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My uncle Maxim was the Pakhan in Russia, and his son Viktor ran things in New York. However, they were more heavily involved in criminal activities than us and less involved in legitimate stuff.
We kept more of a low profile here in the UK, so the majority of our businesses were legit. We appeared to be nothing more than Russian Oligarchs, which simply meant Russian businessmen, at least on the outside anyway, and that was how we liked it. While the authorities might have their suspicions at times, so far, we’d managed to stay off the radar of the local Metropolitan Police and, most significantly, the National Crime Agency and FBI.
The Poles were mainly involved in counterfeit goods like cigarettes, alcohol, perfume and, more recently, vapes and drug trafficking, supplying everything from prescription painkillers to heroin. However, like us, they also owned numerous legitimate businesses and had several other businesses they used to launder their money through.
Unfortunately, we still dabbled in the supply of drugs, but only cocaine and ecstasy.
We hated our drug side of things. I never used drugs; none of my family would, but we sold them, and we knew what they could do to people. None of us were immune to feeling a certain level of guilt at being a part of the hard drugs problem in the world. But being born into the Bratva, our lives had always been mixed up in drugs, and it was not so easy to walk away.
We wanted to, but it wasn’t that simple. Miki had managed to cut back on the type of drugs we dealt, and we now only sold the two, having handed the provision of all other hard drugs along with the prescription drugs to Glowacki over the last few years.
We also ran a large and very crucial part of the routes used for trafficking drugs and guns through the UK. We did this on behalf of our family in Russia, the USA, and several other associates with whom we did business from Ireland and Scotland.
We were keen to offload this side of the business, too, so we could concentrate on the legit stuff and the white-collar crime only, but we would need to find the right people first.
These were the areas others tried to muscle in on occasionally, and it seemed like it was happening again with the recent infractions into our territory and attacks against us.
These areas of our business, in the wrong hands, would be a disaster for my family here and our Russian and American counterparts. It would also upset the balance of power and cause chaos in the UK. Any war that ensued would not just have severe consequences for the crime organisations involved but would no doubt have an impact on innocent lives, too. So, before we could offload anything, we needed to ensure it was to people we could trust.
Glowacki would have been a good bet to take over the rest of the drug supply and the management of the supply route part of our business, but he wasn’t in the position to take on much more right now. He had problems inside his brotherhood and would need to recruit more members from Poland, assimilate them into the UK, and strengthen his own business again before he would be strong enough to take on anything else.
I called Marko and checked in with him. He informed me that our spies, or ratherintelligence officersas he liked to call them, had been working overtime, and the rumours were that the Polish thieves actually worked for the Malia Boys, just as I had thought.
It seemed like they were hoping to set up Glowacki and thus split up our alliance, pin it on the Albanians, and then watch the inevitable war ensue. They could then muscle in on our territory while we were all otherwise occupied trying to kill each other. It was not the first time they’d caused trouble for us, of course, but they had definitely never tried to go up against us directly in such a manner. This was certainly an issue we would need to address with Glowacki, sooner rather than later.
I called Miki to let him know, and he agreed to arrange a meeting to discuss this with Glowacki when we saw him at our club opening tomorrow night.
I jumped into my car and headed to the gym to work out with some of the guys before I returned to the Estate.
CHAPTER 3
GRACIE
SATURDAY MORNING - HUNGOVER
My head was pounding from the bottle of gin I drank last night.
“Hi,” Marcie said, bursting into the kitchen like a mini tornado with Claire close on her heels. “I hear you got yourself fired from that shitty job at last!”
I covered my ears and winced at her loudness.
“Sorry,” she said, “You a bit worse for wear?”
“Eh, yeah,” I mumbled with my head in my hands.
“Can you please turn down your volume?”
Marcie was Claire’s best friend and acted like another big sister to me. Marcie was great but loud, and her voice was always set a few decibels above everyone else’s. Marcie was also hyper and did everything at top speed, and while I loved her to bits, even on a good day, she could be exhausting. And today was definitely not a good day.
“About time. Maybe now you can start that book of yours, huh?” Marcie said, just a tiny bit quieter.
I groaned, feeling a bit distraught.
“Aw, hon, I can see you are still upset, but you should look at this as a good thing because now you have more time and can put it into your writing.”
She had always said that I was not cut out to work for a small newspaper like the London Local.
“You need to be doing what you dream of and writing that book instead of wasting yourself on selling advertising space,” she told me for about the millionth time this month alone.
