By A.C. Thompson

Photo courtesy of Lee Cole.

Tsai, an attorney with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, a big-buck corporate law firm, specializes in product liability cases. But we're not here to talk to him about faulty pharmaceuticals or rollover-prone SUVs.

We're here to speak to Tsai about one of his more unusual clients. The man we want to know about is Igor V. Belov, a reputed Russian mobster tied to at least three murders.

U.S. and Russian authorities paint Belov, 37, as the quintessential mafia man, a ruthless former soldier who returned from the gore-laden front lines of Afghanistan to make war on his fellow citizens. During the early 1990s, they say, Belov formed a criminal syndicate in the Russian city of Petrozavodsk, a decaying industrial town near the border with Finland. They describe him as a chilling figure, a rubout specialist armed with an arsenal of hand cannons who sought to dominate the underworld by ambushing rivals and splattering them.

Tsai, unsurprisingly, spins a very different yarn. The way he tells it, his client isn't a member of the Russian mafia, but, essentially, a victim of it. Tsai says Belov's only crime was to vocally oppose the mobification of the Russian government during the country's chaos-plagued transition to capitalism.

The lawyer's bid to free Belov – who is currently confined to a jail cell in Bakersfield – has met with vigorous opposition from the Department of Homeland Security, which now manages the immigration service.

Tsai figures that's because "the facts are so exotic" – in other words, even if the accusations against Belov come entirely from a notoriously corrupt and unreliable government that has its own mob ties, nobody wants to be the bureaucrat who let a potentially blood-hungry con run amok in America. That means even if Tsai's version of the events is largely true, it's going to be very hard for Belov ever to get beyond the immigration hurdles and return to a normal life in this country. "In their minds," Tsai says, "there's some risk that he's a hit man, a security risk."

At a certain level, Tsai, who is representing Belov pro bono with the backing of his firm and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, understands. "When I tell my friends about the case and how Igor's accused of multiple murders, I can see the prejudice just coalesce across their faces," he says. Still, he insists, beyond the wild allegations of some crooked Russian officials, there's "no evidence" implicating Belov.

Both sides agree on one thing. When Belov bailed on his home country, in 1997, he settled in San Francisco, where he found camaraderie in the city's expat Russian community, and lived a fairly generic life, working as a limo driver, studying computer programming, and trading blows at a boxing gym. He lived in and around San Francisco until he was snatched by the feds, in 2004, and thrust into semipermanent detention, where he languishes today.

"I think the U.S. people, if they were aware of the allegations against Belov, would expect us to do everything we can to get rid of him," says a federal agent familiar with the case. "According to the Russian authorities, he's a dangerous man capable of committing violent acts. He might be a danger to people here."

  

Free Igor: Attorney Rocky Tsai is representing Belov pro bono. Guardian photo by Lori Spears

In court papers and an interview with the Bay Guardian, Belov argues that his firm was an annoyance to the cops in Petrozavodsk, who liked to supplement their paychecks by shaking down business owners for protection money.

The cops, Belov claimed in a sworn declaration, also hit him up. One high-ranking officer told Belov "he wanted us to give him money he could use to buy a new car and furniture for his apartment," according to the declaration.

The friction came to a head the night of Aug. 29, 1994, as Belov was set to start a shift guarding Alexander Badirkhanov, a casino owner who'd been receiving threats. Belov, who carried a handgun, was arrested by local police outside a café. They accused him of illegally carrying too many bullets – though he had only a single magazine of eight rounds plus one in the chamber – and seized his weapon. Belov spent the night in a cell on what he considers bogus charges.

While he was caged, his client Badirkhanov was whacked in the entryway to his apartment, terminated by a pair of shots to the torso and one to the leg.

Belov went public. He gave an interview to the Northern Courier newspaper suggesting the police were responsible for Badirkhanov's death; the paper ran the story on page one under the headline "A Coincidence? Prior to the Murder of Mr. Alexander Badirkhanov, Police Took Away His Bodyguard's Gun."

A later article in another newspaper cast more suspicion on the cops. "The police did not then, nor have they since, provided any basis whatsoever for the arrest.... It seemed very strange that Badirkhanov ended up without security on the night that he was killed. The detention of his bodyguard on the eve of his death has spawned varied theories about his death, but so far it remains a mystery."

