"millions of dollars have been obtained illegally" and that Kiritchenko was using EuroFed to "minimize his tax exposure in the U.S."

It was a classic money-laundering case, Boersch thought- moving the proceeds of certain illegal activities through U.S. financial institutions with the intent to conceal their origins. But there was one huge twist: the money wasn't the proceeds of crimes committed here. The alleged frauds all had taken place in Ukraine.

That didn't matter, Boersch argued. Read liberally, the criminal code implied that anyone in the world who committed fraud or extorted money could be charged with money laundering if they ever brought that money here. This was a daring approach-so daring it had never been tried in U.S. courts.

Armed with their novel legal theory, Boersch and Earl arrived jet-lagged at the Kiev airport for what they thought would be a low-profile trip to meet with Ukraine's government investigators and confirm their ideas about Kiritchenko. They were greeted by a crowd of people waving signs and chanting, "Free Lazarenko!"

Boersch and Earl were stunned when their hosts explained that while they had been in the air, the Swiss investigators tracking Lazarenko's assets had charged the presidential challenger with money laundering in Switzerland. Since Lazarenko had left office the previous year under a haze of allegations, the Swiss and a team of about fifty Ukrainian investigators had dogged him even as his opposition party won a bloc of seats in Parliament. The Swiss were expected in Kiev any moment.

The turn of events transformed the fact-finding trip into a multinational swap meet, with the Swiss, Ukrainian, and American investigators exchanging leads in their overlapping investigations. Boersch and Earl spent their days bundled in winter clothes in an unheated interrogation room interviewing potential witnesses. The witnesses explained how Lazarenko used his political power to direct government contracts for housing to Kiritchenko. From the

Swiss, the pair soon learned that before Kiritchenko had invested close to $100 million in EuroFed, Lazarenko had asked for $96 million in cash from his Swiss accounts before settling on withdrawing two $48 million bearer checks.

Earl is a family man through and through, and he missed his kids-he'd just had his second-during his trip. But he was picking up Russian and also enforcing criminal law in an exotic foreign locale, which he loved. "It was snowy and there were beautiful parks, big trees," he says. "In Dnepropetrovsk I'd go run in the mornings, freezing cold. My Ukrainian people thought I was crazy." On the drive back from the provincial capital to Kiev, he says, "everybody was out ice fishing, and we'd stop by these little markets and look at all these big fish. It was an experience."

At night, the Ukrainians hosted elaborate six-hour banquets to celebrate the historic cooperation. For a country whose criminal corruption makes it "the epicenter for global badness," in the words of a former State Department official, teaming up with the FBI was a sign of acceptance. The vodka toasts continued to midnight, and Earl, who doesn't smoke or drink, was obliged to attend. His fascination with two things Russian began to wane. "It's a game-let's see who can outdrink who-but I don't think they enjoy it," he says. "And the pickled food! It's their history, how they preserved stuff. But it's horrible."

Soon after Earl returned home, he found his investigation turned on its head. Lazarenko's wife, Tamara; son, Oleksandr; and twin daughters, Katya and Lessia, had moved into the Novato mansion. With the Ukrainians' legal vise closing in, the oligarch was feathering his nest. Earl put Lazarenko's name on an FBI watch list that would alert him the moment the former prime minister stepped on a plane to the United States.

The call came just a month later. As Kuchma's "anticorruption" campaign came to fruition, Ukraine's parliament voted to revoke Lazarenko's immunity from prosecution. The politician fled to Athens and on February 19, 1999, boarded a plane bound for JFK

International Airport. Earl knew he was coming before Lazarenko had fastened his seat belt.

Suddenly the routine police request had exploded into the biggest case in the Eurasian Organized Crime Squad's history and one of the highest-profile cases within the FBI.

When INS agents briefed by Earl greeted Lazarenko at the arrival gate, the imperious Ukrainian immediately requested political asylum. He would take his chances on America's legal system rather than Ukraine's or Switzerland's.

On the face of it, Lazarenko's application for political asylum had some validity. He had been running for president as a reformer against a brutal autocrat who wanted him in jail or dead. Some Ukrainians suspected Lazarenko's only crimes were failing to share his "profits" with Kuchma, and then having the audacity to use that money to run against him for president. In audiotapes secretly recorded by a bodyguard of the president and first released in November 2000, Kuchma can be heard mentioning Lazarenko as an oligarch whose demise might conveniently satisfy the American government, which was pushing him to do something about the country's rampant corruption. "Who from the oligarchs?" an aide asks. "Who embarrasses you most of all? Whom can I give to the American intelligence?" (The same tapes revealed Kuchma authorizing the sale of stealth radar to Saddam Hussein and allegedly ordering the death of a top Ukrainian journalist-the cofounder of Olena Prytula's publication-who was later found beheaded in a forest outside Kiev.) Lazarenko was no saint, but some observers wondered if the United States had been conned into doing Kuchma's dirty work.

Lazarenko's arrival, meanwhile, threw the U.S. government into a tizzy. Ukraine was calling for his head, and the Swiss were preparing to file for his extradition. While the State Department madly debated the options, Lazarenko was detained until his asylum petition was considered. At his own request, he was transferred to Marin County Jail so he could be closer to his family. He was eventually moved to the Camp Parks Federal Correctional Institution in the Contra Costa County town of Dublin.

For Earl and Boersch, Lazarenko's surprising appearance was also problematic. He had always been a secondary concern in the investigation. Most of the evidence Earl had accumulated against Kirit-chenko implicated Lazarenko, but there was not enough for an indictment against either of them.

Still, the endgame was on. Earl's Swiss colleagues had gathered enough evidence to include Kiritchenko in their case against Lazarenko and asked the agent to present the extradition warrant. One morning at 6:00 a.m., Earl knocked on the door of Shangri-la, finally coming face-to-face with a bleary-eyed Kiritchenko. After eighteen months, his covert investigation had just become overt.

Earl's Victory was tempered by a decision by the Bureau of Prisons, which, over the objections of Earl and Boersch, put Peter Kiritchenko and Pavel Lazarenko in the same jail cell at Camp Parks, two miles from downtown Dublin and thirty long miles from Shangri-la. For six months, the two men would spend all day together plotting a defense.

Their confinement was a classic example of what game theory calls, with good reason, the prisoner's dilemma. Given two prisoners, both implicated heavily in a case, the best group outcome is achieved if they refuse to cooperate with the prosecution. But while sticking together may save them both, each prisoner knows the surest ticket to freedom-or a favorable plea bargain-is to betray the other.

Under these psychologically grueling conditions, paranoia set in. Though the available evidence indicates that Lazarenko had not met with Earl or Boersch to discuss cooperating, Kiritchenko believed he was about to be betrayed and did the only rational thing. He asked for a meeting with Earl and Boersch. Earl did not want to give up on prosecuting Kiritchenko, whom the FBI not only suspected of masterminding the money laundering but was investigating for deeper connections to Russian Mafiya. But Kiritchenko was what the case against the bigger fish needed: an eyewitness who could put a human face on the complex financial transactions for a jury.