The Ivory Cooperative is one of the prime distributors in the ivory trade. The cooperative is housed in a dark and dusty warehouse, surrounded by crumbling apartment buildings that go back to the time of Khrushchev. Behind the nondescript, concrete walls and steel door are thousands of pounds of mammoth ivory worth millions of dollars, waiting to be shipped out to China and Burma, where they will be carved into trinkets for the thriving Asian tourist market. The white treasure is contained in crates that are stacked on shelves running from one end of the warehouse to the other.

Three men were standing in one of the aisles. They were Vladimir Bulgarin, the owner of the ivory business, and two helpers, who were holding each end of a huge mammoth tusk.

“This is beautiful,” Bulgarin was saying. “What's its weight?”

“One hundred kilos,” one of his helpers said with a grunt. “Very heavy.”

“Wonderful,” Bulgarin said. Prime ivory was going at one hundred dollars a kilo.

A third helper was hustling down the aisle. “Your partner is here,” he said.

Bulgarin looked as if he had bit into a lemon. He instructed his helpers to load the tusk into a sawdust-filled crate and to set it aside. He might have the tusk carved into little ivory mammoths or earrings rather than send it out as raw ivory, increasing the value even more.

As he headed back to his office, he had a frown on his fleshy face. His so-called partner was what they called a “bagman” in the United States. He was a Mafia thug who showed up once a month from Moscow to collect a percentage of the take, accuse Bulgarin of holding out and threaten to break his legs if he was.

It was inevitable that the Russian Mafia would find a way to get its sticky fingers into the profitable mammoth tusk trade. Business was booming, thanks to the international ban against the sale of ivory from the African elephant herds that had been decimated by hunters. Inhabitants of Yakutsk had a history in the mammoth trade going back hundreds of years, and, with an estimated ten million mammoths buried under the Siberian permafrost, a vast source of material.

Political change had boosted the ivory trade as well. Moscow had always regulated commerce in Yakutsk, and still controlled the diamond and gold business, but the local inhabitants had been trading with the Chinese for two thousand years, and they knew better than anyone how to make money off the bones of ancient, dead giants. The ivory first had to be worked in order to be exported legally under the law, but some distributors, like Bulgarin, ignored the law and sent raw ivory directly to the buyers.