Belov wrote letters to the central prosecutor's office in Moscow complaining about corruption in Petrozavodsk and detailing the strange circumstances surrounding the slaying. He didn't get any response. Well, not in writing, anyway.

In April 1995, Belov was detained by police for 10 days, locked in a filthy, windowless cell, and, he says, tortured by four or five cops, who smacked him with a rubber stick and kicked and punched him. He claims the bludgeoning left him pissing blood.

Here the story, for some reason, gets quiet for a moment. After his release, Belov, an avid pugilist and hockey player, ditched the security business and began coaching a youth boxing team. By his own account, his fears of the alleged gangster cops faded. For two years there was little plot development in the saga of Igor Belov. In 1997 he visited San Francisco, where he met a woman named Johari Sloan, whom he eventually married.

  

Forget the Sopranos. Since the implosion of the Soviet Union, the Russian mobsters have set the benchmarks for audacity and brutality in their bid to gain market share in America. As the late Robert I. Friedman reported in the book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America, by the year 2000 about 30 Russian crime syndicates were operating in the States – infiltrating the National Hockey League, pulling off jewelry heists and some of the most spectacular Medicare and insurance frauds in history, and allegedly laundering billions of dollars through the Bank of New York. One particularly colorful mobster, a guy nicknamed Tarzan, was popped while trying to broker the sale of a $100 million dollar Soviet-era submarine to Colombian coke kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Here in San Francisco, however, there seems to be little organized mob activity, despite the town's sizable Russian population, which is concentrated in the Richmond and Sunset Districts. In this town "opportunistic individuals out to make money" are responsible for most of the crime in the Russian diaspora, says a well-placed FBI agent, adding that those singular con artists "are smart enough to know there's no need to be overt or aggressive."

When Belov settled in San Francisco with Sloan, he discovered a Russian community with its own magazines and Web sites, eateries, bars, churches, and prep schools. One expat he hung out with was a building contractor named George Kulya, who says, "Igor's an honest, hardworking guy. He was always trying to help his friends."

As Belov was getting to know his new country, the authorities in Petrozavodsk suddenly regained their interest in him and began hunting for ways to drag him back to the motherland.

In March 1997 the Moscow unit of Interpol, the international police agency, faxed a bulletin marked "URGENT" to the States, requesting the help of U.S. law enforcement in apprehending Belov, saying he was wanted for "murders, criminal conspiracy, illegal possession of weapons and ammunition." The message continued, "You are kindly requested to take appropriate measures in order to determine the subject's whereabouts. In case the wanted person is located in your country[,] please trace him and inform us immediately."

Further messages from Russian officials to their U.S. counterparts indicated that Belov had been indicted, in January 1997, for several slayings and had fled to San Francisco to avoid his imminent prosecution. According to the Russians, Belov had gone on an execution binge in the mid-1990s, acquiring an AK-74 assault rifle (the successor model to the infamous AK-47), a pistol, and a sawed-off rifle, and proceeded to blow holes in at least two men, in early 1994. Allegedly, his preferred tactic seemed to be stalking foes as they drove their cars around Petrozavodsk.

The officials also implicated Belov in an attempted hit and accused him of aiding the people responsible for the slaying of a man named Alexander Gerasimov.

Writing to the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, a midlevel Russian official said Belov's 10-day stint in jail, during which he was allegedly tortured, had occurred when he was popped in connection to the slaying of Gerasimov.

"In the course of that investigation," the official wrote, "BELOV was apprehended on April 4, 1995, when trying to get the weapon that had been used for murdering GERASIMOV out of a hiding place. Taking into account the above circumstances, BELOV was arrested on April 4, 1995, on suspicion of accompliceship in murder. He was kept in custody for 10 days. For lack of evidence, BELOV was released but the criminal proceedings against him were not stopped, which resulted in obtaining additional evidence. For this reason, on January 31, 1997, a decision on BELOV's prosecution was made. Thus one of the main reasons for BELOV's departure to the United States was his attempt to escape from the investigation."

Repeatedly the Russians asked to extradite Belov. There was just one hitch: the U.S. government doesn't have an extradition treaty with Russia, a legacy of the cold war and, perhaps, a reflection of the country's current shadiness. So if Belov was going to stand trial in Russia, he'd have to be booted from this country for transgressing U.S. laws or committing an immigration violation.

