Shoot for the Face: Crime and Punishment in Moscow Today

Jason Rogers couldn’t remember the last time he had slept soundly. After surviving 20 years in the high-octane world of Russian investment banking, he knew that his time there as the high-flying international banker to the oligarchs was coming to an end.
The bank he’d built from scratch in the '90s, Falcon Capital, his pride and joy, was being assailed on all sides by shadowy forces in Russian society with impeccable government connections, the “siloviki”. To compound matters, his chief risk officer had approved a loan to an oligarch, Ari Kandinskiy, who was down on his luck and had all but gone broke. His efforts to recover desperately needed funds from the stricken oligarch would pit him against powerful interests in Moscow – including Ruslan Akhmatov, the mercurial emissary of Russia’s most troublesome regional governor.
Desperate times would call for desperate measures. Jason Rogers would have to call one final time on the services of Dmitry Ovchinnikov, the Siberian hitman who was a little rough around the edges and dressed like an American cowboy – but who had proved so terribly effective at neutralising his client’s enemies over the years and despatching them to cemeteries all over Russia.
Dmitry Ovchinnikov’s capacity for violence and appetite for dispensing his own, unique brand of “justice” would result in some of Moscow’s most bloody executions in recent memory. It would trigger an orgy of revenge killings which would see the body parts of prominent members of the Russian underworld scattered all over the white tablecloths of that city’s finest restaurants.
Would Jason Rogers come to regret the murderous gang war that he had unleashed on the streets of Moscow? Would he become one of its victims?
Only time would tell…