Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs. Mark Hollingsworth

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СКАЧАТЬ that it was an assassination and is highly critical of the police. ‘What I cannot understand is why there has never been a proper murder investigation’, he has said. ‘There was a just cause of suspicion because Stephen had received death threats, there was a motive because of what he knew, and there were suspicious circumstances. But the police did not interview me or my colleagues or Stephen’s clients or his employees. Usually, the police would interview the last person to speak to him and I was that person. We may not know for sure what happened to Stephen but I think there could have been a more thorough inquiry.’

      While Curtis’s wife Sarah has never believed that her husband was murdered, she has reflected on why it was a Russian businessman who first informed her about the death of her husband. ‘I am sorry that Stephen is dead,’ he told her. The police did not telephone until an hour later to say that ‘there has been an accident’.

      It is a measure of the accuracy of the premonitions Curtis had about a premature death that he left detailed instructions for his funeral. This was partly influenced by his superstitious, almost fatalistic nature. He believed in ghosts and in the afterlife and always thought that he would die young. ‘I will never make old bones’, he once said, well before he met the Russians.

      But Curtis had also been diagnosed with leukemia and a rare blood disease. This manifested itself in bizarre ways. During a sailing trip he once hit his head heavily on the boom of the boat and a friend was stunned to see his bloody flesh wound apparently heal before his very eyes. Curtis needed regular blood transfusions to stabilize him and took Warfarin to thin his blood and prevent clotting. He also wore surgical stockings to inhibit deep-vein thrombosis. After two operations at a private clinic, he was told that he could no longer travel by airplane because this would worsen his condition. But he could fly by helicopter, which was why, just three months before his death, he upgraded to the Agusta A109E.

      Typical of his flamboyant and irreverent personality, he requested that his funeral should not be a mournful event but a ‘celebration of his life’ and that mourners were ‘not obliged to wear traditional black’. On Wednesday, 7 April 2004 some 350 relations, friends, and business associates gathered inside All Saints Church in Easton on the Isle of Portland near the Curtis family home at Pennsylvania Castle. Such was the lawyer’s popularity that a further 100 stood outside and loudspeakers were installed to broadcast the proceedings. At 1.50 p.m. a glass carriage bearing Curtis’s coffin arrived, drawn by two blackplumed horses and adorned with flowers that spelt the word ‘Daddy’. The carriage was followed by a Rolls-Royce Phantom, carrying his widow Sarah and his daughter Louise, and two Bentleys and a Ferrari, ferrying other relations and close friends.

      Preceded by a Scottish piper who played the ‘Skye Boat Song’, the coffin was carried by six bearers into the church, followed by a tearful Sarah and Louise, both wearing pink coats and dresses. As they slowly walked down the aisle, Sarah noticed the intense, brooding figure of Boris Berezovsky, dressed in black, in the congregation with his girlfriend, two bodyguards, and a Russian entourage. Most of Curtis’s clients attended. Notable absentees were representatives of his clients IKEA, which did not want to be associated with his controversial Russian clients, as well as most Yukos executives. Indeed, the only Yukos executive to attend was Vasily Alexanyan, a close friend of Curtis and the oil company’s former legal director. Alexanyan was furious that his colleagues had boycotted the funeral despite the risky operations Curtis had conducted for their company.

      At 2.00 p.m. the service began with traditional hymns, followed by a piano solo by Louise. It was evident that Curtis was well loved. One speaker described him as epitomizing a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If, which reads: ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue/or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch’. His closest friend, Rod Davidson, told the congregation, ‘In business he was in a league of his own. He would start off with an earthquake, build it up to a crescendo and [was] always setting his sights beyond the stars…He was the most generous of men and I think of him now at the pearly gates giving St Peter a red Ferrari and providing Playstations for the cherubs.’

      But there was also palpable tension in the air because of the conspicuous and, to some, menacing presence of the Russian contingent, who attracted frequent nervous glances. When Berezovsky and his colleagues left their seats at the end of the service, the remainder of the congregation moved out of the way to let them pass first.

      The local mourners and Sarah’s friends were mostly conventional, middle-class English people who lived quiet, rural lives in the pristine Dorset village of Easton. They were hardly used to the hard Russian faces or the battery of television cameras, photographers, and police that greeted them as they left the church that bright spring afternoon. To the local villagers it must have looked like the cast of The Godfather or The Sopranos had arrived.

      Sarah was devastated by her husband’s death, but she was also confused by and concerned about the media attention. ‘Why are there so many cameras here?’ she asked outside the church. ‘I don’t understand.’ A former secretary, Sarah’s life was family, music, friends, the castle, and the English countryside. Stephen had told her nothing about his secret life in London, Gibraltar, and Russia. A lover of James Bond films, Curtis revelled in this covert existence. He compartmentalized his life, mainly to protect Sarah. ‘I don’t want to know,’ she once remarked and would have recoiled from the dark, cut-throat world of the Russian super-rich.

      Sarah recognized none of the Russian mourners.‘Who’s this? Who’s that?’ she asked one of Stephen’s colleagues in a state of increasing bewilderment. ‘What on earth was my husband doing with those Russians?’ she asked another friend. Not wanting to worry her, they declined to answer.

      After the service the procession escorting Curtis’s body was accompanied by the song ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, with Sarah’s soprano voice ringing out the final words as she followed her husband’s coffin. The burial took place in the gardens of Pennsylvania Castle, attended only by family and close friends. Curtis was laid to rest to the strains of the bagpipe melody ‘Highland Cathedral’.

      As the guests mingled in the marquee after the burial the atmosphere was tense and apprehensive. Many former clients were anxious to know the identities of the other guests and whom they worked for. ‘It was a weird situation for a wake,’ said a former employee of Curtis’s law firm. ‘People were looking over their shoulders to see who was talking to who. The strange thing was that I knew some of our clients knew each other, but they would not acknowledge each other at the funeral in case they were photographed or associated with other clients. It was very bizarre, almost comical.’ At 9.45 p.m. a spectacular fireworks display erupted over the English Channel.

      The funeral of Stephen Langford Curtis brought together an uneasy, unsettling gathering of two cultures: the conventional, light-hearted, understated English middle class and the dark, intense, stern-faced, focused Russian business elite.

      Little more than a decade earlier the Russian presence in Britain had been barely noticeable. It would have been rare to hear a Russian accent in a Knightsbridge boutique, a Mayfair restaurant, or even on the London underground, let alone at the funeral of a mysterious, even obscure, British lawyer. There was no sign then of what was to come: the arrival in Britain of a wave of middle-class, affluent Russians. The influx that followed the collapse of communism in 1991 started slowly but by the end of that decade the Russian desire to move to London had reached what one insider has described as ‘fever pitch’.

      Although there are no official figures for the size of the London-based Russian and former-Soviet community, it is widely accepted that by 2008 it numbered well in excess of 300,000. This was large enough to spawn four Russian-language newspapers, the glossy magazine New Style, a plethora of Russian networking clubs and internet sites, and a host of Russian social events.

      Although by then the Russian community was diverse, most of its members were ordinary professionals СКАЧАТЬ