J. T.’s worldview” and “J. T.’s philosophy of life.”
God, was Tower dumb.
What had that half-wit ever done except inherit a fortune in hard cash, a complex of lucrative petrochemical refineries, a gaggle of astronomically profitable hedge funds, a money-minting chain of casinos and a gargantuan group of global real estate development businesses from his filthy-rich father? That these concerns continue to make money has had nothing to do with Tower. The credit went to the legions of MBAs, tax lawyers, judges and pet politicians whom his father had already put in place. Those were the people who were responsible for Tower’s operations. And even with all those advantages, Tower had almost bankrupted his real estate empire. Putilov and his army of pocket bankers had had to pump tens of billions of dollars into Tower properties and floundering construction projects to keep them afloat. Meanwhile, all Tower had ever done was attend big-money balls, appear at show-business awards ceremonies, play in pro-am golf tournaments and fuck avaricious supermodels.
Putilov, on the other hand, had started with nothing and now had a fortune that was so vast he wasn’t sure how much he was worth. Knowledgeable Kremlin insiders estimated his worth to be well over $200 billion, which made Putilov far wealthier than Tower. In fact, it made him two and a half times richer than Bill Gates, who was, according to Forbes, the richest man on earth.
Furthermore, Putilov had made his gargantuan fortune the old-fashioned way: He’d stolen it.
Remembering those heady days of thievery, chicanery and murder-most-foul brought a rare smile to Putilov’s otherwise stern and wintry face.
* * *
Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov began his rise to wealth and power in the late ’80s by putting together a junta of unrepentant, unreconstructed, revanchist, revisionist KGB officials, all passionately united by their hatred of Gorbachev’s reforms. Putilov quickly allied them with a like-minded close-knit group of superwealthy, ultra-ruthless oligarchs, all of whom were in league with the Russian mafia. Soon he and his crew were liquidating the Communist Party’s foreign coffers and funneling those funds into their own covert bank vaults overseas. This was no small bank heist. Over the decades, the Party—always sensitive to reversals of fortune—had secreted a clandestine hoard of foreign currency in the mid–nine figures, and within a few years Putilov had succeeded in stealing it … all.
If anyone objected to his myriad peculations, Putilov had them framed on phony evidence and sent to prison—or simply had them killed.
Putilov would later brag to his confederates that he had emptied the Party’s cash trove—like he was “gutting a slaughterhouse pig”—and then plundered the rest of the nation as well. In the end, Putilov and his pals had walked off with the net worth of both their countries’ corporations and the Russian Federation. Moreover, during these thefts, Putilov had proven himself the irreplaceable man—energetic, ingenious and utterly without fear.
While Putilov and his cohorts were acquiring great wealth and were brokering trade deals on behalf of cities and major Russian corporations, Putilov was also advancing his political career. As his power in the Russian government radically increased, his junta’s power to transact those lucrative trade deals, many of which were international, likewise burgeoned. During that period, such deals in Russia were profitable but complicated. Since the ruble was not a globally recognized currency—and, in fact, had always been intrinsically worthless abroad—Russian cities and firms were uniquely dependent on foreign money whenever they wanted to do business overseas. Putilov quickly figured out how to exploit this dependency and how to pile up massive amounts of dollars, pounds, deutsche marks and eventually euros in secret foreign accounts.
He had a network of ex–Stasi agents who were active in the German banking system, one of whom rose through the ranks to become a top financial executive. He helped Putilov—who had been his former KGB case officer and was now a major St. Petersburg political leader—to broker these kinds of lucrative foreign business deals. Due to the ruble’s weakness overseas, Putilov worked out barter transactions. For example, he would arrange for Russian cities or Russia firms to transport Russian commodities, such as gold, oil, coal, diamonds, gas or timber, to a foreign firm in exchange for whatever the city or Russian firm wanted. Since at that time computers were a hot item, Putilov did a lot of deals for foreign computers. The firm or city, which Putilov represented, would ship overseas the Russian commodities in anticipation of receiving high-tech computers.
