MCS: Yeah. But, you know, all this stuff that the black market has has been diverted from where it was, and there are different ways to divert it. One way is, of course, to steal it. But a simpler way, and one that is more the norm, is simply to pay somebody—to pay somebody in the government who will ship it your way. So there’s this new hand-in-hand relationship between brazen, organized crime and the caretakers of the old system. Because they’re operating, they’re operating like, as if they’re officers of a bankrupt company. The company doesn’t function anymore, it doesn’t make anything, it doesn’t produce anything anymore, but it has a great deal of physical assets. It owned much of the country. And what it didn’t own directly, what the Party did not own directly, it controlled. It controlled everything. So now it was selling off those assets to the highest bidder. And some of the highest bidders are foreign companies. And many of those bidders are also mafias—mafias which have the hard currency.

DS: And it should be noted that we’re not talking about the Sicilian mafia.

MCS: No.

DS: This is a mafia—

MCS: It’s interesting that they call themselves the mafia.

DS: Yeah, they’ve appropriated the term, but they’re distinctly Russian, and they’re actually many ethnic Russians—

MCS: Yes.

DS:—making up various factions of the mafia, as you point out in the book.

MCS: I spent, uh, I spent a day with a Russian Mafioso. He took me for a picnic. And, uh, I’d already spent a day with him before, questioning him, interviewing him about how he did what he did. And he was enormously successful, so we went out in a fleet of Mercedes, out to the picnic. And he starts—one of his underlings starts cooking up the shashlyk. Shashlyk is a shish kabob. And it was really, it was like a scene out of one of the Godfather movies, where they’re stirring the spaghetti. And every few moments he goes over there and he kicks his underling, to ask how the shashlyk is coming along, as if he’s a great expert—we’re now dealing with a great chef of shashlyk. And I questioned him for a couple hours, and we eat, and we have some vodka and wine, and then at the end he has a question for me. And he says he’s meeting some guys from New York. And he wants to know, he says he’s very concerned—he wants to know how to act around these contacts from New York—and his question is whether the book The Godfather is accurate. Whether he can use that as the style that he should assume. So there was this very strange, they see themselves as patterning themselves to some degree on our own mafia.