  

Support group: Carol Sloan and husband Lee Cole fear Belov will be sent back to Russia. Guardian photo by Lori Spears

Despite the damage, Cole, 53, who sells in-line roller skates and skateboards for a living, quickly took a shine to Belov. In time he became one of his biggest supporters, a sort of one-man Free Igor committee.

Belov's tale "is so classically American: a person escaping from a land where they're persecuted," Cole says.

Here in the States, Belov, a striking, blond-haired, blue-eyed man with classic Slavic features, pursued an array of career paths, posing as a male model for the J. Walter Thompson ad agency in New York, making runs to the airport for several limo and sedan services, and honing his computer skills with the hope of landing a geek job. "Igor," Cole continues, "loved America. He loved everything about America."

The U.S. government, though, definitely didn't love him back. In 1999 the U.S. Department of Justice pounced on Belov, accusing of him of lying to immigration officials on two occasions, a criminal offense. They had what looked like a prima facie case. Charge one: During an interview with immigration staffers, Belov stated that he'd never been married before he tied the knot with Sloan. However, a visa application from the mid-1990s said otherwise, listing a Russian woman as his wife. Charge two: Belov also informed the immigration people that he'd never been arrested, when he'd twice been jailed in Petrozavodsk.

Awaiting trial, Belov spent nine months getting familiar with the interior of Alameda County's North County lockup, in downtown Oakland. When the trial finally rolled around, it was quite an affair, featuring several translators and a parade of Russian detectives and prosecutors. "Every single witness was Russian," recalls attorney Michael Stepanian, who represented Belov at trial. "No one spoke English. No one. We tried a Russian case in a U.S. courtroom. It was nuts."

Belov had explanations for his apparent deceptions. About the wife thing, he said, his visa papers had been filled out by a travel agent who had somehow got the information wrong. As for the issue of his jailing, he relied on a technicality, saying he'd been informally detained rather than formally arrested by the Petrozavodsk cops. He also pointed out, truthfully, that he'd been asked about his incarceration in English and responded in English, further complicating the matter.

The jurors hung, leaning 11 to 1 toward conviction. Stepanian says "the jury didn't believe" the Russian law enforcers. The Justice Department decided to retry the case.

A second trial, held in 2000 and attended by Robert Mueller (then U.S. attorney for northern California, currently director of the FBI), went no better for the feds. The second time around, Belov's legal team launched a frontal attack on the credibility of his Russian accusers, portraying them as lawless rogues, de facto kidnappers.

The feds shrugged off the torture allegations. "Whether he was tortured is irrelevant," prosecutor Matt Jacobs told the Daily Journal, a local newspaper that covers the legal world, at the time. "The question is whether he was in custody."

That line of reasoning didn't sway the jurors, who cut Belov loose, acquitting him on all charges. Cole says his friend's lawyers made the Russian cops "look like liars and thugs."

  

In fact, they just may be. At this point, few sane people have faith in Russia's criminal justice apparatus. Most observers see the recent conviction of the nation's wealthiest man, Yukos oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on a slew of white-collar crime charges, as the product of a profoundly flawed prosecution stemming at least in part from the tycoon's political opposition to tough guy premier Vladimir Putin. The malodorous nature of the case even drew criticism from President George W. Bush.

For its part, the U.S. State Department has little confidence in Russia's crime-fighting institutions. "The judiciary is often subject to manipulation by political authorities and is plagued by large case backlogs and trial delays," the department says in its background notes on the nation. "There are credible reports of beating and torture of inmates and detainees by law enforcement and correctional officials. Prison conditions fall well below international standards."

There are also specific clues suggesting Belov's opponents are ethically challenged. Russian journalists have dubbed Arthur Parfenchikov, the prosecutor who testified at his trials, the "Godfather of Petrozavodsk."

"According to our information, the local organized criminal groups have completely embraced Mr. Parfenchikov," reported the New Petersburg newspaper in 2001. "It has recently become a normal practice to make involuntary, forced donations for the 'needs of the prosecutor's office.' In cases where the aforementioned 'donors' are not willing to 'share' their profits with [the] prosecution office, they are confronted with extremely high possibility of criminal investigation based on entirely fabricated evidence and causes."

