The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump

by Andrew G. McCabe

the number of times a man has served time in prison. Stars on the shoulders signify authority. The real leaders who emerge from that process are the vory v zakone. One of the first vory of stature to come to the U.S. was Vyacheslav Ivankov. From the prisons of Siberia he made his way to Brooklynski—Brighton Beach, the home base of Russian organized crime in the U.S. Spinning cycles of extortion that touched the worlds of nightlife, sports, entertainment, and investment banking, Ivankov became the first target of Kerr’s squad. In late 1995, they got him. In news footage of his perp walk—with Mike McCall at one elbow and his partner, Lester McNulty, at the other—Ivankov actually spits at the camera. The month Ivankov went on trial, the New York Daily News alleged that he put out a murder contract on both agents. All the way to sentencing, in 1997, he refused to admit any guilt for anything. “I am not in a church,” he told the judge. “I have no need to make a confession.” The Wire After C24 caught its first big fish, the waters were calm for a while. I and a few other new agents joined the squad—Ray’s Day Care, we called it. Fresh out of Quantico, full of piss and vinegar, we knew nothing. We were all eyes, all ears. A lot of the Russian gangsters were unrefined, but their behavior had its logic. One man arrested in New York for murder confessed that, back in Russia, he had carved up a few bodies with a blowtorch. A blowtorch is better than a saw, he explained, because it is ...