CHAPTER 24
Pascale Perillo was tall with well-groomed dark hair and wearing a neat navy-blue suit and white shirt. When he emerged into the arrival’s hall, he was pulling a bag on wheels and carrying a brown brief case. Mark Dobson asked if he’d booked somewhere to stay. He hadn’t so they took a taxi to the Suvarnabhumi Suite, a new, medium priced hotel in Lat Krabang, not far from the Peacock. Once Pascale had checked in, they took the lift to the top floor coffee shop and Pascale began on his story.
“My home is in Naples,” he began. “I was born and brought up there but went to the USA to pursue my career in banking. We had a very successful family business but my father admits to a mistake after my mother died, a mistake made during grief. He bought the business called Bio-Cal from an old school friend; a pharmacist called Gabriele. Gabriele subsequently had a stroke. No-one blames Gabriele for what happened, least of all Papa.”
“How old is the family business?” Mark asked.
“It was started by my grandfather. Canned tomatoes and pasta sauces. My father set up Perillo Internazionale to trade in other local foods – fruits, wine, coffee and even espresso machines. It was a success story until Bio-Cal.
“A guy called Enzo Grassi came with the business. Gabriele had left all the day to day running in Enzo’s hands and told Papa to do the same because Enzo was experienced in the business. But my father didn’t like Enzo from day one. He didn’t even like the name Bio-Cal. Enzo liked football, supported Napoli and seemed to spend most of his spare time in the company of those who liked to bet on football results. My father is good at business but he’s a quiet, nature loving man. They were different people.
“And Enzo was always away. The three staff at Bio-Cal always said they did not know where he was. ‘Try again, tomorrow,’ they would say.
“Then Gabriele had his stroke. Wheelchair bound and barely able to speak, Gabriele was no longer the man he used to be and unable to give advice, encouragement or even offer his apologies and regrets that things weren’t working out so well. For the first time in his life, my father was having sleepless nights.
“Papa was still trying to decide what to do the morning Enzo phoned to ask if he would meet two Russians and a Chinese man from Kuala Lumpur and take them for lunch. Enzo said they supplied raw materials for the cosmetics industry and were looking for an Italian partner.”
“What were their names?” Dobson interrupted.
“According to Enzo they were called Vlad, Mikael and Mr Yap. Papa took them to lunch at his favourite restaurant in Somme Vesuviano but they were very – what is the expression? - hard going.
“My father describes them very well. The Russian called Vlad looked like a retired boxer. Mikael was older, thinner and wore a grey suit flecked with silver threads. Both smoked incessantly despite the ‘vietato fumare’ sign on the dashboard of my father’s Mercedes. The Chinese man had untidy black hair and did not smoke but seemed not to understand a word of English. Instead, he sweated, scratched and blew his nose in his hand. These are my father’s descriptions, you understand, but I saw someone very similar in Malacca yesterday.”
Mark produced his phone and flicked through photos. “Is this him?”
“Yes,” Pascale said.
“We know him as Ho Chiang,” Mark said. “What about these?”
He flicked through more photos. There was only one that Pascale thought he recognised. It was the one Colin Asher had identified as Valeri Pavlyuchenko but he’d not been seen often and certainly not in Malaysia. The photo on Mark’s phone had been taken by Sannan in Pattaya. Mark logged the information and Pascale moved on.
“My father handed out his business card but all he got in return was a piece of card with nothing on except the name of a company called Sara Enterprises and an address in Bangkok. Finally, my father drove them to the airport to catch a flight to Kuala Lumpur. That’s when he was shot.”
Mark interrupted. “He was lucky to survive, yes?”
Pascale nodded. “Very lucky. His precious Mercedes was found on a rundown industrial estate, a junkie’s hang out, on the outskirts of Naples. Papa was found just a short distance away in a pool of blood with serious bullet wounds. He was in a coma for a month. My brother and I returned to Naples. I came from New York. Adriano was in London.”
“Who did you work for?”
“Capital One but I’ve since resigned.”
“And the police?”