Interestingly, Parfenchikov was also singled out in the late 1990s by federal prosecutors in Moscow for disciplinary action connected to the slaying of Belov's casino-owner client, Badirkhanov. This little fact appears in a letter sent by the Russian feds to a member of the Russian Duma, or parliament. The letter, however, doesn't reveal just what Parfenchikov did – or how he was sanctioned.

Still, there's evidence that cuts against Belov. For starters, Vadim Volkov, an associate professor of sociology at the European University of St. Petersburg, told us by e-mail that both the cops and the mob are deeply involved in the business of protecting the country's oligarchs and tycoons. There aren't, in his view, many squeaky-clean Boy Scouts running firms like Belov's Shield.

Belov portrays his problems with Russian law enforcement as a product of his outspokenness. But Volkov thinks his case probably has "little to do with him exposing corruption. Nobody feared corruption charges then [in the early 1990s], and nobody cared about being exposed, especially police. And nobody would make really big efforts to avenge corruption accusations.... I strongly doubt this has to do with politics and the struggle against corruption."

  

When Belov's second trial culminated with an acquittal, he was exuberant. But the party was over the moment he stepped out of the courtroom and into the hallway, where two immigration agents were waiting for him. They cuffed him and took him into custody for overstaying his visa (which expired while he was in court). Thus began a new chapter in Belov's odyssey.

"The U.S. is basically powerless to remove" purported criminals hailing from Russia, our FBI source says. "Our only recourse against criminals escaping to the U.S. to avoid prosecution for their crimes is through our immigration laws."

During the past five years, Belov's been bounced from one jail to the next, with immigration officials moving him from Yuba County, Calif., to Florence, Ariz., to a jail in Bakersfield, where he now resides. His wife has divorced him.

"People who are doing time, they know what they're being punished for," Belov says in slightly choppy English from a pay phone in the Bakersfield lockup. "I didn't do anything wrong, and I know by law there is no reason for me to be in custody."

The Bakersfield facility, he continues, "is a dungeon. The food is terrible. I've been in many different jails, but here the food is the worst." Visiting sessions are only 30 minutes long, and none of Belov's friends have come to see him since he was sent to Bakersfield. "Who wants to travel from San Francisco for half an hour? I don't want them to travel four hours to Bakersfield for thirty minutes." Plus, he says, a visit from his pals would only remind him of what he's lost, leaving him more depressed.

He says, "Sometimes I think, 'You know what, guys? I'm not going to stay here forever. You want to send me to Russia? OK. Send me to Russia.' "

And what kind of scenario does he see unfolding on his return to his hometown? "If I am sent there, I'll be killed quickly. At least I won't be stuck here without any charges," Belov replies. "I'll be handed to the Russian prosecutor, Mr. Parfenchikov, who'll put me in jail and will start to obtain a kind of confession through torture – I don't care how strong you are, anyone will break. Then they can say I made suicide. Or I was killed in prison riot."

Belov's attorney is fighting his repatriation on the grounds that he'll be tortured or killed, and is asking for asylum.

At the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, a spokesperson says she can't comment on Belov's case. However, in court, Katherine Ciarrouchi, a lawyer for ICE, told the judge, "The most important aspect of this case is that it is a situation where [Belov] is fearing prosecution, not persecution," adding that he "was detained by the police for a legitimate criminal investigation." Of course, she continued, the Russian government wants to bring a known hit man to justice.

But for Rocky Tsai, at the core of this long, convoluted, and bloody narrative stands a simple, inescapable fact: There's a paucity of hard evidence linking Belov to the bloodletting.

"Where was the evidence, and where were those witnesses, when the Petrozavodsk police and prosecutorial officials who detained Mr. Belov in Russia flew over to San Francisco to testify against Mr. Belov in his federal trials before U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, which ended in his unanimous acquittal by an American jury?" he asks rhetorically. "That evidence has never been seen; those witnesses have never been produced; the proof that is required to convict – not merely to charge – an individual of a crime has never been established, either back in Russia or here in the U.S."

E-mail A.C. Thompson

Camille T. Taiara contributed to this story. Alex Doubinin translated some of the Russian documents.