If you want to do what I did, and unlock the underworld of mobsters and spies, not the

glamorized cartoonish, disconnected lore of each, which have dominated American storytelling

for the past hundred years. But the real realm of darkness. The realm where mobsters and

spies intersect. The one that's connected to our realm in the light lurking beneath

us, with the threat to one day rise and flood our world with their blood soaked money, a

second economy built off the capitalization of human misery.

If you want to unlock that world, you just have to start with two dead bodies.

Body number one. When KGB asset FC Egron stepped out his front door on May 4th 1985, he

already had three notable scars from his time in the United States. Two on his face and

neck from being shot at close range a year earlier outside this very apartment. And one

on his stomach. A bullet he took in 1980, while out and about on Coney Island. Egron

emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1975, landing in Brighton Beach via the Jackson vanic

amendment, and gained control over the Voivizakonia, a.k.a. the Russian War, who had washed

ashore with him. By the time he took that first bullet in the gut, Egron was already the

Godfather of the Russian Mafia. By the time he took the next two, in the face and neck,

he was raking in a billion dollars annually from just one of his schemes, a gas scam

he ran with the Genevieve's crime family. This, on top of his decade-long extortion

records, made FC's 5-foot-four-inch frame a prime target for assassination. From the

crime bosses he wasn't in business with, to his own underbosses, who with their ties

to the Kremlin and even bigger gangsters in the Motherland, were pointing a thousand

knives at his back. On that fresh spring warning, in 1985, at the height of the Cold War,

the little dawn of Brighton Beach had every reason to stay inside. But the lore of a famed

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