“The police got nowhere. Enzo was interviewed at length but the interesting thing was that he gave the police different names for the three visitors. He said they were called Andre Arshavin and Roman Kolodin and the Chinese was called Lee. That was not what he’d told my father. He also told the police they were from a Thai company called SCAZ.
“The Polizia di Stato carried out all the usual checks and found they’d caught the Malaysian Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur before my father was shot. So, no-one could accuse the SCAZ men of anything. And Enzo had been in his office in Naples in the morning, had flown to Rome in the afternoon and hadn’t returned to Naples until the next day. What could the police do? No-one was arrested.”
“How is your father now?”
“Better but he finds it difficult to concentrate. Adriano needed to return to London but I stayed on to look after Papa and the business.”
“And that’s when you went to talk to Enzo?”
Pascale took a deep breath. “Enzo was annoyed when I started asking questions. ‘What position do you hold?’ he asked me. I am here as my father’s representative, I replied. My father is still too weak to deal with matters. Enzo was aggressive but I asked him the names of the two Russians and Chinese and he wanted to know why I needed to know. I said it was because my father couldn’t remember. He seemed pleased he couldn’t remember so I asked again. What were their names? And he said the Russians were Andre Arshavin, Roman Kolodin and Mr Lee from SCAZ – the same as he’d told the police.
“When I told my father, he was very angry. He was adamant the name on the card he was given was Sara Enterprises. Papa then found the card and I still have it.”
“Can I see it?” Mark asked. Pascale produced it from his case. It was Sara Enterprises, Sukhumvit, Soi 85, Bangkok – the area of the warehouse that Ritchie had been taken to.
“You know the company?” Pascale asked.
“We might do,” Mark said. “We’ll check.”
As soon as he’d said it though an idea came. “SCAZ,” he said. “That name is new to us. I can’t place it. Tell me again. It was Enzo who said that the three visitors he called Andre Arshavin, Roman Kolodin and Lee were from a company called SCAZ in Bangkok. Correct?”
Pascale nodded. “I asked Enzo. He was still mad with me. ‘SCAZ is SCAZ,’ he said as if that was all there was. I checked. It doesn’t exist.
“A few weeks ago, when we were talking about the future, Papa told me he wanted to sell Bio-Cal. He was depressed by it. ‘Never mind if we lose money, Patsie,’ he told me. He calls me Patsie. ‘Help me sell it.’ So, I asked him about the shares in the business. He held eighty percent; Enzo had twenty percent. I asked him what would have happened if he’d died. He told me his shares would automatically go to next of kin - Antonio and me.”
Pascale then took a deep breath.
“I had a key to the Bio-Cal building,” he said. “One night I decided to look inside. Bear in mind that my father had not been there for almost a year. What I found shocked me. The store area was empty and dirty but in a filing cabinet in Enzo’s office I found a copy of the papers from the time Papa bought the business from Gabriele. There were two documents inside an envelope. One document said that on my father’s death Enzo Grassi could buy his share-holding for five thousand Euros.
“I told my father. ‘Not true, not true,’ he said. He denied it, totally so I phoned our family lawyer. The lawyer told me he had received no instructions on what would happen in the case of my father’s death, but that the document in the envelope in Enzo’s office was prepared by a lawyer in Trieste and bore my father’s signature - or something similar.”
“Trieste again,” Mark said aloud for his own benefit. “What was the lawyer’s name?”
“Studio Legale Marco Senini,” Pascale said.
“It doesn’t exist,” Mark replied.
Pascale was visibly shaken. “I’ll need to talk to our family lawyer but the more I know the worse things get.”
“What happened next?” Mark asked.
“Our family lawyer then discovered that Enzo owned at least three other companies with names like Bio-Cal - in Rome, Milan and Trieste. These businesses were called Bio-Kal spelled with a K not with a C. They imported cosmetics labelled Bio-Kal and sold energy drinks, canned green tea and coffee.”
Pascale finally stopped. “There is not much more I can tell you.”
“Except you then flew to Trieste and haven’t stopped since,” Mark said.
Pascale smiled for the first time. “Believe me I was so pleased to meet Jeffrey and the English professor yesterday. Do you know what’s going on yet?”
