Vic Socotra

24 November 206

Black Friday

I was back from the airport not long after 6:30 in the morning. The sun was not up yet, and the day stretched ahead as empty as the condo.

There had been laughter and tons of food. Now it was silent with the guests gone. The dog was the last one home, and he was grave with only me to rub his fur.

I heated up some leftovers from the feast the day before as breakfast and looked at what had happened over the last couple days when I was making merry.

It is Black Friday, I realized, which is a good thing for a change. This is the first day of the year that most retail businesses show a profit and go out of the red ink.

I don't know how things will be this year. The Sunnis were savage in their assault on their countrymen in the markets of Sadr City, with more than a hundred dead from market bombings. A Palestinian grandmother tried her hand at belt bombing, in Israel, the first in a year or more.

She failed. According to the martyr video, she had lost her house, her son, and had another maimed. She was acting oddly, and the authorities got her to detonate herself prematurely, with only minor injuries to the soldiers.

It seemed the Russians succeeded in killing their renegade gadfly in London. Alexander Litvinenko passed away in hospital, as the British say it, after declining the last few weeks.

Litvinenko's last words were that they might have killed him, but they could not kill his cause. I had cause to comment on the illness the other day, on request from an associate, and I noted when I heard my words later that the cause of his illness, and in fact, all reference to him, had been edited out of the broadcast.

I certainly understand it. There is hazard in recording anything about current events, since most of what we hear is wrong, or at least premature.

Alexander- apparently known as Sasha to his family- had been examining the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was an acquaintance of his, and another fierce critic of the Putin government. I was impressed by her courage in taking on the goons, year after year.

Precisely which goons killed her, and Sasha, is a matter of some speculation. I would think it would be far too pat to blame the SFB, the Russian Federation Security Service. They could not be that stupid, could they?

Whatever the poison was, and there is some speculation, it was slow acting and left Sasha talking to the end. He described meetings with former KGB officers, and a former member of the Italian Service on the day he began to get sick.

Mr. Putin's people described the accusation from the murdered man as "sheer nonsense."

It is anything but that.

I was standing off Red Square a few years ago, wandering up the boulevard toward the Old Arbat. It was high summer, still late despite the lateness of the hour. I could see the white “wedding cake” high rises in the distance.

One of those unofficial motorcades was lined up at the curb. There was a knot of people on the street and I wandered over to see what the excitement was. A street vendor offered to sell me a blue mesh hockey jersey emblazoned with the logo of the Moscow Penguins.

“Is signed by Pavel Bure!” he said. “One hundred rubles!” The vendor was excited that his standard merchandize had been augmented by a signature. He had a genuine collectable item, which he wanted to be rid of quickly.

Bure was known as the Russian Rocket in the National Hockey League at the time, playing for the Vancouver Canucks. He was apparently summering back home. I saw him get into one of the limos, lithe and sleek, as the convoy headed off. He was surrounded by thick men in leather coats.

I knew that Bure was a great hockey player, but was connected to the Oligarchs, the privatized parts of the old Soviet infrastructure that had suddenly become personal property.

It certainly appeared that Mr. Bure was a figure of some significance here at home, though as a private citizen or something else. Last I heard, he was running the Russian Federation hockey team in this year's Winter Olympics.

I bought the hockey jersey, which I still have. But I have a hard time sorting out exactly whom was whom. Bure was obviously something more than a simple athlete. Rumor was that he was associated with a man named Anzor Kikalishvili, who headed an organization known as the 21st Century Association.

Such organizations as the Russian Federation, the FBI and the United States Senate named him as the top mafia boss in the post-Soviet era. After he was traded to the Florida Panthers by the Canucks, the FBI caught him on a wiretap, threatening to skin someone alive.

His office was bombed in 2002, by person or persons unknown.

Now his partner Bure is working for the Government in the Olympic Movement.

I don't claim that he has anything to do with the murder of a retired intelligence officer in London, far be it. I have enormous regard for his career on the ice. But I can't say the same thing for all the men in the black leather coats that surrounded him. I think it does show that you can't tell much about which Russian is doing what to some other Russian.

After all, you don't have to be in Government to have good ideas, right? Isn't that what capitalism is all about?