How to Succeed in Business Despite Being Hounded by the FBI, the KGB, the INS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, Interpol, and Mafia Hit Men
Alex Konanykhin was a wanted man. The Russian mafia took out a contract on his life. The KGB, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security were also on his trail. With paid assassins and two governments in hot pursuit, Konanykhin was running out of time and places to hide.
What happened to Konanykhin, once one of Russia's wealthiest entrepreneurs who by his mid-20s amassed a $300 million empire and bankrolled Boris Yeltsin's rise to power, is, as one U.S. judge noted, a tale worthy of a spy novel. It is a true-life story so riveting, only Konanykhin himself can tell it.
This is a hair-raising account of betrayal, corruption, conspiracy, kidnapping, high-speed chases, as well as secret government cover-ups. The book goes behind the press headlines Konanykhin's case has generated for the past 10 years; the case The Washington Post called a spellbinding seminar on international intrigue.
In Defiance Konanykhin, the founder of KMGI, a thriving high-tech agency located in New York, describes in gripping detail his against-all-odds ascent from a poor but industrious science student in the former USSR to a powerful tycoon in the post-Communist Russia, who lived in the mansion built for the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and was protected around the clock by the Russian Secret Service. But when trusted members of his own security team betrayed him, and the U.S. government became a willing accomplice in an illicit pact with the KGB, the lives of Konanykhin and his wife Elena became a terrifying roller coaster of desperate attempts at survival, vindication, and search for justice.
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