The Great Moscow Bank Shakedown
While supervising financial institutions, agents of the KGB’s successor—the FSB—have siphoned off serious money.
Kirill Cherkalin told his parents the piles of cash stashed at their apartment—$50 million, €1.8 million ($1.9 million), and 17 million rubles ($267,000)—were “for work.” At the downtown pad he shared with a girlfriend he had shoeboxes, tote bags, and suitcases stuffed with $22 million, €6.5 million, and 794 million rubles. In his supercharged Mercedes-Benz SUV: $200,000. All told, he had some $100 million in various currencies, dozens of pricey timepieces such as gold-and-diamond Patek Philippes, four apartments, and a 5,000-square-foot house in Razdory, a leafy suburb where rich Muscovites keep homes modeled on English country estates.
Yet Cherkalin isn’t a Kremlin boss or an oil-pumping oligarch. He’s not even a general. Until this spring, he was a colonel heading one of dozens of subdepartments within Russia’s FSB—the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet KGB.