“We’re building a picture and it’s bigger than even I imagined. Would you like to eat? Talk some more over lunch?”
“One thing puzzles me,” Mark said as they ordered lunch “If Enzo also has a thriving business in Trieste why keep the small, badly run business in Naples with nothing in its warehouse but dust? Why not just resign?”
“Because the biggest customer base for Bio-Cal was in the south of Italy and Sicily. It would be easy to replace it with Bio-Kal. If my father had found out there would have been a problem so the quick and easy solution was to remove my father so that Enzo got the shares and the business. Ruthless but perhaps easier. It shows the sort of people we’re dealing with. Had my father died they’d have got away with it. But why is selling a few little-known, low-cost cosmetics so important?”
“I’m not sure it is that important,” Mark replied. “I think it’s a front for something else.”
Pascale nodded but neither of them said anything for a while until Mark pulled up another photo on his phone. “When you were in Malacca watching Ho Chiang at what we call the Min Hin building did you see boxes falling of the pallet?”
“Yes,” Pascale said. “The bottles smashed. It was a red liquid.”
Mark nodded. “We think they are bottling a counterfeit energy drink called Red Power inside the building. By co-incidence, the official Taiwanese producer of Red power is another of our clients.” He showed him a photo of a Red Power bottle.
“Yes, I’ve seen Red Power in Milan,” Pascale said. “I’ve also got photos.” He took his own phone, scrolled through and there it was: Red Power. Rows of bottles in a refrigerator in a small supermarket amongst cans of Red Bull and bottles of Caribou.
“So, we can add Italy to Kenny Tan’s list of countries where counterfeit Red Power is sold,” Mark said. “Would you forward that to me?”
Within seconds it was on Dobson’s phone and in less than a minute in Taiwan.
Pascale then added another dimension. “There were other things in Enzo’s office in Naples,” he said. “In a drawer I found a gun wrapped in a cloth, a Beretta 92G. There was also a print-out of an email from someone called Dimitri. I copied it.”
Pascale then produced the copy from his case and handed it to Mark.
The email address was a Hotmail account with letters and numbers so even Colin would have found it impossible to locate the IP address of the sender but the date was shown and it was quite clear what the message itself conveyed. “It’s a threat,” Mark said.
Pascale nodded.
Enzo was receiving an instruction that unless he sorted the Naples company out ‘fucking now’, then Enzo himself would be ‘fucked 100%’ and ‘removed’ and all the packaging and labelling of Bio-Kal would be moved to Croatia. Enzo, it seemed, was also under some pressure.
“And the email date?” Mark asked.
Pascale nodded again. “It was sent a month before the two Russians and Chinese arrived and Papa was shot.
“Enzo was panicking,” Mark said.
“It was because of the threat to move everything to Croatia that I then went to Trieste,” Pascale explained.
Mark was beginning to admire Pascale’s determination. “What did you do in Trieste?”
“First of all, I phoned the Trieste Chamber of Commerce and Industry to ask if they knew of a company called Bio-Kal? They didn’t. So, I then called the Free Port of Trieste office saying I was looking for a packaging company operating in the free zone. They were good. They sent me a long list and I began working my way through it eliminating ones as I went. I then phoned all those on my short list. I was about to give up when I phoned one called Scatolifici Santo. By then I’d started putting on a foreign accent to sound vague.”
Mark smiled. Ritchie would have liked this approach.
“When I phoned Scatolifici Santo I said, ‘Buongiorno, I have an order for you,’ and that’s when I struck lucky. I got, ‘Pronto’, then: ‘Ciao, Bio-Kal Treste’ then ‘Dimitri. Come vanno le cose?’ How are you my friend?”
“Nice,” said Dobson.
“I said no more but called the Chamber of Commerce again and told them I’d now found the company - Scatolifici Santo. Did they have an address or phone number?”
Mark interrupted hm. “How do you pronounce Scatolifici Santo?”
Pascale gave it a good Italian pronunciation.
“Could you shorten it to SCATS?” Mark asked.
“Perhaps,” Pascale replied.
“So, SCATS could be SCAZ. Do you think Russians might call it SCAZ because they can’t say Scatolifici Santo?”
