ONE day last winter, I was walking along 25th of October Street in downtown Vladivostok with my head into the wind when a short, rotund man careered into me with a knife. It wasn't a big one, but the way he was waving it around and ranting made me jump back about a metre into the crowd, knocking over another woman.
The Russian, probably 60 years-old, wore a tan fur-lined leather jacket, fur hat and good boots. He was reeling drunk and attacking a clean cut man about half his age and half a metre taller. As the intended victim placed an outstretched arm on the old man's head to fend him off, the assailant waved the knife harmlessly at his target's chest like a scene from the Three Stooges. After watching for a few minutes, I walked on toward my appointment as the potential murderer's small but sturdy wife pulled him back into the bar by his coat-tails, the blade waving in the air, and me never knowing the cause of his rage.
For the visitor who knows next to nothing about Russia, Vladivostok is a place where you tumble from one event and from one person to another. I went there to cover the Russian election and write on foreign investment opportunities. A friend and journalist had put me in touch with two men who were to arrange appointments, cars, hotel and translators. They saw me coming. After a week they had managed to spend almost my entire US$3,000 (HK$23,150) travel advance - $125 a day for a translator, $100 for a journalist to make two phone calls, $15 an hour for a car ... and I had zero to show for it.
Broke, disgusted and ready to quit, staff at the local newspaper the Daily Vladivostok, a member of a dance troupe, their friends and others took me on a month and-a-half tour of the city by tram, by foot and hitchhiking to prove that not everyone in the city wants something from you - which they did and didn't. A 10-day trip turned into a month and-a-half odyssey into the former secret port of the Pacific Fleet.
But the people who greeted Hong Kong lawyer Gary Alderdice were not just after his money - either roughly $3,000 or $150,000 depending on who you believe - but his life and that of his girlfriend and prostitute Natalia Samofalova. Within a few hours of his arrival in Vladivostok late last month they had taken both. Regardless of whether he had gone there to buy Samofalova out of the syndicate that sent her to Macau, or just because he missed her, my bet is whoever killed Alderdice was waiting for him too.
There are several groups to chose from. The first syndicates appeared in the city in 1989 and by 1992, a security officer told the Vladivostok News, the city's commerce was neatly divided among rival groups of two kinds, 'athletes' and 'ex-cons'. Today you can often identify the ex-cons by tattoos. In Russian prisons, inmates give each other tattoos to identify their crimes and place in the hierarchy of the underworld. If one of those killed Alderdice, the last thing the lawyer might have seen was a tattoo of a skull and crossbones - the mark of an assassin.