Of course, those foreign goods would never arrive.
Instead of delivering the bartered goods, this ex–Stasi agent-turned-banker would pump huge amounts of foreign cash into the offshore tax haven bank accounts of Putilov and his cronies. When his clients pressed him for payment, Putilov would claim the computers had clearly disappeared in transit.
Due to their increased political clout, Putilov and his KGB-now-FSB-cohorts could guarantee asset protection for friendly oligarchs and ambitious plutocrats all over Russia. Well versed in the blackest of the old-school KGB arts, Putilov’s asset-protection schemes quickly transmogrified into an outright extortion racket. Survival in Russia soon meant giving Putilov and his friends an exorbitant cut on anything and everything.
Many countries bragged of their folkloristic outlaws: America, for instance, took pride in the exploits of Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. Late at night wealthy Saudis were known to boast sub rosa of the BCCI bank job, in which they and their Pakistani business partners had conned the world’s top investors out of an estimated $18 billion. Putilov smiled when he read of such laughable attempts at larceny. He had pulled off the most spectacular financial shakedown in history, the expropriation of almost all of Russia’s assets—the largest theft in world history.
He also became the wealthiest of the world’s oligarchs.
And Russia’s Boss of Bosses …
* * *
Putilov seldom consumed alcohol, but after he spoke with Tower, he found that his hands shook uncontrollably and that he invariably needed something to calm his nerves. When his chief of staff failed to come up with a palliative of sufficient strength, he remembered a drug his KGB interrogators sometimes gave people to calm them down, relax them, so they would lose their inhibitions and confess everything they knew. He immediately obtained a bottle of those pills for his Tower-phone-call anger attacks. In a state of hysterical rage, after each conversation, he unlocked his desk drawer and lunged for the bottle full of the super-potent pills. The tablets were called desomorphine. The street name was krokodil. After eight or nine of them entered his bloodstream, it was as if a two-hundred-pound sack of cement was lifted from his shoulders. Every fiber of his being, every nerve ending in his brain and body was at peace—something Putilov had never before known. The
drug had come to him as … a blessing.
One of his bodyguards told him that the effects would be even more pronounced if Putilov ground the pills up between spoons, then chopped the granules up into fine powder with a razor blade. Dissolving them in high-octane alcohol, then adding splashes of ether and gasoline—just for an added kick—he could then heat the liquid in a bong over a lighter and smoke the fumes out of the bong’s stem. By pure happenstance, Putilov owned such a bong—a souvenir he’d taken off a suspect he’d once tortured and killed. He’d never known why he had kept the man’s bong. Now he knew why. He must have had an unconscious premonition that he would need it. Putilov truly believed that a large part of his genius was his “unconscious premonitions.” He was in many respects a “gut player”—just as George W. Bush had once described himself to the Russian tyrant.
So this time when Putilov reached for the krok, instead of swallowing the tablets, he heated the powdered pills, vodka, ether, and gasoline in the dead man’s bong and smoked the vapor.
He found the experience … exhilarating.
Of course, Putilov understood the dangers of addiction. Furthermore, he knew that desomorphine was eight times stronger than straight morphine. So he realized it was imperative that he only smoke it during emergencies—which were easy to define since they only occurred after Tower’s phone calls.
But he also believed in his soul he could handle the krok. Putilov was a man possessed by an overwhelming will, by infinite resolve, and by indomitable self-possession. He would never allow himself to become addicted to anything, which was one of the reasons he so studiously eschewed alcohol or tobacco. He could handle the krok.
And he did need it.
God, how he hated Tower! How could a man like him be so moronic and yet get so far? Tower was terminally ignorant, devoid of even the tiniest iota of self-awareness and consumed by a grandiosity so ludicrously delusional, so monstrously megalomaniacal that he was truly beyond description or any form of psychiatric treatment. Tower’s mental condition made a mockery out of the DSM’s entire catalogue of psychiatric nomenclature and reduced even the most elemental attempts at serious analysis to stupid drooling absurdity.