“Maybe.”
Mark parked the idea but it had struck him immediately that SCAZ in Bangkok could be Sara Enterprises.
Pascale was still talking. “I then went to look for Scatolifici Santo,” he said, “but my taxi driver got lost in the docks area off Riva Alvise Cadamosto. It’s an industrial estate littered with shipping containers and warehouses with trucks, vans and fork-lifts moving everywhere but we eventually found it hidden amongst trees in Via di Zaule, a rundown area of mostly demolished industrial buildings off Strada Provinciale.
“By then it was nearly dark but around the back of the building were three containers There was also a Mini Market close by so I went in and asked if anyone knew Scatolifici Santo. The old lady behind the till did. “Si, certamente,” she said. A Russian man came into the shop every day for vodka, bread and sausages.
“I returned to the building, checked the three containers and inside one of them was a 200-litre drum of rubbish. I’ve got some of it here.”
Pascale then put a bag of crumpled papers and small bottles on the table. Seeing what they were doing the waitress cleared the table of plates and cutlery and they began to sort it.
It was box labels, shipping labels: ‘Palm Oil - Product of Indonesia’, plastic bottles, probably rejects, in different shapes with flip lids of the sort used for shampoos and small, pink and white plastic tubs with screw caps and labels which had been put on lopsided or upside down, labels that said: ‘Bio-Kal Natural Moisturiser’ and ‘Bio-Kal Hands and Nails’. There were shipping documents, technical data sheets for palm oil, coconut oil and krabok nut oil for ‘customs purposes’ and invoices from a company called SCS.
Pascale pulled out one of the invoices and turned it to show Mark.
“The number of drums of palm oil and krabok oil shown on this invoice are huge,” he said. “They would never have fitted in the warehouse. I was in banking security, Mark. I know false invoicing when I see it. And false invoicing often means only one thing - money laundering.”
“And the supplier of the palm oil and krabok oil?” Mark asked, still sifting through the pile.
“SCS (South China Sea) Health, Hong Kong. But in smaller print at the bottom it shows two associate companies: SCS Bangkok, Thailand and SCS, Malaysia.”
Mark shook his head. It was confusing but, in commercial fraud cases, sowing confusion was deliberate.
“And then,” Pascale said. “I found a copy of a fax on SCS Malaysia letter head.” He handed it to Mark.
“Oreshkin. 835,000 USD. Use SCS Bangkok Bank Singapore A/C.” it said. And then, at the bottom, where Pascale was pointing with his finger was an illegible scrawled signature. Beneath that, in type, it said, ‘D Medinski’.
“That’s when I decided to fly to Kuala Lumpur,” Pascale said. “Another lead took me to Malacca and then I found myself outside the building where Jeffrey and Eddie saw me. But by then I was getting confused with names. I began to think that different names were the same person. I still do. There were the Russians Enzo called Vlad and Mikael to my father, but were probably Andre Arshavin and Roman Kolodin.
I was more inclined to believe the latter because Arshavin and Kolodin were the names that airline officials checked on the passenger lists, but they could be false passports.
“The Russians, Enzo said, were from a company called SCAZ in Bangkok but the card they gave Papa showed Sara Enterprises. The only evidence of SCS were the invoices to Bio-Kal Trieste. Enzo had not mentioned SCS. And then there was the Chinese man my father thought was Mr Yap but Enzo called Mr Lee and I wondered if this was a man called Ho Chiang because, by sheer chance, I met a salesman, Jim Keong, in KL who was trying to see someone from SCS Kuala Lumpur. He said SCS was run by Ho Chiang but he also mentioned another Russian name - Igor. I was losing track?”
Mark nodded. He fully understood. The investigation for Kenny Tan had already taken them a year during which they’d completed several other jobs for other clients. Losing track had become an occupational hazard.
“And I still don’t understand about the English professor and Vital Cosmetics,” Pascale concluded.
No, Mark thought to himself. Let’s not forget Isobel Johnson and Eddie Higgins but he was becoming more and more convinced that Pascale’s case, Kenny Tan’s Red Power and Isobel Johnson’s Vital Cosmetics were all connected.