the first thing the lawyers need to know is whether their client's story is real, whether it can be supported, you know, because in any new case you don't know whether your own client is telling you the truth.
So originally one of the first things we were hired to do was to check out whether this was, in fact, the case. So they claimed that the allegations originated with a mobster named Demetri Baranovsky, B-A-R-A-N-O-V-S-K-Y, who was, in fact, jailed for running a shake-down operation in which he posed as an anticorruption campaigner for the purpose of extorting money from people by threatening to accuse them of some kind of corrupt activities. As you know, Russia is rife with corruption and there's a lot of anger over corruption.
We were able to ascertain that Mr. Baranovsky was, in fact, associated with Russia's biggest organized crime family, the Solntsevo Brotherhood, S-O-L-N-T-S-E-V-O brotherhood, which is the major dominant mafia clan in Moscow. So as far as it went, the client seemed to be telling the truth. You know, there was extensive record of these events and we found some indications from western
